Rick Davies' Black Country Stories

Rick Davies is showing his panoramic images of the Black Country in a free exhibition at The Public in West Bromwich from 27 January 2012 to 20 May 2012 (Wednesday to Saturday - 10 am to 5 pm; Sunday - 11 am to 3 pm).

For further information about The Public and the exhibition click on the button below.

Detailed below is Rick’s artist statement about the project.

"I describe my work as being ‘A Visual Geography of the Postindustrial Landscape’. The reason that I document the urban landscape is because this has such a major effect not only on the material conditions of life but also on the way we think and feel. People’s physical conditions (food, clothing etc) and built environment are a result of the relations of economic production and these physical conditions create a person's social being. Major changes have occurred to our urban life since 1945, and it is clear that we are now moving from an industrial to a postindustrial society.

This has not necessarily been good news for a major centre of manufacturing like the Black Country. While there is still a significant presence of manufacturing in the region, the changes to a postindustrial state are clear to see in the present-day privileging of service and retail sectors, so apparent at sites like Merry Hill. While up until the early 1970s the urban environment remained under the guiding hand of a kind of benign, municipal socialism, where collective consumption (seen, for example, in the building of council housing) was of central importance, a switch then occurred to the privatisation of public space.

Transnational corporate developers are now pre-eminent and the nature of consumption has been individualised and privatised (see the picture of the Showcase Cinemas development in Dudley). Paralleling this change is the partial demise of the old town centres (see Dudley Town and Castle image). The overall result is a loss of ‘local’ culture (see High Street, Bilston) and its replacement with faceless, placeless buildings, embracing a debased postmodern aesthetic (see Star City, Birmingham)."