Thomas Erskine has photographed rural and urban environments in Los Angeles, London, France, Iraqi Kurdistan, and elsewhere. He aims to capture the distinct atmospheres of these diverse places, to be aware of their history and social use of space.

In Los Angeles Thomas has recorded the manicured and sometimes fantastical front gardens, and the uncannily empty streets of affluent suburbia. Throughout LA walls are full of images of all kinds, and from several cultures: Catholic Latino murals; commercial billboards, often for the film industry; or gang culture graffiti, as on the concrete walls of the LA River. The apparently wild Californian desert often turns out in fact to be the site of human activity: the location for famous Hollywood movies; failed utopian communities; or real estate land-plots, named, paid for, but as yet not built on.

In London Thomas has taken views towards the city, from residential terraces or council flats, to the Square Mile beyond, capturing the amazing diversity of the architecture, new and old, and the uses to which it has been put. He has also done a series of collages of entire streets, panoramic in shape. In some ways these capture the appearance of a technical drawing, except that they include a ‘snapshot’ of all the rich ephemeral incidents of the street, with people walking past, relating to each other, as well as the alluring paraphernalia of changing shop window displays.

Iraqi Kurdistan is officially still part of Iraq, but newly conscious of its autonomy and a growing prosperity; different religions try to live side by side. Thomas photographed people at home, in places of worship, in the market, and in the countryside.

Thomas’s commissions include an exhaustive record of the architectural features and layout of the Ladbroke Estate area, for its conservation organisation, (2007). In 2009 he has just completed the photography for an exhibition catalogue of fine art textiles, ‘Krishna and Devotion’, exhibited at Asia House, London.

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