I’m Jim Stephenson and I run clickclickjim, an architecture + interiors photography firm. This is my blog where I’ll be posting some images from all the shoots I do throughout the year, including many, many images that don’t quite make it to the website and a whole bunch of news, inspiration and thoughts from the wider world of photography and architecture. This will also be a good place to stay up-to-date on the monthly, free, miniclick photography talks I curate.

You can view my portfolio website here. Enjoy!

This is the photography blog of Jim Stephenson, Architectural Photographer. Please head to my website at www.clickclickjim.com if you’d like to see more of my work.

The Old Market are our amazing hosts for the monthly miniclick photography talks I put together. As a group, they’ve taken us on board and have been really enthusiastic about what we’re trying to do since day one. In fact, as everyone in the city knows, they’re just generally enthusiastic about all kinds of interest art events and they host or put on a series of excellent talks, shows, exhibitions, gigs, theatre productions and dance ensembles on a regular basis (it’s well worth checking out the listings page on their website).

On Tuesday May 29th they have a very interesting talk by Peter Cresswell who will be discussing and displaying Stereoscopes. Entry is free and it kicks off at 7pm (bar open from 6pm). From The Old Market’s website (please note, this is not a miniclick talk – but it looks ace anyway!)…

Stereographer Peter Cresswell brings a collection of his 3D image viewers to TOM for a hands-and-eyes-on event. As Peter will explain in his introductory talk, Stereoview cards and the accompanying Viewers were a Victorian Obsession. Peter’s work creating viewers has provided a fascinating insight into this 19th Century craze.

Following Peter’s talk, there will be a chance to experience the viewers for yourself, and there will then be a Q&A session.

Peter Cresswell introduces his Stereoscopic Viewer:

“I have invented and made a stereoscopic viewer which displays a comfortably large image in a simple undistorted space.  Initially, I only intended it to be used to view my own stereo photography but I soon realised that it also had the potential to reveal the true spatial value of any stereoscopic image once it had been digitally re-mastered to fit the viewer.  So the stereo images created by the very earliest photographers are just as susceptible to the process as any other.

The Victorian obsession with stereoview cards meant that they were produced in millions and many are still readily available today.   They were analogue contact prints so they are as good as negatives for my purposes and enlarge very happily.  They were produced to fit the various Brewster type viewers used at the time and were therefore severely limited in size.  But when subjected to a high definition scan, enlarged, cleaned, re-aligned  and  in some cases subjected to a certain amount of re-organisation, can be offered in my viewer as a spatial experience which could only have been dreamed of  by the photographers of the day.”

Looks ace! (please note, this is not a miniclick event)

This is the photography blog of Jim Stephenson, Architectural Photographer. Please head to my website at www.clickclickjim.com if you’d like to see more of my work.

This is the photography blog of Jim Stephenson, Architectural Photographer. Please head to my website at www.clickclickjim.com if you’d like to see more of my work.

I’ve been working together with Conran & Partners for over five years now, photographing projects as diverse as social housing, exhibitions, restaurants, shopping centres, hotels and ferry piers in the UK and Japan. To celebrate this, we’re putting on a joint exhibition entitled “Collaboration” as part of the nationwide Love Architecture Festival.

In the spirit of the exhibition’s name, we trying to put something together that will be a bit more interesting than just photos on a wall – I can’t say to much at this point, but it’s shaping up to be pretty exciting. The private view will be at Conran’s offices on Queens Road in Brighton on June 21st. If you’d like to come, drop me an email.

This is the photography blog of Jim Stephenson, Architectural Photographer. Please head to my website at www.clickclickjim.com if you’d like to see more of my work.

This is the photography blog of Jim Stephenson, Architectural Photographer. Please head to my website at www.clickclickjim.com if you’d like to see more of my work.

Earlier this evening I made a comment on twitter about the disdain I have for cameras. This was a slightly off-the-cuff and glib comment that followed an even more off-the-cuff comment regarding new cameras being released, specifically the news that Leica have released the first ever black and white digital camera.

Upon reading the headline of the press release my instant response was “What’s the point of that?” I appreciate there’s certain advantages to removing all the processing a camera has to use to work in colour, and that this should make for richer mono images. It’ll be interesting to see what the final results are, but really I suspect it’ll be the kind of difference only the photographer and a couple of other folk might notice. “What’s the point of that?” probably speaks more about how I feel about cameras, than about new releases.

Anyway, the comment on my disdain for cameras was slightly tongue in cheek, but I would like to expand upon it a little, given more than 140 characters.

