This is the remnants of a failed attempt at a photo project looking at Birmingham’s pedestrian subways. I never really thought it was a very good idea for a project but I decided to give it a go anyway because I wanted to try shooting a project and it was the best idea that I had, also the subways are the sort of thing that I usually like to shoot anyway.

Everything in this series was shot with my Hasselblad 500C/M and Zeiss 60mm Distagon CF with Ilford HP5+ rated at 800 and developed with Kodak HC-110 at a dilution of 1+49 for 11 minutes. This is what I shoot most of the time anyway but I thought that the pushed HP5+ would work well for the sort of gritty feel of the subways. I shot 3 separate rolls of film on 3 different days in May of 2018\. I have chosen 12 of the 23 pictures that I took that I feel fit the scope of the project.


The intention behind the project was to capture the feeling of the subways, which I think I was at least partially successful in doing. I think photos 2, 8 and 9 capture some of the dread and uncertainty I, at least used to, feel when entering one of these. At some point when hunting these things down I began to realise how quickly they were disappearing, a couple that I photographed were fenced off and one that I visited had been totally filled in. I was then also trying to document some of these before they were also demolished. The main thing that I failed to capture was a human aspect of the subways, although I'm not sure that photographing people walking through these areas or homeless people sleeping in them would be more compelling than what I have.


I gave up on the project mostly just because I'd lost interest in it. I visited almost all of the subways that I managed to find, some a few times, and despite only shooting 23 images I was starting to feel like there wasn't really any new compositions left since they're all quite visually similar.

See also:

• Flickr album
• Reddit discussion