99 pounds

I have gathered together and photographed  99 objects, each acquired for exactly £1.   This strange collection is interesting not because of beauty or intrinsic value, not because of age or usefulness or skill in the making, but because each one can be seen as representing a stratum of society, a cypher for some aspect of the richness of our world.  A plastic dinosaur skeleton is not just a child’s toy but a key to paleontology and prehistory, a critique of creationism.  A knife and fork, bought for £1 in a car boot sale, remind us that one of the world’s ever-present problems is hunger.  12% of the world’s population – 800 million – do not have enough food to eat.

Whilst much of photography looks towards the aesthetic, attempting to beautify or make visually striking, my approach is to try to represent the objects for the most part just as they.  An impossible task, of course!