8X’s

‘8X’s’ is an ongoing collaborative project exploring a site that is located within our hometown of Bridgend. Both a historically significant and personally nostalgic place, its original construction consisted of seven expansive underground storage tunnels used to store ammunition during the Second World War. It was later developed during the cold war into a nuclear shelter and now exists as an archival storage facility.

During the last sixty years, the landscape surrounding the original infrastructure has developed to become a dense wilderness surrounded by vast residential and industrial areas. The forest that evolved on the site became an idiosyncratic place of solace in which we could embrace the enviable pursuit of escapism, evoking uses and new histories that far outlive the sites’ original function. This duality of personal and factual histories produces a potent photographic space; one that almost seems too ‘charged’ to photograph within a singular framework. It is a place in a continual process of becoming, constantly regenerating to create new histories. To try and capture the site, to hold it within the stasis of the photograph seems to be betraying its nature as an evolutionary place.

This project aims to engage in an active dialogue with the potential multiplicity of photography by attempting to provide a portrait of the place in motion. This is achieved by exploring facets of the place through different photographic approaches, each relating to the photographic discourse that can arise when looking at the notions of time and place. The method of deconstruction and subsequent rebuilding of photographic genre relations aims to create a variety of spaces through which the viewer can travel whilst engaging with the body of work; an ambiguous index. The photographs shown here are part of an extensive collection of imagery taken from the book ‘8X’s’.