The body of my photographic work is a collection of essays on urban landscape and architecture. The project On Watch started as a series of images depicting small shelters designed with specific utilitarian purposes. I became increasingly fascinated by the solitude of guardhouses and watchtowers quietly standing in a state of unobserved decay.  While they are positioned to oversee their territory, to raise an alert against illicit activity, the buildings themselves appear overlooked and abandoned, hardly noticeable in the fabric of the surrounding urban textures. 

The single spark of vitality in the structures are the guards themselves. In the last year, I began adding a human element into the project by photographing the people hired to wait, on watch, in different countries around the world. In this series I display the buildings and the guards side by side, finding that in many cases the two share a common sense of isolation, one haunting the other.

Increasingly our daily progress is recorded by unmanned cameras and other surveillance equipment. The marketplace has long been overseen by ubiquitous black plastic domes, positioned as a means of deterring or fighting crime. In the post 9/11 world, security has become something of an obsession. London's infamous 'ring of steel' may not have prevented the terrorist attacks on the transit system there, but it captured images of the men responsible shortly before they blew themselves to pieces. Cameras can record and be reviewed but they are a reactive technology. It is still the solitary figure sitting behind a dirty pane of glass, day after day, that has a chance to be proactive. It was a man sitting in this position in Mumbai's Victoria Terminus train station who began shouting evacuation orders to the travelers under fire during the terrorist attacks of November 2008. He continued shouting directions into his microphone even as the gunmen pumped bullets into his little booth. Miraculously he survived.

On first glance there is something ironic about these forgotten huts and their lonely watchmen, but these are paying jobs that ask much of the employee: hours of intense monotony with a small but real chance of personal risk.  And of course, palpable despite the inglorious surroundings, it is in many countries a position of pride, felt in the occasional neatly pressed uniforms and upright posture of authority.

I've shot these images primarily with my Mamiya 6, my own portable window from which I observe.