I moved to Leeds in the early 1970s and have been photographing its dying buildings and the people associated with them ever since, making notes and observations to accompany each subject. This image appeared at the Impressions Gallery in York in 1979, as part of an exhibition I called A New Refutation of the Viking 4 Space Mission.
In the show, every photograph was bordered with a coordinate grid like the ones used by Nasa, and mounted in a tin frame painted bright red. I wanted to give the impression that the Viking Mars probes, which had been launched a few years before, had returned to Earth and their rovers were now rolling through the streets of Britain taking pictures. The shots in the show were largely of Leeds, but I also included photographs taken in London and Sheffield, as well as Nasa images of the surface of Mars.
