They called me a corporate whore
From an article in the Observer newspaper in September 2008, one week after the collapse of Lehman Brothers:
(The) chief executive of (a) financial headhunter based in the City said he was hoping to pick up a bit of business over the next few weeks as staff at Lehman and other troubled banks looked for new berths; but he knows that the golden age of the City is over.
'What we are living through now will reverberate through the rest of the century in the same way the Great Depression did last century. We are witnessing a very real power shift. Money is moving eastwards - while they're creating wealth, we're losing it hand over fist. Where it ends no one knows.
'London has enjoyed an unprecedented decade of global dominance. Let's hope people took lots of photos to look back on in the years to come'.
In 2005 I was literally fresh off the boat, new to both London and photography. For the next two years, at the peak of the pre-recession boom, I worked for a large multinational investment bank in London’s financial district (otherwise known as the City). I brought my camera to work every day, exploring the area extensively before, during and after office hours. And as the great machine careened to a shuddering and cacophonous crescendo, I took lots of photos.
At the time, a victim of the subsequent layoffs remarked to me “It’s all swings and roundabouts mate. Just like that old Austrian cyborg, we’ll be back”. Naturally, he turned out to be right on both counts.