It is easy to see how cruel contemporary food standards can be when one is inside a North Yorkshire vegetable sorting facility. Carrots pass through a device that looks like an airport scanner as they move along a conveyor belt under bright industrial lights. The Focus device analyzes each carrot’s shape with mechanical precision in a matter of seconds. The vegetable is ejected from the belt by a sudden burst of air if it curves too sharply or splits slightly close to the root. Perfect carrots keep going. The flawed ones disappear. Photographer Tim Smyth may have found his subject…
Author: Ellis Stevenson
Ellis Stevenson
Ellis explores public art, visual ethics, and the evolving role of documentary storytelling in a digital world. Ellis Stevenson focuses on how the systems that influence creative practice—from public institutions and funding to international cultural movements—relate to it. His writing, which frequently explores how artists, photographers, and designers react to political and economic pressures, combines critical analysis with firsthand reporting.
Hotel rooms have an understatedly eerie quality—the carpets with patterns. The lamps were the same. Even when muted, the television hummed softly as it was fastened to the wall. While on assignments that took him all over Britain and beyond, from Dublin to Los Angeles, Tim Smyth started to notice this sameness. Although each room is unique, they are uncannily similar. This may be where In Your Absence really started—not in a kitchen, but in those unidentified areas that seem detached from reality. His partner was back in the kitchen in Nunhead, south London. On the counter, a loaf of…