A Cambridge Diary photographer Martin Bond publishes stunning second book

When the world went into lockdown, Cambridge revealed itself anew to photographer Martin Bond.

His social media account, A Cambridge Diary, which saw Martin post a photograph from Cambridge online each day, between 2010 and 2023 is now becoming a series of books, with the second out this month.

And the period of his pictorial diary covered by this second book is 2019 to 2021 - covering the pandemic and the ghostly abandoned streets of lockdown Cambridge.

Martin says: “I've always, very ambitiously, set out to do a trilogy. Because I had so many images and I wanted to break it down into three manageable, bite sized volumes to cover the 13 years that I did the project.

“I feel like each one is a social commentary on that particular period and the second one pretty much covers the pandemic.”

Martin remembers the day of the first lockdown when he began wandering the empty streets of Cambridge, camera in hand, during his hourly allotted walk.

He says: "That first day, I remember there literally wasn't anybody on the streets. And the only reason I justified my presence, was the fact that I heard that Marks and Spencer in Cambridge was open, and I thought, well, that's my exercise and my essential shop combined..”

What he discovered on those empty streets was a renewed love for the city and a change in his photographic style.

“The first book was very much about people, which was the aim of the project. When I first set out, quite naively, I thought I could take pictures of people without them knowing and putting and put them on Facebook without any problems. And as it turned out, most people have received their presence in the book very happily.”

In the books he chooses one photograph to represent each day, but it could be from any year in the period covered so the resulting diary is not chronological.

Martin says: ““The second book covers the Covid period and it also matches a period of time when I step back a little bit from from people, they're still there, but there is more of a focus on the city itself. It’s more about the architecture or the beauty of Cambridge. I was trying to find a different way to photograph a very well known city, and so I was forced to look at different ways of framing the composition.”

He also found the silence and “lack of ambient noise” helped him see the city differently and that change has stayed. “I think I rediscovered the beauty of the city and it wasn't just the fact that there weren't people there,” he says.

“There seemed to be less clutter in terms of bikes and bins and that sort of thing. Now I’ve noticed my work has moved more towards kind of more liminal scenes, a bit Hopper-esque. There's not a great deal going on. There's a feeling of detachment and almost loneliness in the pictures, which I'm drawn to. I'm not sure what that says about me, but that's the way I'm going anyway.”

Cambridge - Time & Space, by Martin Bond, with a foreword by Sebastian Faulks, is available priced £65 from cambridgebooks.co.uk