Taylor Coyne is a researcher working tracing infrastructure, water histories, and cultural storytelling. His doctoral project, Swamp City, examines Sydney’s stormwater systems as cultural artefacts shaped by power, memory, and place.
Taylor’s work reveals the soggy histories and murky futures that flow beneath and through the city.
From archival deep-dives, photography, sensory fieldwork and Country-centred design, his work reframes water infrastructure as a living archive.
My photography functions as a research method rather than an illustrative add-on. It is a way of thinking with place through light, surface, and duration, using the camera to slow attention and register spaces that are usually treated as background or residue. Below are a series of select photographs that demonstrate this work.
The images focus on infrastructural and ecological traces that resist easy explanation. Rather than documenting or aestheticising these sites, the photographs operate as analytic prompts, working alongside walking and archival research to engage urban waterscapes as active, contested material worlds.
