At the beginning of 2023,  I rediscovered my love of photography - and sparked a passion for street photography specifically - by doing what any curious photographer should do: pick up a photo book. The book in question here was Morocco by Harry Gruyaert, which I discovered while browsing the big Foyles near Tottenham Court Road, something which invariably happened when heading into Soho.

To my shame, this late find was my entry point to Gruyaert’s work, but instantly I was hooked on the vivid colour and strong contrast of his frames, especially the use of red. His work also evokes a strong sense of place and is a concept I like to try and carry into my own photography.

Since then, I’ve picked up many other photo books showcasing what street photographers can do with colour, works from Fred Herzog , Alex Webb , Ernst Haas . The way that Gruyeart and Webb, specifically, place their subjects within their compositions, while maintaining a semi-abstract feeling with their use of colour, is very inspiring to me.

Fast forward to early 2024, and my personal style of street photography has begun to solidify, with a more consistent look and sense of colour. Around this time, I began taking my camera out with me more and more when heading to the local grocery shops or just out on my evening walks.

Before this, I usually only had my camera with my on specific “photography days” or when going on trips with my wife, but when carrying my camera along on my usual routes, I began to notice interesting compositions in the mundane, everyday places I was so used to looking past.

Something about the method of photographing my local area had me gripped, and over the latter months of 2024 I began mounting up shots from the area that I felt were strong enough to share. It came to me quite late that many of the shots had a recurring theme and that I could produce a project out of it.

At the time, I lived around the Shepherd’s Bush area of London. An area with a real diversity of community and architecture, and importantly for this project, a lot of bold colour. When walking to the shops, I found myself frequenting Uxbridge Road and taking a detour down Shepherd’s Bush Market . The more I walked the same streets, the more I noticed interesting details and colourful backdrops to return to and frame with a subject.

Throughout 2024, most of the images I made for this project were quieter in tone. Fewer people, more about the smaller details of the local area. Originally, I wanted to focus on lonelier scenes, such as fly-tipped and left behind objects, or signs telling the locals not to do something. Over time, this morphed into a project documenting the area in terms of its colour, vibrancy and diversity, but a hint of that quiet tone remained.

At the beginning of 2025 I became a father. While that meant that I wasn’t frequently heading into Central London for a day of shooting street, it didn’t mean that I stopped heading out to get groceries. Those infrequent walks became my sole creative outlet during the early month’s of my son’s life, and produced some of the photographs I am most happy with.

I would walk up and down Shepherd’s Bush Market with my camera until I felt uncomfortable with the attention it was bringing me. I have always struggled with the “contact” side of street photography, and although I made myself familiar with many of the people who worked in the market, there felt like there was a limit to the amount of repetitions I could make in a single session.

The experience reminded me of the following quote:

I reached a point where I had a folder of around 150-200 images that I liked, and I knew that within that collection there were a few that I liked enough to put to print. I knew then that the next step was to cut the collection down to a size appropriate to print in a book or zine format.

For me, the greatest joy of street photography is the act of walking the streets and being attuned to what is going on around you with camera at the ready. In very close second, is reflecting on previous work and figuring out how to best physically display those images on paper. Browsing through photography digitally can be inspiring, but there’s nothing better than a physically printed image.

Curating and sequencing your own work is also a lot of fun, but I wanted to try a different process from my “New York in Colour” project. While I am attached to a lot of the work in the New York project, I would definitely approach the selection and sequencing stage a little differently if I were to do it again, and I took these learnings into W12.

One thing I was keen on trying was to ask other street photographers their thoughts on early drafts. I reached out to Gustavo Minas and a few fellow street photographers from the Framelines community to help isolate some themes and pick out some favourites from the collection, something which was super useful and helped me identify things I may have initially missed.

After reducing the pile down to around 60 images, I then printed all of the selected ones out on small 6x4 postcards. This gave me an easier way to view all of the photographs in a given sequence and is how I landed on the final order, pairing photographs together by their theme, colour palette and subject. I also cut another 10 during the sequencing process and landed on the final 50.

I like to present my projects in two forms: a digital gallery I built on my photography website and in a print zine or book. I print my personal favourites in a zine collection every year, and have built various layout templates for the inner pages to keep my work consistent across publications. I’ll follow up with a post dedicated to the process of designing a zine at a later point.

One of the greatest joys of these projects is that it crosses over all aspects of my professional and personal hobbies: engineering, design and photography. It’s truly exciting to see the final product of a project you’ve been working on for a long time printed out in physical form. It’s even more exciting to see that work out in the world when other photographers share pictures of their copies of the zine on social media.

I’m still out shooting around the area and I still have a pile of originally discarded frames that didn’t make the initial cut, so there is potential for a volume two. Keep an eye out!

W12 is a quieter, hyperlocal exploration of this vibrant and bustling, yet seemingly overlooked, London borough. Featuring 50 colour photographs, all captured within the boundaries of W12, represent nearly two years of pausing to observe what was happening on these local streets.

Copies of the zine are still available to order from my photography shop for £10 with international shipping. You can also check out the full digital gallery here.

A big thank you to the following for their thoughts and feedback during the sequencing period of this project:

Scott Brant, Jan Gottweiss, Mark Luke Grant, David Klein, Gustavo Minas, Anton Podolsky, Smitha Rao-Gynn, Galuh Sahid, Bence Vágvölgyi, Ed Wellbrook