Prince Albert, SaskatchewanTim Atherton has contributed two photo-essays to On Site in the past: Edmonton's back lanes and fences in On Site 18: culture, and Prince Albert in On Site 19: streets. He documents the small and insignificant which gain terrific power simply by being noticed and legitimised through collection. The camera extricates its subject from the anonymity conferred on the ordinary.
The next issue of On Site will look at small things: micro-urbanism for example, rather than the 'master' plan, houses of less than 500 square feet. It has been a sobering year for hubris and grand designs; perhaps it is time to relearn how to cut our coat to fit the cloth. Examples from the past abound: Prince Albert for example, overlooked because development pressure on it has been slight - new building happens on the highway leaving the downtown (above) intact. This fine little building was, once, ordinary fabric with limited ambitions. Did it ever need to be more?
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Tim Atherton's blog is a lovely thing: photography and the things that influence it in the widest sense. His entry on Sigfried Sasoon for Remembrance Day shows a fragment of Sasoon's Soldier's Declaration, his handwriting all defiant and firm. Earlier on Atherton has a collection of photos taken at the Somme which as he points out would have been illegal if not suicidal. A bomb explodes in front of the camera, razor wire photographed looks like some exotic cactus in sepia.
Anyway, Tim Atherton doesn't send On Site anything anymore as his energy goes into this blog, which is actually a magazine in itself. This raises a question: do we need magazines still?