Before reading the excerpt ‘The Street’ from Georges Perec’s, ‘Species of spaces and other pieces’, I believed that I knew how to look at things, how to observe things. Tasked with applying a systematic method of investigating some aspect of a physical site, I chose Dalston Junction; A literal junction in Hackney, East London, connecting four main roads, Dalston Lane, Kingsland High Street, Balls Pond Road and Kingsland Road. I’ve been familiar with that particular space for most of my conscious life, but only at face value, so it seemed like the perfect place to exercise a few methods of investigation. 

The first visit was made on a weekday in the early afternoon when it was quiet, with very little traffic on the streets and the pavements. I was able to observe this chosen area from a window seat in the Crown & Castle, the pub situated on one of the four corners of Dalston Junction, and began a series of brief note taking, photography and sketches; The aim was to establish what and where my physical site would be using photos of the buildings and the streets they were on, a few general notes about the area at the time and a few sketches of the architecture. 

I was able to read Georges Perec’s excerpt between the first and second visit to the Junction, and I considered ‘The street’ to be an intriguing piece on dissecting the method of observation; His instruction to take notes of everything that you can see, specifically ‘what is of no interest, what is most obvious, most common, most colourless’, was something that I wanted to take quite literally. This was a new approach for myself and not one that I had attempted before, but I believe that I understood the premise and saw how this type of practice could reveal a multitude of details that might otherwise go unnoticed. 

The idea of noting everything I see, ‘almost stupidly’, spurred me into wanting to be more thorough with my methods of investigation; To take more pictures, to produce more detailed notes and fill a page with sketches, so I did just that on my second and third visit to the Junction. 

Being present at different times of the day allowed me to see how this affected the people, traffic and buildings within that chosen space, and I felt most compelled to photograph these differences as they were the most noticeable and visible. 

Using these pictures, I assembled a panoramic collage featuring all the photos I’d taken, aligned in an order that could recreate the space. This panoramic collage came with four images that I’d taken from the Rio Cinema’s Tapes/Archives collection; A book containing images of the Hackney area, taken by members of the community in the 1980s. The past images were essentially ‘puzzle pieces’ for viewers to attempt to match with the present pictures in the collage and an interesting way to see how much, or little, things had changed via these momentary captures in time. 

Given the chance to do this project again, I would like to experiment with my findings and make some attempts to incorporate all three methods together, as opposed to only focusing on photography. I would also like to capture the eclectic and diverse atmosphere that I experienced during my visits to the Junction, as I believe that could have made a much more fascinating visual.