RecycleTheReal

Photography: On Love (and Necromancy)

I have hundreds (probably thousands) of photos of Charlie, most of which I have never shared. They’re personal, deeply intimate images, soft, poorly composed and technically awful photos that, as time passes, I regard as some of the most beautiful I have ever taken, mostly by accident. They were never really meant for anyone, let alone anyone else and they now reveal a side of him that few others alive today ever saw. They have become “art” that was never meant to be. Documents that were never meant to be important.

We were constantly stuck somewhere between best friends and siblings. Sometimes in total symmetry — a mirror held up only to see the other looking back.

This is the painful truth of photography. It is testament to what we have loved and lost, and in being so it becomes the technological necromancer, resurrecting a shade that is both real and a cold, pale imitation in comparison to the warm flesh whose form we are aided in recalling.

22/10/2025

Three Perspectives on a Season

(Berlin)

03/03/2026

Keeping Up Appearances

Back to a waiting room. Not a metaphorical one, a very real waiting room with its vinyl-covered, wipe-clean seats that you slowly stick to on a warm day.

Here Charon doesn’t man the ferry across the Styx, but the tea trolley. Mournfully it moves its way between pockets of patients, its pilot reminding them “It’s all free,” and pushing half full paper cups of lukewarm milky tea into hands. The trolley is unplugged when in use and so the contents of the urn grows ever cooler. The custard creams in wrappers the same yellow as the toxic warnings on so many medications here have to be pushed harder still. Here, Charon conveys nobody anywhere. The ritual of passage reduced to the ritual of the trolley round, its thin comfort delivered with a gentle but slightly desperate insistence that the incurable participate.

So I sat, waiting, declined the tea with a slight acknowledgment from Charon that I know the ritual but today I did not wish to participate, when somewhere else on the same floor, muffled by heavy hospital doors, a bell was rung.

Read the full essay at:

03/01/2026

Making Tracks (Berlin)

02/01/2026

Before // After

25/12/2025

Edgelands

01/12/2025

Cuts to prevention, testing, and community services across the UK are already leaving people without support. Globally, progress is stalling, and inequalities continue to drive new infections and prevent access to lifesaving treatment.

ACT UP’s message remains as urgent as ever:

Silence = Death.

Funding Cuts = Lives Lost.

18/11/2025

Before // After

Santiago, Chile

22/10/2025

Trying to understand the orchestration of public space; what’s offered, what’s implied, what’s missing.

(Berlin)

22/01/2025

Glimpses

04/04/2025

Out of the frame

05/10/2024

09/01/2022

Pockets of Water

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15/12/2023

Framed

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15/12/2023

Enchanting Old Ruins (Brighton)

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25/10/2023

Dance

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