'Solo City' by Polly Braden

Text by David Campany

Stumbling into London's Square Mile these days, you could lose your way within minutes. Public streets blur into private forecourts. Seductive passages become corporate cul-de-sacs of soaring glass, steel and stone. Abstract public sculptures - those token concessions to the human spirit - invite and ward you off at once. The summer heat adds a dizzying effect while harsh sun bounces off every shiny surface, turning spaces into film sets or locations for slick fashion shoots. If it wasn't so unnerving you might enjoy it.

Much of the new City architecture has a preening bravado. These are offices built to look great in photographs. So much of the Square Mile now depends on image. Each new London landmark is launched on a wave of computer generated anticipation, reducing the public city to publicity. Well, almost. In the end a city is not its buildings, it is its people and there is something salutary in the way Londoners fail to live up, or down, to the cosmetic gloss of their surroundings. Whether or not we wish to, we just don't mirror these facades.

Polly Braden is making a long-term study of the Square Mile. The images that comprise Solo City come from the first chapter. "I hope they give a sense of what it might be like to be in this place today" she says. "To a newcomer the City looks impenetrable, like an oiled machine with a hidden logic. City folk might seem coolly efficient but it's an illusion. Look again and many of them seem out of their element, as if caught between one air-conditioned sanctuary and the next." These are not employees 'on message'. There is doubt and indecision in their gestures. Others are not dressed for the office at all. Perhaps they are residents from the housing estates in nearby Middlesex Street or Golden Lane.

Braden insists she is not after the true character of these people yet something of the essence of the City is visible here: the telling gap between official rhetoric and the lived experience of flesh and blood. She is a quietly patient photographer, framing up a portion of the city then waiting, sometimes for hours for a telling shot in the ever-changing light. It is isolated, concentrated work, most of it done in the early morning hours of summer months when workers are arriving for work. She gives us a modern England bathed in a light more typical of American street photography. There is no long lens involved ("telephoto lenses are for telephoto people"). Even so, "picking out out a single figures with a camera is strange" Braden confesses. "The City teems with people, but selecting on just one can feel unbearably intimate." Inevitably cities bring out the voyeur in us all and this is part of their appeal. To look, or more accurately to watch without being seen is a part of what defines metropolitan life. And while there is no actual contact between the Braden and her subjects, she is looking for some measure of humanity. To be a voyeur is not always anti-social. It can be very different from the cold gaze of the ubiquitous surveillance camera or the miscreant, more guardian angel than opportunist gazer. CCTV catches every second of every day in the high security Square Mile but it misses the things that really matter.