Future Stories.

Abstract

Future Stories is a multi-component work by Dr Ashley Woodfall comprising photographic works produced as a practice research element within the wider Future Lab community research project. The project translated community insights into a spatial design strategy for the town centres of Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole. Disseminated through the book Future Stories: Tales from the BCP Future Lab, two public exhibitions and a public talk, the photographic work was created through a psychogeographic method combining embodied urban drift with pre-mapped structures that directed framing and shutter release. Drawing on walking as practice-based research, this hybrid methodology brought free movement and systematic procedure into productive tension, partly displacing the photographer’s ownership of the decisive moment. The resulting images moved beyond illustration to become reflexive encounters between mapped instruction, embodied movement and urban contingency. The work’s originality lies in extending psychogeographic image-making into a civic and speculative mode that contributes visual evidence to debate on possible urban futures.