Inventory of Empty Streets is a photographic project documenting every street inside central London’s Congestion Charge Zone (CCZ) during the UK’s first Covid-19 lockdown in the spring of 2020.

Covering an area of 21 square kilometres, the CCZ was first sub-divided into 32 geographical zones. With the photographer then travelling on foot or by bicycle, the streets in each zone were documented over the course of one to two days. From over 6000 images shot, the resulting sequence is a unique archive of approximately 3000 final images with accompanying GPS and track metadata.

From the shuttered retail and entertainment hub of London’s West End, the estates and residential roads north and south of the River Thames, to the strange emptiness of the global financial centre of the City of London, each photograph, shot identically, presents an orthographic view of a cityscape that is never seen or even possible to capture during normal times, and has indeed already vanished.

Inventory of Empty Streets also investigates the idea of a photographic typology of lockdown and explores the dissonance between the potential cinematic reading of the image and the very real anxieties generated by the onslaught of daily horrifying statistics on the news during the pandemic.

Through the forms of photography, long-form moving image and twelve volumes of artists books, Inventory of Empty Streets stands as a unique visual record of a city under extraordinary circumstances. It is also an almost irrational endeavour to classify / categorize / index, in order to navigate this strange physical and temporal territory, that ultimately reveals how much we have yet to understand.

Inventory of Empty Streets attempts to survey and visually codify what was, and continues to be, unpredictable times.

Project updates:

Duncan Ganley: Inventory of Empty Streets
Michael & Noémi Neidorff Art Gallery
Trinity University
San Antonio
Texas, USA

November 3rd - December 10th 2022

For information about the exhibition catalogue click here.

Books

The entire archive of Inventory of Empty Streets is presented as a 13 volume series of artist books - 12 volumes of images/data plus 1 index volume.

Book layout design by Nicholas Jeeves.

Slipcase by Nicky Oliver at Black Fox Bindery, London.

Long form video

The entire archive of Inventory of Empty Streets is presented as a long-form video work. Each image and data-set in the series is shown for 30 seconds before transitioning to the next. The duration of this long form work is 26 hours.

Images

The Inventory of Empty Streets image archive contains over 3000 images and data-sets. The 24 works below are a small sample.