London’s Occupied Spaces (9 Photos)

All photos © Ben Roberts. Tent Interiors from the Occupy LSX camp, St. Paul’s Square, London.

British photographer, Ben Roberts’s latest series “Occupied Spaces” shows an intimate look at the private spaces of occupiers at the protest camp outside of St Paul’s Cathedral in central London. The project began in response to stories Roberts heard in the mainstream media claiming that “thermal imaging” proved only 10 percent of the 250 tents in St. Paul’s Square were being inhabited overnight. Skeptical of these claims, Roberts set out to record the daily life of an occupier without, as he says, “resorting to the standard photographic language of ‘protest photography.’ The traces of activity and inhabitance in these photographs serve as a document of the intense utilisation of a limited space by a large number of both permanent and temporary residents.” Roberts’s series was recently featured on the BBC.