Between the City and the Sea is an ongoing project that traces the eastern reaches of the River Thames, from Barking and Belvedere to the Isle of Sheppey and Shoeburyness. This stretch of river, long overlooked, is now undergoing immense transformation — new ports, housing and a tunnel are reshaping the land along its banks.
The photographs explore this shifting edge of London as a place of contrast and coexistence: wildlife beside industry, beauty amid pollution, peace within noise. Once largely public, much of this riverside land is now being absorbed into private ownership, altering how the river can be seen, used and experienced.
At its centre is the Thames itself — timeless yet restless — carrying the movement, materials and stories that allow the city to function.
This work marks a new direction in my photography, focusing on landscape rather than people. The shift was inspired by a 1989 lecture by Luigi Ghirri, who observed that “today, the majority of images we encounter are of faces. Our visual landscape overflows with faces. No longer do we consider the relationship between a face and where that face lives, dwells, eats, dreams and moves.” Ghirri suggested that our environmental crises stem, in part, from this disconnection — from a failure to see and represent the places we inhabit.
His words resonate deeply with this project: to look again at the margins, to restore a sense of attention and dignity to places long dismissed or unseen — what Adele Ghirri, in Viaggio in Italia (2022), called “restoring dignity to places and people no one would have dreamed of looking at.”
