City of London
St Paul’s, City of London Paternoster Square, City of London City of London The Royal Exchange, City of London The Royal Exchange, City of London City of London The London Stock Exchange, City of London City of London City of London City of London City of London City of London Cheapside, City of London City of London Bank Junction, City of London Taxis Protest Bank, City of London Lloyd’s of London, City of London City of London City of London City of London City of London City of London City of London Outside Lloyd’s of London, City of London City of London Street Photography By Michael Wayne Plant, Documentary Style Street Photography,
Tunnel, Liverpool Street Station, City of London
City of London
A London Street Photography Project
By Social Documentary Photographer, Michael Wayne Plant.
I began photographing the City of London in January 2016. The project started as a straightforward question: what does global finance actually look like on the street? Not in boardrooms or trading floors, but in the built environment it creates and the people who move through it every day.
What the camera kept returning to was a gap. The real capitalists, the people who own and control the wealth concentrated in the Square Mile, were never visible. What was visible were the workers: the people in the uniforms of the financial services industry, moving through spaces that capital had built but that they did not own. The suits, the lanyards, the branded coffee cups, the security barriers, the glass towers rising over Georgian streets. Finance leaves traces everywhere. The people who actually run it leave almost none.
Photography is a limited tool for this kind of subject. It can show a thing. It cannot explain the forces that produced it. I worked with that limitation directly, photographing the visible surface of the City, its architecture, its security infrastructure, its redevelopment sites, its daily human traffic, and trusting that surface to carry the weight of what lies beneath it.
Over nearly a decade of returning to the same streets, the City itself kept changing. Buildings came down and went up. Access narrowed. Public space contracted. The physical environment registered economic shifts that rarely made the news as images.
The photographic phase of the project is now complete. From over 30,000 images made across that period, I am editing and sequencing the work into a book. The result is a long-term social documentary study of a place where concentrated wealth shapes everything you can see, and the people who actually run it remain out of frame.
All images copyright © Michael Wayne Plant.