“Lines of Desire” is a town planning term for the routes people instinctively take through an open space, rather than those marked by paths.

Attracted by the unintended and unnoticed, I try to create this quality in my daily life, weaving through the back streets and estates on my bicycle, a camera always in my bag.

In the highly regulated life of the city this wandering gives me the illusion of freedom and makes physical space personal.
The restrictions of paths, walls and fences are only the tangible expressions of the rules, taxes, mortgages, rents, congestion charges and surveillance by which we are told how to live and how to think.

Just as lines of desire run opposed to the rigid projections of authority, the pictures that result from following them can reveal and explore freedoms and desires that are suppressed by the matrix of apparent order.

To act on instinct and from direct experience of the world is to be in opposition to this age of media in which we are continually tempted to compare ourselves, not to the world around us, but to a soap opera seen through the distorting glass of televisions, cars and computers.

I do not want to tell anyone else how they must do this. It is enough to produce images that, hopefully, ring true.