renga time

I'm thinking of making a zine with the photographs from my New Europe collection. Why zine? Wouldn't it be an opportunity to add to my fabulous publishing empire? Well I'm seeing this as a punctuation point not an end. This is still very much a work in progress, as is the immigration debate itself of course.

I have to credit my friend Fabrizio from my local LIP group for the inspiration as he has used the zine format to really complement his wonderful work. 

One characteristic of a zine I like is that you can do away with the reverence of the high end reproduction values of a book. For me it's a more accessible way of presenting images and their sequencing in a visceral way that can really engage you. It reminds me of my conscious rejecting of what I called the white gloves school of photography back in the day. For me the word zine recalls the work of Jamie Reid. In no way could I call myself a punk but the DIY ethos of creating art - whether music, design, film or photography - of picking up whoever or whatever is around you and expressing yourself is really vital to the individual and society.

This is also another opportunity to do something different to how I've worked before by collaborating on the selection and flow of my pictures. Typical of my practice it's always been a solitary process. I had a foray into collaborative working thanks to the Ambiguous Book Project which was quite magical so the seeds are there. This time I'm keen to use the process to interrogate my own work.It's taken me time to feel comfortable doing that myself so I'm excited...and a little nervous.

Fabrizio and I have shared our separate experiences of taking photographs in Tokyo and so listening to the radio this week I was caught by the Japanese phrase Renga.  It's a genre of collaborative poetry but for me it captured perfectly what I'm trying to do...and I never miss an opportunity to see serendipity.

Kore wo yarimashou!

city of stars

Wonderful to see London Nights a new photography show at the Museum of London. I really think it's my favourite museum and it was an honour to show my work there in the survey of London street photography. There's a strong thread of street in this show...from times way before the phrase had been coined so it's a great opportunity to look at those photographers and their work.

I was really pleased that the exhibition lead with a photograph by Paul Martin. I first became aware of his work courtesy of the show I mentioned above and he's a real pioneer of this form of photography. Well worth looking up. It was great to discover another "unknown" Mercie Lack. Details of her photography are scant - as are much about her life - so it's great to find an audience for her work in the 21st century which can admire her work both creatively and politically. I'd love to see her story developed.

              Late Extra, Mercie Lack

There's so much to see at the show and it's achieved by a feat of curation by Anna Sparham. More well known work by Bill Brandt has to be included and rightly so but I appreciated the chance to see more contemporary work and the use of film and video too. Rut Blees Luxemburg's piece London/Winterreise, 2013 is a salutary reflection on the state of London today referencing classical architecture and music. Inspirational. 

 

The show challenged me directly too. I've taken night time pictures in other cities but why not London? Am I too obsessed with my daytime practice? The 360 work I made - interestingly enough also in Tokyo - was a step towards a new form of expression. Well maybe it's time for my own Winterreise moment.

tokyo drift

One of the many highlights of my last visit to Tokyo were trips to the wonderful photo bookstores of the city. It's not that I needed another stimulus to photograph but the culture those places represent is powerful. I felt the classic crisis of choice where there was just so much inspirational work I could have walked away with nothing except a, rather wonderful, headache. However I did manage to select two beautiful books by Naohiro Harada and Michio Yamauchi.

I am immediately taken by the images of Harada's book Drifting. High contrast, displaced snatches of figures. Elusive. The sequencing of images resonates with the push-pull rhythm of city streets.

"All these people are drifting, on the surface of the silent jet black film, my body drifts inside them; and their bodies keep drifting too, inside me."

This sense of flow is something I've spoken about. It has unavoidable echoes with Zen in the Art of Archery which has its advocates, and detractors too I admit. Nevertheless it's fascinating to see the realisation of a sensation like this into a body of work that can leap off the page at me. Subarashī!

My love of candid, black and white photography from the street is well met by Michio Yamauchi's Tokyo Up Close. It's a great collection of images, very much what is says on the tin but none the worse for that. 

