This picture is of a building at Mann Island, Liverpool, very near the Pier Head. I worked in a portacabin office where this now stands in 1967/68, a formative time for me having been born in 1950, and a time of change for Liverpool too. The traditional role of the docks was coming to an end with the advent of containers. Rising unemployment contributed to poverty. The old industries that had created the port through cotton and tobacco were changing and Cunard liners now sailed from Southampton. The Toxteth riots were not far off. The injections of cash that turned Liverpool into the city of European Culture in 2008 were a distant dream. The Albert Dock formed a sealed off, guarded space of empty bonding warehouses. There was a diaspora of Liverpudlians, which I would soon join.

The building, from this angle, looks like the prow of a ship to me, an appropriate metaphor for the city and its’ history with the sea. The open windows remind me of portholes and the high flying seagull, an appropriate feature too. The reflective surface and the clouds seem as though the framework is waiting to be filled with dreams.

The city and its’ maritime history, my autobiography of the space in a previous life and the fact my father was a merchant seaman all come together for me in this brief second. Appropriately the building also now contains Open Eye, a major photographic gallery in the North of England.

The photographer Robert Adams in his essay  “Truth and Landscape” from Beauty in Photography published by Aperture says -

“(photographs) can offer us, I think, three verities – geography, autobiography and metaphor. Geography is, if taken alone, sometimes boring, autobiography is frequently trivial, and metaphor can be dubious. But taken together…..the three kinds of information strengthen each other and reinforce what we all work to keep intact – an affection for life.”

I continually strive to place these truths within the pictures I make.