The Mercy Path


Once you bypass

the last starched lightning tree

you enter a hillside world

of midnight stream

and border wire music.


Here, across shilling debris

early shadow

and blisters of high mist,

nature composes movement

from iron and broken bone.

Steve Coel



Steve Coel




Tall Ships

It's found up along cobbled visions of forgotten towns in times disputed by all who lived them.

In places caught by Pentax and Olympus, children play on empty streets near to crumbled demolished homes. 

Tall ships hanging over brick wall skulk in this broken vision. Tall ships made by small people whose dreams, daily smashed, mirror the horror of this passing time.

Close by, crisp tied visitors arrive and soon leave. As they always have and always will. Visitors making quick decisions over local pie and ignored cake.

Windowless empty youth painted buildings now scatter to wind and sudden downpour.

In large open working spaces; in tired dormant, feral communities; few people gather each morning for early shift. Labour here is too vague, mechanical and undisputed. Tiredness is instant and contagious. Jokes are few, clumsy and dulled by lack of echo.

Uniforms, worn in shame, are cheap and ill fitting as they signify nothing but cowardice and lack of respect.

Documentary Fiction Photography 
Steve Coel

Paper Grass

Crouching; doglike alongside a fence corrugated with time, the local old man patters his way home, all memory a slight flicker in grass and paper. Liquid; sweet and delicate, reminds him of people long gone. All are now dismissed with relatives and friends, sweethearts and enemies, photographs and bruises. In a bottle he finds time and peace. In a bottle he becomes young again, a fighter, a winner.



Steve Coel


Steve Coel



Steve Coel



Steve Coel



Steve Coel

Docks Museum

Today...dry docks glisten with salty channel rain as woollen old men sit on one of their favourite benches. Each will smile broadly as together they remember the songs and laughter of young hard welders. Today...visitors will glance at walls of dismal grey photographs. Some photographs show weary men and women waving half empty beer glasses in the air. Others are of car empty streets clogged with leather boots being dragged to early shifts. And some are of boys playing scrappy football with tight balls of Western and Echo in muddy parks bordered with adverts for cheap beer and bread. Tomorrow...the old men will return and see it all again. The departing visitors will not see them.

 Documentary Fiction Photography 
Steve Coel

Rains on Me / Custom House

Innocence doesn't exist here anymore, not even for the young. No, only dead eyes stare from photographs taken on cheap cameras by drunk uncles.


Standing in the doorway to the Custom House you silently mouth a plea for small change. This is not your regular spot and your recent close shave has gone. The waterside is busy, but you are not, and slowly you are becoming invisible. Eventually, you will disappear leaving only a shadow in each doorway of this street.

Note.

The shadow of a man, each day up from the Sally down the docks. Into town. Stillness. In the doors of the Western and Echo.

Documentary Fiction Photography 
Steve Coel

Empty Corners */ The Proposal**

Stepping away from the street through a broken broad open two door, you painfully walk into a high congregation of brown paper and leather. Once inside, along damp tired walls, you discover anointed paint quietly peeling and unclean fragile carpet, frayed by disappointment, falling into gloomy empty corners.*


Steve Coel

Cut into bitter wet stone by masters of dead trades, your life story. Brief like you, words torn from broken parents, target the elders who created your passing.**



Steve Coel

Our life hangs on a single thread / It soon is out and we are dead / Just like a flower you were up at dawn/ A day passed by and you were gone / So boast not reader of your might / Alive at noon and dead by night.


Rhyme and Reason

Steve Coel

It's doleful doorway conversations along the recently re-inforced street.

Steve Coel

It's each footstep spiced up and dispersed along the feral gutter.


Steve Coel

It's steel wire wrapped around the useless guttering that blows into window and youth.

Arbrofion - Steve Coel


Laugh That

Starts on the street. Outside like. Begins with Police searching a car, wrong car as it happens, and other footies holding this guy up against a wall while others is checking his jacket in doorway of adult store. Is my understanding they won't find nothing.

Is sunny day. Busy day actually. Bad atmosphere. And I's seeing looks being passed between people trying too hard not to know each other. Failing badly they is, they really should do better. So here's the story. Morning. Early for some, late for others. And someone, it would seem, is clearly not going to make it through the day and is already getting desperate and is needing some action pretty quick, like right away, right now. So. Quick snatch job is all, but bad call is what it is. Being watched see and being watched quite closely as it happens. Luckily, for all involved, footie wades in. There's a bit of running round, who doesn't like a good chase? Local security joins in too. Laugh that, though twats they is because people's quick round here. When opportunity arises. So, quick in and out is all. Even though they knows cameras got them and security'll be having 'words' later. Poor bastards. Like I tells you is my street. Reckon you knows rest.

Documentary Fiction Photography 
Steve Coel



Shadow Nut Wood

It begins by the shallow path that slopes unevenly away from the shadow nut wood. Here, along the broken hill and towards the distant wet rock, corrugated cylindered tunnels, all built to hide and imprison, shelter straight back frightened animals.

Thick with the embrace of both mud and food, death stamps its mark into heated spot, as an acid smell of ripped air, fallen dead leaf and crippled motor oil twists open the unyielding buckle of weed.

Steve Coel
 

Inside Out

Below the 9 by 9 bricked tunnel, removed by light and fierce water, rollered paper is slipping down the streamered hoarding...chastened, wet plastic sheeting covers the chipped cement pavement as the bruised boots of youth enter the alarm belled neighbourhood.

Arbrofion - Steve Coel


Stryd Fawr / Stryd Uchel ( 2021 )
Steve Coel