I use a very, very good camera and excellent lenses, but I’ve never been into kit. I was never seduced by photography because of the gadgets, and I don’t know all the latest gear. I got into photography in my teens because I liked the magic of creating an image, and latterly because I wanted to record buildings; the way they look and the way they were being used.

If I’m photographing a building, I’ll spend some time walking around, exploring it and getting to know the space. Once I’ve had a good look, I’ll pick my spots and take photographs from there. This depends on hundreds of factors – form, composition, interesting features, the light, people and so on. Once I’ve got the frame in my head I’ll set up the camera.

This is my least favourite part – when I have to place an object between my eyes and the composition I’ve spent all this time working out. It seems completely intrusive. It’s a barrier between the connection you’ve spent time making. I love everything about a shoot and about the photography involved, except for the bit where I actually have to use a bloody camera!

It’s not the camera I don’t like, it’s the act of having to use it.

I know my camera very well, I know it’s settings inside out and adapting them to suit the conditions has almost become instinctive. It doesn’t take too long these days. I also appreciate the technology involved – really, it’s amazing what’s going on inside the camera. And, I know it’s the only way we have of creating photographs – I can’t even imagine a better way, even if technology was limitless! But still I use my camera grudgingly, because it’s the only way I have to create the images I want to create.

This is the photography blog of Jim Stephenson, Architectural Photographer. Please head to my website at www.clickclickjim.com if you’d like to see more of my work.

This is the photography blog of Jim Stephenson, Architectural Photographer. Please head to my website at www.clickclickjim.com if you’d like to see more of my work.

Just down the road from my home in Brighton & Hove, there’s an abandoned former cinema and bingo hall. Or at least, there was.

The former Gala Bingo Hall on Portland Road, Hove, had been empty for longer than I’d lived in the city (so at least 12 years). The art deco building had become a bit of a local landmark, but all agreed something desperately needed to be done to it, or to the site it sits on. Unfortunately, the conversion from cinema to bingo hall in the 1980’s ripped any soul, or semblance of cinema’s heyday, out of it. The interiors that had once been quite grand, had been replaced by tacky stucco and a suspended ceiling. Last month demolition finally started on the building to clear the site and make way for much needed new housing by Affinity Sutton and Conran & Partners.

I was lucky enough to be commissioned by Affinity Sutton to create a historical record of the demolition process. Here’s some of the images, from start to finish…

A big thanks to the Lancebox Group, the demolition contractors, for their help on site.

This is the photography blog of Jim Stephenson, Architectural Photographer. Please head to my website at www.clickclickjim.com if you’d like to see more of my work.

Back in September, 2011, we put on a panel discussion at The Old Market, featuring Ewen Spencer, Jason Larkin, Ben Roberts, Hin Chua, Laura Pannack and Maja Daniels. The discussion was a great success and after that I had a lot of comments from people who were there, asking if I could get some of the speakers down to do talks on their own and expand on some of the ideas they discussed. Maja’s work really seemed to catch the attention of a lot of people, so I’m really pleased to say that she’ll be doing the June miniclick!

The talk will be on Monday June 11th at The Old Market in Brighton & Hove. Doors are at 6:30pm and entry, as always, is free!

Here’s some images from her project on Parisian twins, Monette and Maddy…

Maja Daniels is a Swedish independent photographer currently based in London, UK. Having studied journalism, photography and sociology, her work focuses on social documentary and portraiture with an emphasis on human relations in a western, contemporary environment. By using sociology as a frame of research and approach to her photographic work, she finds it a successful combination when trying to focus on the interaction between man and society.

Her work was included in the Taylor Wessing Portrait Prize 2011 and exhibited at the National Portrait Gallery in London. She also won second prize in the 2012 Sony World Photography Awards and was selected as one of the 2011 and 2012 Magenta Foundations Flash Forward Emerging Photographers. She was shortlisted for the 2010 PhotoVisura Grant for an outstanding personal photography project and she has exhibited in Paris, London, New York and Bilbao, Spain.

Dividing her time between long-term documentary projects and commercial work, she is regularly commissioned by the weekly and monthly press including The Guardian Weekend Magazine, Intelligent Life, New Statesman, Monocle Magazine, FT Magazine, Le Monde Magazine as well as humanitarian organisations and cultural institutions such as the UNICEF and the European Commission.

She also collaborates with social scientists in academic projects, using photography as a tool within sociological and cultural research.

It’ well worth spending a while browsing through Maja’s website to check out some of her other projects as well.

