What I have chosen to do for this part of the exercise is simply to walk from one end of my chosen stretch of road to the other and along the way photographs elements that would mostly normally pass unnoticed: house numbers and other signage; street furniture; drain grids, man-hole covers, water stopcocks, fire hydrants – road hardware. This last group are largely invisible (apart from a couple of the larger covers) unless you pay attention and indeed I could not find one of them (I know it is there, it is the stopcock cover for my house) as it is buried under leafmold, gravel, mud, and other natural detritus!

The house numbers are not complete (and I do not know why, having arranged them carefully in Photoshop, they have not come out in the right order in the contact sheet) as not every house has a visible number (only nine out of fourteen), something that causes no end of trouble for visitors who do not know the area. As with Assignment 5 of I&P I have obscured house names where they would otherwise appear with the number in the interests of privacy – many houses in the village are known better by their name rather than street number.

Which do I think are the most interesting? As a typological set, in the style of the Bechers, I would choose the road hardware, the various covers and grids set into the road surface, simply because there are so many of them, and are surprisingly diverse. The numbers and street furniture do not, for me, offer enough in quantity nor in variety. For the same reason I suspect that a wider audience might similarly find the larger set more interesting, also because it is the more surprising, overlooked set of subjects.

The contact sheets are edited down from the total number of shots that I took (seventy-odd) and do not include alternate takes, other trial shots that did not, for whatever reason, work out quite so well.

Finally, as our little stretch of road is a cul de sac and very quiet, I did not encounter anyone while shooting. Except when I was photographing the stopcock cover outside one of the cottages. To do so I was bent right over to frame the shot. My neighbour suddenly came out to see if I was alright: he and his wife had seen me through their window and were concerned I was unwell. He was also surprised to see me without my dog. Small village life is like that, people expect certain regular behaviours from their neighbours and any deviation from the norm is more likely to draw attention. Many of the people that I see on anything like a regular basis are out because they are walking their dogs and I am walking mine. It is though encouraging that neighbours, even if we do not know each other very well (another characteristic of life in this village, as again my work on Assignment 5 for I&P demonstrated, is that many people tend to be very private, and some positively withdrawn), are ready to come to another’s aid in case of need!

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