abandoned christmas trees (2011-2023)

Since 2011 I have been taking photographs of abandoned Christmas trees on London pavements. I’m not entirely sure why I started doing this. As an adult, I neither like nor dislike the holiday, and the photographs are not suppose to be an environmental statement. I think I started to find the duality of these abandoned Christmas trees intriguing and started to document them. These abandoned Christmas trees were both totally obvious, poised as they were by and sometimes in rubbish bins and on street corners awaiting collection and often in the way of pedestrians, cars and other moving vehicles, and completely invisible, once the centre piece of a living room from December 6th until the new year, people and animals would now walk around them and past them paying them scant attention. From Christmas Eve (I guess some people go away for Christmas and instead of coming home to a living room floor full of pine needles they throw their tree way before leaving) until about mid- to late-January (although one of the photographs was taken end of March which is the latest I have seen an abandon Christmas tree on a London pavement) these leading characters of numerous Christmas stories (however those unfolded in different households) are put out to pasture on the city’s pavements in various configurations and states of greenness. Over the years, I have come to look forward to these encounters on my walks around London. This practice, of letting the tree go, a bit like the celebration that proceed it, marks the passing of a season. I like too how most of the photographs capture a very particular winter light that is starting to grow longer as we head towards spring. There is a certain melancholy and hope in meeting these trees every year, of things gone-by and things yet-to-come.

Most of the photographs in this section were taken in South Islington between 2011-2023.