Monday, June 11th at The Old Market in Brighton & Hove (11a Upper Market St, Hove, East Sussex, BN3 1AS). It will kickoff at around 7:30pm (doors at 6:30pm). Get there early as the seats get snapped up quick! Entry is free, but there is a bar there that stays open after the talk, so bring some cash and support the venue by having a drink or two.

Hope to see you there!

This is the photography blog of Jim Stephenson, Architectural Photographer. Please head to my website at www.clickclickjim.com if you’d like to see more of my work.

At 11am on Sunday May 13th the miniclick talks, Brighton’s acclaimed monthly photography and filmmaking events are joining forces with Hungry Eye Magazine, the world’s first (and finest) publication for photographers and filmmakers to present Anton Corbijn’s masterpiece Ian Curtis biopic, “Control”. The film will be screened at The Duke of York’s Picturehouse, the UK’s oldest purpose-built cinema and features as part of the Brighton Fringe, the largest arts festival in England. After the screening, we’ll be hosting a discussion on the aesthetics of that era with Stephen Mallinder of Cabaret Voltaire, post-punk act, contemporaries and stable-mates of Joy Division. For all the info, and details on where to get tickets, click here.

To commemorate the screening, we asked four local artists to design one-off special edition posters. We asked two graphic designers; Mark Ferguson of Very Own Studio and Chris Harrison of Harrison & Co, and two illustrators; Billy Mather and Ryan Gillett. They all responded to the brief incredibly well and I’m well chuffed with the results (a set of all four will definitely be going up on my wall).

Each poster is around 16 inches by 11 inches (approx A3), printed in Brighton on heavyweight, 350gsm recycled paper by Dudley at Stampa. Only 30 copies of each poster are being produced and you can buy a set of all four for just £20 (plus £5 p&p in the UK). That’s a bargain! Please email me jim@clickclickjim.com if you’d like one and I’ll send you the payment details. Here’s what they did (and why they did it)…

Mark Ferguson

Mark Ferguson has worked as a graphic designer for the last ten years. After working in several agencies, lecturing undergraduate students and completing a Masters degree, in 2009 he set up his own practice called Very Own Studio. Mark now works with a range of clients large and small, helping them visually communicate with their audiences.

Control – “For me, the film offers a bittersweet insight into Ian Curtis’ world. While he and the band are finding fame and adulation, Curtis is depressed and going through a failing marriage. He is also diagnosed with epilepsy and is suffering from the side effects of the drugs prescribed to help him. A line in the film stood out for me: “It’s a matter of trial and error until the right drug or combination of drugs are found”. This illustrates how far medicine had yet to develop on managing epilepsy, and brought home to me the confusion, despair and disappointment that Curtis must have felt after diagnosis. According to the Epilepsy Society, seizures may induce, among other things, visual disturbances such as flashing lights, hallucinations and the feeling of a ‘wave’ going through the head. With the poster, I wanted to visually depict the sensations that Curtis may have experienced as an epilepsy sufferer, giving the viewer the same sort of unease. The poster is also intended to represent the tunnel-like dark loneliness that sufferers of depression report.”

“I wanted to build layers of meaning into the image. So for example, the image is made of 23 concentric rings, each representing a year of Curtis’ life; almost like the rings of a tree. There are also 80 segments to the circle as the film ends with Curtis’ death in 1980. I hope the poster does justice to this beautiful and moving film.”

You can see more of Mark’s work at Very Own Studio here and follow him on twitter at @VeryOwnStudio

Chris Harrison

Chris Harrison is Creative Director at Harrison & Co, a Brighton-based, award-winning graphic design studio. Chris started his career at Saatchi & Saatchi. Over the last 20 years he has worked for some of the world’s biggest brands – creating design and advertising campaigns for the likes of the UK Government and Barclaycard, through to London Philharmonic Orchestra, London Sinfonietta, Freedom Food and many other niche brands. His most recognised piece of work is the design of the UK National Lottery logo. Designed in 1994, it has remained unchanged since then.

Chris’s work has been recognised as ‘Highly Commended’ by D&AD, he has also won a Gold Award for branding from the UK Travel and Tourism Association, a Silver Fedrigoni award for branding, ‘Highly Commended’ work featured in the McNaughton Review and several design excellence awards at sector-specific events that his clients have entered on his behalf.

