When I first read about this assignment, what came to my mind was to do it around the place where I work in central London. After all, this is a place I am most familiar with, having taken pictures of it during lunchtime almost every day for most of the past 10 years. But, on second thoughts, I feel it was more appropriate to use this opportunity to try something else, as photographing places around my office was likely to draw me into doing more of the same I had been doing until now, and would have limited my chances of pushing my ideas into different directions.
The brief does mention about the need to “push yourself out of your comfort zone in terms of subject matter” and this would be quite difficult to do in an area where most of the subject matters were familiar to me. It would either have forced me to photograph stuff I am not comfortable with, or otherwise led to subtle variations of themes and subjects I already had explored, none of which was appealing to me.
Having recently moved to a new neighbourhood that is distinctly different from the place I used to live, I decided this was a great opportunity to both explore my new surroundings and try a new approach to my photography.
In keeping with the title of the assignment, I decided to limit the area of exploration to a square mile centred on my road. The map of this area can be see in the link below.
The long way 