Capturing the urban palimpsest: late-photography and the banality of surveillance in Henrietta Williams’s <i>Ring of Steel</i> (2011)

The Ring of Steel is a security cordon built around the City of London following two IRA bombs in the 1990s. As a piece of counter-terrorist infrastructure it aims to be covert and opaque – something given renewed emphasis in a proposed upgrade. I critique the inherent dangers in such covert security infrastructure and the ‘banal surveillance’ it enables. These dangers range from a lack of public oversight to an increased reliance on technological biases – a process Simone Browne has likened to ‘digital epidermalism’. Key to my critique is my analysis of Henrietta Williams’s 2011 photographic series documenting the Ring of Steel. <br/>Putting Williams’s late-photographic aesthetic in dialogue with theories of urban <br/>palimpsests, I argue that she makes known what Steven Graham would call the Ring of Steel’s ‘manufactured ground’. My reading of Williams’s photographs hereby interrogates the contradictions of surveillance in the twenty-first century city. While the gloss of technological advancement suggests we are entering a digital future of efficiency and objectivity, Williams places the mirage of that metaverse against the earlier foundations of London’s defences. Here, she reminds us of the exclusory perspectives that subtend surveillance architecture – no matter how neutral, or banal, that infrastructure appears to be.<br/>