Click here to see more of Harrison & Co’s work and you can follow Chris on twitter at @ChrisHarrison_

Control – “I’ve been a Joy Division and New Order fan since the mid 80s. My passion for them started in my bedroom, where I would play the vinyl and caress the sleeve artwork. Like many graphic designers, my epiphany moment came whilst holding a piece of Peter Saville design. My Control poster aims to summon up some of the very dark, and somewhat depressing, narrative of the film. I wanted to create a piece of artwork that almost felt as heavy as the story, but I wanted it to have a glimmer of light too. In her memoir, Touching from a Distance, Deborah Curtis writes of an unusual incident: Ian Curtis brought home a bunch of freesias the night before he ended his life. According to Deborah, this was a first, he had never brought home flowers before. The image stood out for me. An image of a man obsessed with death. A man who had already written his suicide note through his music. I wanted to incorporate the freesias, almost as a ‘final act’ to the story. Or if you choose to see it differently, a burial shroud. Darkness and beauty.”

Billy Mather

Billy Mather is a 27 year old illustrator and designer living in Brighton, where he is also interns as a designer for FatCat Records.

Click here to see more of Billy Mather’s work.

Control – “When creating a poster for Control, I wanted to capture the strange juxtaposition of sparseness and chaos that characterises both the film and the music of Joy Division. Whilst it is difficult to try and separate the man from the music, I think Corbijn has been successful in keeping the focus on Ian Curtis the person, as I have tried to do also with this minimalist design.”

Ryan Gillett

“I create my illustrations in a screen-printed style, everything I draw is done individually, then brought together to build layers. Using stippling brushes and thick pencil crayons, I aim to give my drawings a unique texture and feel, like a hand drawn version of bitmapping.”

Click here to see more of Ryan Gillett’s work.

Thanks gents! Again, if you’d like to purchase a set of the posters for just £20, please drop me an email on jim@clickclickjim.com. If you’d like to come to the screening, click here for all the info.

This is the photography blog of Jim Stephenson, Architectural Photographer. Please head to my website at www.clickclickjim.com if you’d like to see more of my work.

This is the photography blog of Jim Stephenson, Architectural Photographer. Please head to my website at www.clickclickjim.com if you’d like to see more of my work.

A couple of months ago, @ellylovesvegas got in touch with me on twitter as she had seen me tweeting about a stay at Living Architecture’s Shingle House in Dungeness. Elly Ward was going to be the guest at the house immediately after us and I think she was just checking up to see what kind of state we were leaving it in. Elly is currently studying MA Architecture at the RCA alongside a friend of mine, Digory Macfarlane. Digs was part of the team that designed and built the Southbank Bandstand I shot last year. Small world!

Anyways, as part of her project this year, Elly has been working on an Illusion Booth – once she started telling me about it, I was dead interested and offered to take a few photos of it for her. First up, here’s Elly’s description of the project and some background images…

‘The Great Glass Divide’

“This project was a 1:1 material test for an architectural programme of reflective and allegorical therapies at the propositional ‘Moral Rehabilitation Centre’.

It employs a simple adaption of the low-tech but extremely effective Pepper’s Ghost stage trick – invented in the 1860s but still used in many museums and theme parks today, most notably in Disneyland’s ‘Haunted Mansion’ attractions.

In this version of the technique however, the audience witnesses a ghostly reflection of itself rather than that of hidden actors. This ‘constructed illusion’ will be staged at various moments throughout the proposed building – in hidden rooms, corridors and any number of nooks and crannies – affording guests a multitude of opportunities to reflect on their own lives, perhaps with the addition of stage sets and props to suggest how life could be very different… (but the ghostly kiss was just for fun!)”

Shooting the booth was a bit of challenge – working in low light, trying to avoid my own reflection and trying to get everyone to pose in such a small space. That said, we had good fun playing around with the illusion and Elly even roped in her fellow MA Architecture students, Anthony Engi Meacock (of Assemble) and Jonny Wilson as well as Dean of Architecture, Professor Alex de Rijke for a shot to. I met up with Elly and she took me round to the booth, constructed in a fairly unassuming spot behind the canteen at the RCA where everyone parks their motorbikes. I quite like the idea that people pass the booth all the time but have no idea what’s inside – it’d be great to install hundreds of them dotted about in cities, half hidden, and monitor the reaction.

Keep an eye on Elly’s brand new website as she adds more of her work to it.

This is the photography blog of Jim Stephenson, Architectural Photographer. Please head to my website at www.clickclickjim.com if you’d like to see more of my work.

