City.keys Artist Spotlight
Photo taken by @alexanderjamestai
What is your home city?
Who Are You?
London
Photographer and explorer documenting my achievements as I attempt to climb the tallest buildings around the world along with other noteworthy locations.
What is a memory attached to one of the images shared?
The red crane. The tallest crane in London at the time which was being used to build the second tallest building in London. As far as I am aware only a handful of explorers made it to this crane and it took us 10 attempts through the cold winter months.
Every weekend Mello and I would meet up & throw ourselves at this glass giant with no success and plenty of escapes and near misses. When we finally succeeded it was using a method we had only joked about as it was so ridiculous. We ran (in front of cameras) across the wooden planks at the front of the building in full view of the entire bottom floors. Had anyone been looking out we would have been spotted. Ascending the blue crane from the bottom all the way to the tip of the jib in the dark which is when I realized how great a photo of Mello on the red crane would look at sunrise.
We stayed on the red crane for a few hours and when sunrise came around I climbed the blue a second time to reach my vantage point, capturing Mello walking along with Tower Bridge just below.
Three years and many more achievements later we still agree this was one of the best experiences of our lives. The amount of effort we put into this was all made worth while.
What’s in your bag?
In my Patagonia backpack is usually a Sony A73, Zeiss 35mm f1.4, Sony 12-24mm f4 and a lightweight Manfrotto tripod that will soon be going in the trash. Depending on the occasion there may be a smaller bag inside which contains a ton of keys and they’re not for my flat.
Did photography lead you to exploring or did exploring lead you to photography?
Why do you explore?
Photography. I picked up a camera initially to take photos of myself and friends skateboarding. I gradually realised I’m terrible at skateboarding and started seeking abandoned places and hopping into random construction sites around the end of 2015.
I explore to separate myself from normality, to push the limits of what is believed to be possible and to eventually have an extensive and high quality body of photo work.
