Places that are unexpected, beautiful, devoid of beauty. As if someone had suddenly turned off the sound or muted their mobile. We expect noise – we’re in the middle of the city after all. But the setting doesn’t need any sound. It has its own frequency. This is the “city from below”: photographs revealing the other sides of a city, beyond the crowds of tourists and coffee-table-book aesthetic – the “special flavour” that every city has. No, it’s not always pretty. But it is real. Pockets of noise in the stillness and pockets of stillness amidst the noise. The city from below is an open conceptual photographic series begun in 1990. Open, because new images are added each year from many of the countries the artist visits. And open because cities change and shift in tone: dark turns to light, calm turns to bustle, nature turns to concrete. All of the photographs are analogue.

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