The Relics Collection: Traces of Human Presence

Relics is a moody fine art photography series exploring objects that have outlived their use yet still carry the weight of the lives that once moved around them. Old radios, worn metalwork, forgotten domestic forms, and surfaces marked by time are photographed not as curiosities, but as presences — quiet witnesses to labour, memory, and disappearance.

Rather than documenting these pieces clinically, the work leans into atmosphere, shadow, and restraint. Light falls softly across rust, enamel, chipped paint, and worn edges, allowing texture and silence to shape the image. What remains is not nostalgia in a sentimental sense, but a study of material memory — of how the ordinary becomes charged once it is left behind.

That same quality extends into the marble figures within this series — works where a reclining figure holds its stillness inside a ruined Gothic interior, long after everything else has gone. It is a dialogue between the industrial and the organic, a theme that runs through the wider collection and connects closely with the work found in Iron Without Witness.

The most recent addition to this series — The Last Broadcast — takes that same scrutiny to a Decca radio left on a dusty dresser in an abandoned room, a candle burning beside it as if the broadcast is about to begin. It is the same conversation as everything else in this collection: an object holding its position long after the person who placed it there has gone.

The collection sits within the wider language of my practice, where forgotten objects are treated not as artefacts but as still-living traces of human presence. Each piece is produced as a limited edition fine art print on premium cotton rag — Hahnemühle Photo Rag 300gsm — ensuring that the tactile grain and soft shadows are preserved in the physical object as fully as they exist in the original capture.

This reflection forms part of the wider fine art blog, where each work is explored as a standalone presence rather than a collection piece.