As part of an ongoing series coinciding with the monthly miniclick photography talks, Joanna Cresswell has written us another essay that covers some of the themes that April’s speaker, Emma Critchley, covers in her underwater photography and film work. For Emma’s talk, we combined one of her images and Jo’s essay in a folded printed poster you could buy on the night. It proved very, very popular and I’m dead chuffed to have Jo on board for future talks as well! This is the piece she did for it, entitled “Scenes from Silence”. All the images here are courtesy of Emma Critchley.

Scenes from Silence by Joanna Cresswell

Time has a quality of intangibility, a fleeting half-life, emitting its duration-particles only in the passing or transformation of objects and events, thus erasing itself as such while it opens itself to movement and change. It has an evanescence, a fleeting or shimmering, highly precarious ‘identity’ that resists concretisation, indication or direct representation. Time is more intangible than any other ‘thing’, less able to be grasped, conceptually or physically. – Elizabeth A. Grosz

The fundamental debate regarding the inextricable relationship between time and the photographic image can take many avenues; narration in the image, the process between the beholder and the image, and the time that is connected to the construction of the image.  Throughout the history of traditional photographic theory there has always been the deduction that the photograph is a static object – a frozen moment in time.  French philosopher Gilles Deleuze once offered the idea that time (in its fleeting and shimmering evanescence) can be seen as running parallel to prevailing ideas about photography’s relationship to instantaneity and to the idea of the photograph as a record of a transitory moment in time. Such infamous books as Roland Barthes’ Camera Lucida, with it’s emphasis on the indexical value of the photograph as an uncontainable trace of the real, highlight the perplexing temporal conundrum that the photograph confronts us with when we try to grapple with what it means to have an image that quite literally freezes time and then preserves it indefinitely.

The photograph is an object associated with permanence, stability and immutability, and as a result, it is often used as a way of trying to preserve events with a nature of impermanence, and instability. The flux of boundaries between the individual and space, presence and absence, object and subject, physical and neurological can all be contained within the photographic frame.  Photographers have long been concerned with distilling the essence of time within the photographic frame, and using the medium to understand, extend and preserve that which we cannot control in everyday consciousness.  It has been widely acknowledged that through the photograph we can explore the nature of suspended states – freeze transitory moments and temporality in points where our physical or mental states are altered.  Personal suspensions of consciousness and of physicality are particularly important in art photographic practice because the extent of their duration is so beyond our control  – suspended states we can enter for only limited periods of time; sleep, being underwater, meditation, unconsciousness and even holding one’s breath become intriguing.

An endless list of contemporary photographers and filmmakers have employed the medium to explore such areas, with Hiroshi Sugimoto, David Williams, Antoine D’Agata, Susan Trangmar and Bill Viola being just a small section of that inventory.  The lucidity, the transience and the ephemeral and ever-changing nature of these states often mean that one theme can slip silently into another as the flux between the real and the imagined, the conscious and unconscious perpetuates.  The allure of fixing fleeting moments indefinitely is what makes photography such a powerful tool – it offers us a way to look back upon ourselves, and we are perplexed.  As a result, photographers will often make work that pushes to find the very peripheries of the camera’s limitations and in using the medium to explore the limitations of the medium itself, we can in turn explore the limitations of ourselves, our bodies and of our understanding of our time here.  The relief felt through containing something within the condensed image is absolute.

Barthes said that within the photograph, “Time is engorged, it contains an enigmatic point of inactuality, a strange stasis, the stasis of an arrest“.  It is in these ideas that we can find a way of understanding the inextricable link.  The physicality of the photographic print offers a conduit through which these in-between threshold states can endure, making it the most powerful tool with which to align the intangible, ungraspable and unattainable within a material terrain. In collapsing the spatio-temporal boundaries of such physical and mental states, and translating them indefinitely into the photographic space, we are able to encapsulate these ephemeral moments in a form that we are able to hold on to, like with no other medium. “The photographic act implies not only a sign of break in the continuity of reality but also the idea of a passage, a crossing irreducible.” The photographic image, through its intervention into the flow of time, reduces the event to a form of absolute spatiality, and inside the photograph lingering, meditative spaces can be built.

The ‘optical unconscious’ is defined as the ability that photography holds to illuminate spaces that previously only existed within the terrain of dreams.  Somewhere between asleep and awake, conscious and unconscious, water and air a certain form of pictorial consciousness emerges. In photographing ourselves or those around us in states that will not last, in states that can be found at the very core of our psyche and our senses, and that we cannot grasp onto, we can extend the wonder of these moments and allow ourselves a prolonged experience of looking.  To immortalize these scenes from silence is what drives us forward.  Whether we’ve seen them or not, or even experienced them consciously at all matters not. Through the photograph breaths and bodies, dreams and memories are suspended, frozen, crystallized in a still and silent space where a tangible version of the true event – liminal or otherwise – is preserved.

