Tales from the Loop: Finding Inspiration in Restriction
How a simple lens test sparked a meditative black and white photo series exploring liminal spaces, creative endurance, and overlooked cityscapes.
Chapter One: Finding the Loop
It started with a lens test.
I’d just picked up a 35mm f/1.8 prime lens for my Nikon Z7. As someone used to shooting street photography with a 50mm, I was curious to see how a wider focal length would shift my perspective — and maybe even spark a new project. So I set off for a walk near my university, into a part of Manchester I’d never really paid much attention to.
This space isn’t a destination. It’s a connector — a non-place. Brutalist concrete underpasses, bridges, graffiti, and scattered litter. Its only function is to move people from one place to another, mostly unnoticed. It runs parallel to Oxford Road — loud, commercial, student-filled — yet feels like its quiet, grey inverse. No shops, no noise, no real reason to stop. Except maybe for the traffic lights.
The first thing that caught my eye was a makeshift camp set up on a piece of derelict land: barbed wire fencing partly covered by sheets and tarps bearing the words Brunswick Resistance Camp – Free Palestine. Despite the obscured view, I could just about make out structures inside — makeshift housing and signs of community, a pocket of protest in a non-space.
It was early March. The air was biting. I took a few tentative shots of the camp and rang the bell at the gate — hoping to return and document it more closely. No answer. Maybe next time, I thought.
I continued exploring around the camp’s perimeter. On one side, skeletal trees framed a muddy cut-through, a shortcut for commuters. The sunlight, sharp and overhead, sliced a nearby concrete wall in half — one side in light, the other in shadow. I waited for someone to walk through the space. One person passed. Click.
Further on, I headed toward the city centre, more observer than photographer now. There was something oddly magnetic about this place. Unremarkable in every traditional sense — but hauntingly photogenic in its stillness. The quiet edges of a city usually passed by, not through.
There was no obvious beauty. And that’s exactly what intrigued me. It felt overlooked. Liminal. Like it might reveal itself, if I just kept showing up.
Maybe I should come back at night, I thought — see how it changes.
