I don’t think it’s going to get any better- a story about my obsession with abandoned trolleys.

I grew up predominantly in a little town called Basildon. So those of you who aren’t from the UK, Basildon was part of the new town initiative after the second world war to try and build brand-new places for people to move to and live in who also worked in London, the first suburban developments if you will. Another one of these is Harlow.

A lot of money time and effort as well as advertising got put into these places but as their purpose was fulfilled and money dried up they got forgotten, they themselves dried up and they slowly turned into dilapidated shit holes. But this was my dilapidated shit hole, I found it very rough round the edges but very fun, a lot of good people lived in that town when I grew up.

As such there was always a number of banding trolleys around and as I grew up and as I moved to different places around the south-east of England I noticed that places that predominantly had more middle-class people had less abandoned shopping trolleys. There was a bit of a correlation between that, as well as other fly tipping, On The levels of homelessness.

Now recently, I won’t lie, the idea of taking pictures of abandon shopping trolleys – something considered a common I saw that I wanted to try and make beautiful in a contrast with black-and-white – was just a bit of fun. But the more I took photos of them and the more I got involved in the homelessness problem in the city I live in currently, the more I saw the correlation between the both and this birthed the first zine on this subject.

‘Ca ne va pas du tout’ literally translated to that won’t do it all in English came out in 2023, with some of the proceeds going towards a local homeless charity. As you can imagine from a darkly abstract photography collection, it didn’t raise that much at all. I still made a point of making a contribution as I originally had promised to do so and I distributed it around my hometown in various coffee shops, public hubs, community centres and a few left on public transportation or on Park benches. I sort of littered them around, scattering them out in random places just like homeless people do.

I will say at this point that you take on this is entirely up to you, I wanted to highlight the problem that we have as a society with using certain items and people and then just throwing them away, abandoning them to the elements as if they no longer have any purpose. I think it is disgusting that we is a society are closer to our first trillionaire than we are to solving poverty and homelessness, hunger and conflict.

The first 50 went very quickly, like with a lot of my work I gave a lot of it out and then took the amount from the value and donated it myself. I’m aware of the nature of it, but I had quite a lot of fun hunting out trolleys and taking photos of them, even if the subject matter wasn’t particularly happy. It just became something I ended up looking out for when I was going round taking photos.

This continued with ‘Ca ne va toujours pas bien du tout’ or Things still aren’t going well at all came out later on in the year with Aim is of doing much the same, but mainly because I had a lot of photos left over from the first one and didn’t think having a 80 page plus zine on the matter was going to do anything or do any good or really sell. It turns out it didn’t sell anyway and it just became a passionate project.

Send them all the time went on and the more that I interacted with the local homeless population the more I started to realise that not only are these just people who have or continue to make very easy mistakes that all humans do, I realised how close I was in fact to being homeless myself. On a couple of occasions during and slightly after the pandemic, I was almost rendered completely hung. One time where greed and the pandemic itself took my business and my house away from me and left me with nowhere to live, and secondly when we were in a massive financial struggle due to the loss of jobs and we had nowhere to go.

It is frightening how close you are to the edge of a cliff sometimes.

So I continue to spot them, resisting the age to take photos of all of them because I didn’t necessarily see myself making any more, I thought it would just be a little bit of fun with some good meaning a good hearted fundraising loosely attached to it.

I then found this picture. To me it was like the trolley equivalent of Ophelia. It seemed to have stick out out of the water majestically, surrounded by luscious green foliage looking rather peaceful if not a bit debt – much like the painting of Ophelia herself.

It seemed that I was going to do another one and considering I had to given myself the fucking stupid goal of creating a thing each month for 2026 (I have already stated that I will not be doing this on September) I thought I would try and compile another one.

This is where ‘La Situation a empiré’ or ‘ the situation has worsened’ came into play. The title itself having two meanings, one was that I seem to be doing a relatively fruitless yet fun and abstract attempt at making art again – I don’t think I’m going to learn that lesson any time soon, and because it had yet again become another obsession. I would be mid conversation with my partner, friends or loved ones and then suddenly demand that they stopped moving. Crouching down to make sure that I could take a picture of seemingly nothing, but in reality it was another beautiful chrome basket on wheels, another wonderful vessel of a bizarre passion project that only seemed to be growing.

All three are into dispersed with dark twisted takes on what you would commonly hear from a self checkout robot in your local supermarket, with all of the colours used being the exact colours used by major supermarkets in England; Waitrose, Asda, Tesco even Happy shopper and Booths, all the colour indexes are there setting the background for some gigantic existential questions. “Have you swiped your feelings?“ or “do you need help packing? “ they are peppered with what would’ve initially be quite Monday in questions to assist your daily gathering of goods and producers, now making you really think about the existence and the space that you inhabit as a mortal entity. Fun isn’t it?

Oh, and why are all the titles in French? I liked the idea of giving them a bit of a classy edge. Anything that’s gonna be posh or fancy seems to be for some reason at least, written in French. I thought the juxtaposition between making these sound quite shiny and decadent considering the subject matter entirely revolves around society discarding its most vulnerable rather fitting.

Mostly it was because I just thought it was quite fun.