Ultimately, the phenomenon of altering ones state can relate back directly to our inherent understanding of photography.  The desire to fix time and space indefinitely is inherent within us all, and our collective magnetism to the photographic image endures through the promised chance of immortalizing in print that which we cannot keep from disappearing and dissolving before our very eyes.

Thanks to Joanna and to Emma! You can read all about future miniclick events and talks by clicking here. You can read Jo’s previous essay, “Everything, All of the Time”, by clicking here.

This is the photography blog of Jim Stephenson, Architectural Photographer. Please head to my website at www.clickclickjim.com if you’d like to see more of my work.

Last week, Gem Barton did a great guest blog post for me on her Scan.it project. It proved to be pretty popular and both Gem and I got quite a few emails about the project from people wanting to know more. I thought it might be nice to see if anyone else fancied doing another guest post, since I’d hoped it would become a regular thing. I put a shout out on twitter and Brian David Stevens dropped me an email about his “Brighter – Later” series, which caught my eye for a number of reasons, which hopefully will become obvious when you check out the work. Over to you Brian…

Brighter Later by Brian David Stevens

Brighter Later is a journey around the British Isles looking outward from the coastline of each county. It is an ongoing project that was started in 2009.

Essex

Its a project about optimism and possibilities, a portrait of an island that chooses to look outward rather than inward. There have been many influences on the project, the title is a phrase from the Shipping Forecast, a four times daily BBC broadcast of weather reports and forecasts for the seas around the coasts of the British Isles,”Rain at first, Brighter Later”.

Fife

Another influence has been the work has been the book ‘The Rings of Saturn’ by W G Sebald first published in Germany in 1995 and translated into English in 1998 it contains the passage ‘I do not believe that these men sit by the sea all day and all night so as not to miss the flounder rise or the cod come in to shallower waters, as they claim. They just want to be in a place where they have the world behind them, and before them nothing but emptiness.’

Sussex

Charles Rangeley-Wilson notes that Sebald told his students that there is a certain merit in leaving parts of their writing obscure. Indeed it is not always obvious where Sebald is taking you or why.

Lothian

I started to produce diptychs of seascapes when an old family friend reminded me that as a child I used to have the habit on looking at things through one eye and then the other, fascinated at the difference between the two images, so I started to try and reproduce the effect photographically. You end up with these little puzzles which seemed to suit the project.

Kent

The first picture in the series, taken on a February morning in Dungeness, Kent in 2009.  Dungeness often feels like the end of the world, and the end of the world is as good a place to start as any.

Thanks Brian! You can see more of Brian David Stevens’ work on his excellent website by clicking here (in particular, check out his portrait of “The many hats of Billy Childish” in the portraits section – I love it!).

This is the photography blog of Jim Stephenson, Architectural Photographer. Please head to my website at www.clickclickjim.com if you’d like to see more of my work.

This is the photography blog of clickclickjim, Jim Stephenson Architectural Photographer. Please head to my website at www.clickclickjim.com if you’d like to see more of my work.

A couple of weeks ago an old friend of mine posted a link to his new website on facebook. We hadn’t been in touch for a few years so I didn’t know much about what he’d been up to and how busy he’d been. Since we last spoke Andrew T Cross had set up An-Architecture and had completed a number of projects all over the country. I’m pretty interested in this type of architecture, that borders art and architecture and mainly seems to be practiced by young architects or Part II students who are both building and designing their own projects. Last year I went to a great discussion at The Gopher Hole on the future of architecture, where a lot of these themes were talked about by some of these young practices.

Last Saturday I headed up to Cambridge to photograph one of An-Architecture’s projects at Aid & Abet; Bibliotheque. From their website…

“The Bibliotheque grew out of a commission and conversation with Aid & Abet to create a simple structure that covered a myriad of uses.  Amongst which were a new visitors centre, gallery space, bookshop, tea bar, cocktail joint, seating area and a space within which artists commissioned by the CB1 development could showcase their proposals.

In the end it became it’s own freestanding structure taking over a portion of the gallery creating a space separate from the gallery in which other projects can be explored or more simply an environment within which relaxation and it’s myriad forms can occur.”

This is the photography blog of clickclickjim, Jim Stephenson Architectural Photographer. Please head to my website at www.clickclickjim.com if you’d like to see more of my work.