Manchester

The first Kói Creative photography collection to go on general sale is now available as a limited edition photozine, stocked in Unitom (Stevenson Square, Manchester).

By accepted gospel of product management, my experience in part II of this trilogy should have warded me off analogue photography and the search for friction forever. I should have retreated into contactless, algorithmic comfort. Instead, I went out looking for more.

Stand on a hilltop in the Peak District outside Macclesfield and look west, and you see the watermark of a culture whose flood-tide re-invented engineering, music, painting, writing and sport across the world, over a span of two centuries. You can see North-West autodidactism.

"Praxis is the idea that you do something cos you want to do it. And after you've done it, you find out all the reasons why you did it." Tony Wilson said that in 1984, sitting in a bathtub in south Manchester, trying to explain Factory Records to anyone listening. It sounds romantic. It sounds like permission to follow your gut and figure it out later. But that's a misreading.

Engineering, at its best, is repeatable, testable, transferable between people because it's written down as a rule. That's exactly what the razor unit's makers had. What they didn't have was design judgement - the thing rooted in observation rather than specification, that knows when the rule has stopped serving the purpose it was built for. They applied technical rationality to a problem that needed reflection instead, and the result was an object with exact tolerances and n

Wander around the North-West after time away and what jumps out is the architecture of the cotton and silk towns that initiated the Industrial Revolution. Terracotta that was visually resistant to the polluted air, Ruskinian Gothic straight out of the Stones of Venice, Corinthian columns supporting huge sandstone pediments, and above all many tonnes of red bricks.