When I travel with the purpose of making photographs, I spend evenings taking long walks through cities, for hours deep into the night, sometimes until I can hardly stand any longer. I enter alleyways, buildings, stores, without real purpose, other than an innate interest in the visual qualities of a new place, and how those visual images speak to the images conjured or held within my mind. Sometimes this wandering takes me to places so dense and layered with human inhabitation, so poetic in light, shadow, noise and smell, and in building and spatial composition, that I feel like I have entered a space that I previously believed could only exist in cinema, in painting, in written stories or even the dreams formed as composites of those narratives consumed.  When I entered the dense alleyways that snake through textile factories and homes of the Haizhu district in Guangzhou, I felt this overpowering uniqueness of place, and consequently for all of my time in the city, I remained within those alleyways.

The textiles manufacturing area of Haizhu distric is, composed of an infinitely dense labyrinth of alleyways, with brief glimpses of a night sky tinted magenta from light pollution. Jets of steam are catapulted from duct openings rhythmically, like in the levels of an old playstation platformer game. The walls are richly layered with texture – accumulated dust and grease, posted bills layered upon one another, cables, pipes and caged windows. And the windows, the windows have their glass tinted, and they glow fluorescent greens and blue from the piercing striplights behind.

Walking through alleyways some almost too tight to fit with backpack and camera, I would suddenly come across a factory window, and would find myself no more than a metre from someone sat at their sewing machine. Mid-way through another alleyway I encounter another window, and here I find someone eating before a small television. Within this world there was a sudden immediacy of encounters with people a but still always from a position of a voyeur, who gains small slices of worlds inhabited behind the tall walls that enclose the alleyways.