Beneath the Surface / Hidden Place (2007–2010) is a project by British photographic artist Nicky Bird, made across Foxbar (Paisley), Ardler (Dundee), the Doon Valley (East Ayrshire), and Craigmillar (Edinburgh) to trace how regeneration reshapes places—and the memories tied to them.
Set against late 20th- and early 21st-century deindustrialization and urban renewal, the work tracks what is lost when postwar housing and working-class landscapes are dismantled. Bird frames redevelopment as an "unmaking" that removes roads, gardens, and meeting points, then asks how personal history persists when those cues vanish. Treating residents as primary sources, the project assembles a counter-archive of local knowledge that rarely enters official records, shaped by Bird’s feminist commitment to overlooked voices and to questioning what institutions count as history.
Visually, the images hinge on a double exposure of time. Bird photographs present-day landscapes with wide, static framing and crisp descriptive detail, then overlays scanned "family snaps" contributed by collaborators at the exact sites where the originals were made. The older figures and scenes often appear semi-transparent or "ghosted," so contemporary rubble, fences, or new housing can be seen through them. Color dominates, with the faded, sometimes yellowed tones and grain of snapshots pressed against the cooler precision of digital capture; occasional black-and-white material heightens the temporal gap. The result is a layered space where past and present sit in the same frame without pretending to merge.
That montage effect is shaped by process: "memory walks" with residents to relocate viewpoints, a DSLR on a tripod, and a high depth of field (often f/22) to keep contemporary detail legible. Outputs ranged from 20 framed C-type prints in multiple sizes to sited works on transparent resin screens and vitrines with overlay maps and ephemera.
Commissioned by Stills (Scotland’s Centre for Photography) in 2008, the project premiered there (May–July 2008) before touring widely, including community and museum venues, and it culminated in a 2010 book publication. A 2009 Kraszna-Krausz Foundation publication award supported the monograph, and reviews in Scottish and photography press framed the work as a way to read social change through the family snapshot and collaborative authorship. Beneath the Surface / Hidden Place is in the following public collections: Dundee Art Galleries and Museums (Ardler, Dundee works), East Lothian Council Museums Service (Prestongrange, East Lothian works) and Renfrewshire Museums Collection (Foxbar, Paisley works).
