FOOTFALL

The Footfall project started by accident in 2019 in New York when I took photographs of feet and footwear on the sidewalk. This led to an ongoing series focused on capturing images of people’s shoes and the pavement, highlighting ordinary urban moments that often go unnoticed. The photographs typically show the sidewalk with the footwear at the edges, creating simple compositions.

In 2020, the project expanded into performance work during lockdown, experimenting with movement and walking within spaces.

The transition from photography to performance is a natural extension of my practice.

The work also includes photographs taken at international art fairs, where social dynamics and power relationships can be observed through how people stand and move.

The project is inspired in part by the work of Richard Wentworth, particularly his photographic series Making Do and Getting By, which documents accidental but purposeful street occurances. Like Wentworth’s work, Footfall invites viewers to notice the small, often overlooked details and patterns in urban environments.

ArtFairs, biennials, galleries and Museums

FOOTFALL — ART FAIRS

Footfall began in New York in 2019, almost by accident. I started photographing feet and shoes on the pavement: people walking, standing, waiting or simply passing through the city. What began as a series of observations developed into an ongoing photographic project concerned with movement, repetition and the traces of human presence within public space.

Alongside the photographs made on the street, another strand of Footfall has developed through visits to art fairs, including Frieze, The Armory Show in New York, Photo London and the London Art Fair.

Art fairs are particular kinds of spaces. Thousands of people move through temporary architectures constructed for looking at art. Collectors, curators, artists, gallery staff and visitors walk the same aisles, stopping and starting, gathering around particular works, talking, waiting and moving on.

In making these photographs I turn the camera away from the artworks and towards the people who have come to look at them.

The photographs concentrate on the lowest part of the body: shoes, feet, legs and the floor beneath them. Faces disappear and individual identities become less important. Instead, small details begin to emerge — how people stand, the distance between one person and another, the formation of groups, a moment of hesitation, somebody moving while somebody else remains still.

There is inevitably an element of social observation. Clothes and shoes can suggest fashion, wealth, work, status or simply personal choice, particularly within the highly coded social environment of an international art fair. But the photographs are not intended as portraits of particular individuals. They are fragments of a much larger choreography.

This connects Footfall to other areas of my practice. I have long been interested in repetition, task-based actions, movement through space and in what happens when apparently insignificant actions are isolated and given attention. Walking, standing and waiting are amongst the most ordinary actions we perform, yet repeated across thousands of people they create the rhythm of these spaces.

The art fair itself is temporary. Stands are constructed, artworks arrive, thousands of people pass through and a few days later everything disappears. What remains in these photographs is not so much a record of the art that was exhibited, but of the people moving around it.

As the series has developed, I have begun to build separate groups of photographs from each fair. Seen together, they become another way of recording these events — not through the artworks, galleries or sales, but through footfall.

A record of who was there, without necessarily showing who they were.

Prints are available on Print Editions and Also at The artistagency