There's a wonderful passage in The Ongoing Moment, Geoff Dyer's characteristically idiosyncratic book about American photography of the twentieth century, in which he focuses on images of rooms that are empty yet suggestive of activity, waiting to be brought back to life.
Those words came back to me instantly on seeing some of Simon Harsent's photos of football pitches around the world. As the Guardian's Jonny Weeks observes, "the absence of action" does indeed give the pictures "an eerie quality", given that action is the pitches' whole purpose. The lack of any players makes them seem lonely, in desperate need of people to (re)animate them.
Other images in the series are fascinating for the way in which they position well-known football stadia in their geographical (and, by extension, socio-economic) context. I hadn't realised, for instance, that streets within very close proximity of Anfield had been condemned. In this respect, the pictures are a timely reminder of clubs' physical rootedness, and the fact that transplanting a team to a new ground - even if close by - is inevitably a very significant decision.
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