Search up ‘Stoke-on-Trent’ into YouTube, and you’ll be met with many videos in which people come to the city, present the worst elements to their audiences, and leave. They don’t take the time to truly investigate the layers of the city, instead adding to the pool of the base-level cliché. Consequently, this feeds into a loop whereby the representations of the city with the most clicks are what cultivate the audiences’ perceptions. Especially for those people who haven’t visited themselves, this then forms a perception bias for any future interaction with the city. People will see, within the city, what they are told the city really is like. This is a pattern that expands across the media landscape in its broadest sense.
The majority of these media producers offer an outsider-in point of view. My goal here is to offer a second narrative for Stoke, as someone who has lived in the area for most of my life. Whilst I agree that there are problems in regard to urban decay, drugs, crime, and so on, there are two sides to a coin, and this is true for most places in the UK. This is a sequence of prints of my personal experiences - a photographic realisation of the many interactions I had with the lovely people I encountered - as I endeavor to contribute to a growing, optimistic documentation of the community, life, and love in Stoke-on-Trent.
To say that my story of modern Stoke is objective would be to reject a universal truth about photography: there is an eye with a bias behind every camera. This exhibition is a subjective document of my experiences wandering the local streets, and I have no intention of hiding that. To photograph is to be in one place at one time. This is why I encourage you to critically explore and ask yourself, ‘What is the Stoke I know?’, informed by your own experiences.
These photographs were all made on 120 film, processed, and hand-printed in a darkroom.

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Please note: The below digital images are printer scans of analogue prints, so may not accurately resemble the physical prints.