Southern Street emphatically addresses immense urban changes that have taken place in Manchester, the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution, in a very specific manner. Abandoned and barricaded Victorian terraced houses were condemned and disappeared. The houses, which gradually took on an individual character over the decades, originally symbolized a radical transformation of the firmly established everyday culture of the English “working classes.” They ultimately became a mere metaphor for a comprehensive societal transformation that happened in the early twenty-first century. The Southern Street series not only documents things gone by, thanks to its visual language, it also orchestrates the concrete “place” and the identity that it is based upon, thus provoking immediate reaction.
