Pleased to announce the arrival of a test copy of my first foray into zine territory New Europe 2015-19.
I've appended the dates since I put this together last year as it really does feel like another world. Perhaps pre-2020 will become a phrase of the future freighted with meaning. In the meantime it already has an nostalgia skin to the wonderful Café Royal books. I see so many instances of our former paradigm of privilege that it puts the themes I was exploring into profound perspective.
Here's my original thinking, way back last year...
European cities have long been shaped and identified by immigrant populations. No news there. It's how they've historically grown and prospered. This time things are different. Attitudes and assumptions are being challenged. The essence of what it is to be a citizen is being fought for, intellectually and physically.
When I think of London I don't think of monuments to the past. I think of people. People like my parents who came here for a better life. But it's not easy. London is a dream as much as a place. The streets don't always glitter with gold. But still people come from all around the world. We make lives, love, work, bring up families. Along the way we keep a connection to the home country. But something else happens. Out on the street we share the everyday. Struggles. Triumphs. Despair. We share space and time.
We belong.
Well.
The ease of travelling to European cities for the fortunate is now elevated to an aspiration for the few.
National consciousness is heightened. Borders are porous to this particular migrant. Tensions rise between city and village.
The advent of social distancing, a contender for phrase of the year, makes some of these images appear reckless. Some may say good riddance, granted.
Will we ever return to that way of walking, way of life even, with the same confidence? I'm sure we will but right now, with talk of one-way pavements, it feels a little distant.
Here's to the memory.
I'm fundamentally challenged not just by the current restrictions on personal movement but by the impact of them on my very impulse for taking photographs. The irony of the phrase street photography comes home to me. The streets are nothing without people. Without people's faces.
For succour I'm drawn to photo books. My guilty pleasures. I recently saw a picture by the photographer William Gedney posted on Twitter which lead me to a lovely collection of his work by Gilles Mora, Only The Lonely. Wilfully resisting or indeed neglecting to create any public profile for his work during his lifetime Gedney has only since his death achieved any recognition. His work has plenty of stylistic traits that interest me but I was drawn to his working practice, what Mora calls his "commitment to his art...born solely of a internal necessity"'
Myrtle Avenue, May 5, 1969, 4:45 pm, William Gedney
His work is part of but also separate from the American 20th century documentary tradition. The words immersive and complicity are used to describe his technique and it's fascinating to see how he transposes that to his street work. One of Gedney's significant project was the documentation of life on Myrtle Avenue as he looked from his window in Brooklyn. One image that caught me eye is the only one in his archive titled with such specificity. It place not just himself but me as a viewer in that moment in time. I've always eschewed titles of any description yet this made me think again. It made me think of Chris Dorley-Brown's use of it in The Corners to root his images in an alternate reality. For me knowing the time the picture was taken doesn't define it but adds another layer of story telling, of possibility, of ambiguity.
I'm intrigued. Why May 5? 4:45 in the afternoon? What happened on that day? At that time? I thought of the turmoil of that decade in America, powerfully portrayed by Paul Fusco's Robert F. Kennedy’s Funeral Train. I imagined Gedney listening to the radio and feeling impelled to record and reflect the moment. It'd be fascinating to see if anything is revealed in his writings. I don't think it's what I found.
I recognise this relationship of the ordinary to the extraordinary was my motivation for my New Europe project. It's also poignant that any photographs taken in 2020 will need no such checking.
Everyone knows what started then.