A soft launch · work in progress
Damen Hartley is being shaped as a calm public front room for Sleaford photography, visual research, and selected archive work — with deeper rooms held back until Simon chooses what becomes public.
Scroll the wall below
Photographs, streets, shopfronts, public change and the evidence of a town in transition.
Enter room →
The work sits between photographic essay, research dossier and archive trail: beautiful enough to enter, structured enough to question.
See the method →
Railway platforms, crossings and routes through town: the places where Sleaford opens, waits and moves.
Follow the line →
Familiar structures, older surfaces and local landmarks held as evidence rather than nostalgia.
View landmarks →
Courtyards, paths and green edges where the town slows down and lets the looking settle.
Step inside →
A holding room for photography, making, leatherwork and future bodies of work once the first public layer is settled.
Visit placeholder →
A project about the project: the human–AI collaboration, the timeline, the breakthroughs and the dead ends, recorded as part of the work.
Walk the road →
Curated rants and selected journal extracts — wellbeing release, creative source and historical evidence. Raw originals stay private until reviewed.
Enter the archive →
Start here → the guided route
An animated, step-by-step path through the museum — from arrival, to a gentle peruse, to a deep dig into the archive. The clearest way to see what Damen Hartley is and how it was built.
Photograph workflow
When images become available from iCloud, OneDrive, Lightroom or the external drive, copied candidates can be placed in a single local inbox for review. Originals stay where they are; the website only uses selected, resized copies after approval.
Use site/photo-selection/inbox/ as the workbench. Nothing there is automatically published.
I can group candidates as hero images, gallery panels, Sleaford evidence, textures, or hold-back material.
Approved photographs get resized into web copies with captions and page-use notes.
Build rule
This version is a visual direction prototype only. No GitHub, Netlify, DNS, Adobe Portfolio or public publishing changes have been made.