The Usual Spot

Photography & Text: Baris Ucar
Location: Finsbury Park Skatepark, London
2025–2026

 The Usual Spot is a portrait-based project made entirely at Finsbury Park Skatepark in North London, developed through regular visits over nearly a year. It began with an interest in the place beyond skating itself: the people who return to it, their personal style, routines and ways of occupying the space.

Skateboarders, BMX riders, scooter riders and people who come simply to spend time there share the same setting, but each brings something distinctly their own to it. Clothing, hairstyles, boards, bikes, accessories, posture and gesture become ways of expressing individual identity. The portraits draw attention to these details, giving each person their own space within the wider group.

This individuality is central to the project. Rather than approaching the community as a single identity, The Usual Spot builds a picture of it through the people who make it up. Each portrait stands on its own, while together they reveal a community formed from different personalities, styles and forms of self-expression. What connects the photographs is not a particular look or type of person, but the fact that these distinct individuals continue to occupy and give character to the same shared space.

Portraiture becomes a way of bringing this relationship between the individual and the collective into focus. By photographing people separately, the project gives attention to the particular qualities of each subject, while the growing series allows those individual identities to sit alongside one another. The community emerges through the accumulation of portraits rather than through a single defining image of the group.

The project is photographed entirely on 120 and 35mm film. This is partly an aesthetic decision: the colour, grain, texture and slight unpredictability of film feel closely connected to the way I want the portraits to exist. But the medium's physical nature is equally important. Each photograph leaves behind a negative — a tangible object that can be kept, revisited and preserved independently of the final image.

As the project grows, these negatives form a physical archive of the people who have occupied this particular space at a particular moment in London. In this sense, The Usual Spot is not only a series of individual portraits, but a developing cultural record built from them: an archive of personal identities, styles and forms of self-expression that, seen together, give a community its character.