Publication: Adrenalin Magazine, Pages 98 & 99, Issue Six, 2001.

EIGHT YEARS ago I was a contributing photographer for the surfing, skateboarding and snowboarding magazine Adrenalin. The editor at the time, Michael Fordham, had me in the office one day to talk about a story on public and private space in an urban context.

The week before I had been shooting a group of skaters around Canary Wharf (private land), when one of them was arrested by the police and later charged with criminal damage and fined, for skating.

Below and above are the tear sheets from the story, which we called Prohibition, Michael (aka Gabriel Drake) did the words and I did the pictures, plus we added some quotes from City of Quartz by Mike Davis*.

“The physical space of most American and some European cities is becoming privatised. And in the process of this privatisation, deviants who defy defensive architecture are prohibited, demonised and excluded. A class war is being fought, at the level of space. Along with this recapitulation of space goes an extensive iconography; a semiotics of exclusion which is spreading…”*

“Design deterrents: the barrel shaped bus benches, overhead sprinkler systems, and locked, caged trash bins. The Mall as Panopticon. Recapturing the poor as consumers while benefiting from municipal subsidisation with a comprehensive security-oriented design and management strategy. High perimeter fences, video cameras lined to motion detectors, a handful of gated and monitored entry points, a security observatory and a police substation…”*

“Use of permanent barricades around neighbourhoods in denser, lower-income neighbourhoods, The transformation of the police force into an operator of security macrosystems (major crime databases, aerial surveillance, jail systems, paramilitary responses to terrorism and street insurgency, and so on, in part because the private-sector has captured many of the labor-intensive security roles.”*

“Fear proves itself. The social perception of threat becomes a function of the security mobilisation itself, not crime rates. Moreover, the neo-military syntax of contemporary architecture insinuates violence and conjures imaginary dangers, while being full of invisible sighs warning off the underclass other.”*

I shot the pictures in America, Australia and the UK and at the time I was still shooting on film.

Plus, this documentary film made by Winstan Whitter is well worth taking a look at. It was made last year in response to the uncertain future of the undercroft skateboarding area on London’s southbank.

Publication: Adrenalin Magazine, Pages 100 & 101, Issue Six, 2001.

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Tags: Adrenalin Magazine Canary Wharf City of Quartz Michael Fordham Mike Davis Skate Skateboarding Southbank Space Urban Winstan Whitter

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