"The photographs I take are all photographs; even so, I believe that 99% of them are pretty much equivalent to garbage. It's the remaining 1% that intrigues me and causes me to wonder at my reaction to those instances of reality. And then another person, looking at photographs I've taken in response to my arbitrary reactions, reacts too. Other people are able to feel my reactions - that's even more intriguing."

Again another quote and another connection to reflections I've made. The subjectivity of meaning, and the sharing of those interpretations, were my motivations to create the Ambiguous Book Project!

Photography in book form is regarded as an art form in itself and I'm really privileged to have two such examples in my collection. Time to think about some new ideas...

Tokyo 360

I've been toying with new ways of working. Film will always have a special place and it's been wonderful to fall back in love with it again over the last year. 

Singular focus and dedication to a cause, the 10,000 hours story, has its merits. That perfect shot is just around the corner, it has to be...surely? I confess at the same time it becomes a comfort zone. I've taken the plunge into digital, although just through a camera phone, dallied with video and so next up is the wild west of 360.

A trip to Tokyo seemed the perfect opportunity. A collision of ancient and modern, Blade Runner in a petri dish. 

How did it go? Well it's certainly out of my comfort zone! Pretty much every maxim I follow is quite literally turned upside down. 

 

Is it street? Absolutely. As you immersive yourself in the image you are in the moment as well as outside it. A participant and an observer. Part of a bigger story. 

That's life. That's street.

the price you pay

What's the cost of street photography? Street photography is for me a self-initiated, self-indulgent, self-financed act. Part of the tension I bring to my work is that desperate pull between the worlds of earning a living and the intoxicating state of creating work for its own sake.

This issue was really brought home to me while reading the book by Sam Stephenson of The Jazz Loft Project featuring the images of W. Eugene Smith. In essence it's a document of the life and times of that photographer in a New York City of the late fifties, early sixties where the jazz scene defines my perception of the romance of that world, however misguided.

Ironically the words and the image that I responded to most were the references to his family life...

...Smith was thirty eight years old and at the top of his profession. But he was suffering through a harrowing stretch in his personal life. His misery made may of those closest to him miserable in turn. He had four children and a wife living at his home in Croton-on-Hudson, and another child living with a lover on Philadelphia. He virtually abandoned all of them when he moved into 821.

...In a 1976 interview he [Smith] recalled the time around 1958 as his peak as a photographer but his nadir as a human being: 'My imagination and my seeing were both - and I don't know if I can think of the right term - red hot or something. Everywhere I looked, every time I thought, it seemed to me it left me with a great exuberance and just a truer quality of seeing. But it was the most miserable time of my life'.

In the book, among the many of known and unknown jazz musicians of the day, there is a photograph of his daughter Shana in the stairwell outside the loft itself.

Jazz Loft Project, W Eugene Smith

This photograph really made me pause for contemplation of that moment and that gaze between father and daughter.

Such sacrifice is not for me. The price is too high. I can remember walking the streets of Shibuya in Tokyo, camera in one hand, a bag of toys in the other, and thinking 'I'm sure William Klein didn't do this...'

However I can't escape the question that by not "following the dream", that talisman of self expression, is my work never going to be good enough? Good enough for whom? Maybe good enough just is...

"loved; life; London" published at last

The title is a line taken from the novel Mrs Dalloway written in 1925 by Virginia Woolf. I read it after seeing the film The Hours, a story of how the novel affects three generations of women, three times in a row on a flight from Tokyo so it made an impression on me in a number of ways!

In relation to my own work I connected to the novel in part because of its setting in central London, but more so through the style of writing, the personal thoughts of individuals woven into their experience of a day in the city.
The photographs of mine that arrest me most are those in which the figures passing through the frame beg me to wonder what's on their minds: the mundane, the epic, the hope, the fear.

As I work in black and white, in a style that concentrates on moments of interaction between individuals and the fabric of the city, I am also drawn to the impression that it's sometimes a challenge to precisely place these images in a particular year or even decade.

For me these moments are a bond with the lives of Londoners coming to terms with the new experience of a rapidly changing London in the 1920s, around the time Mrs Dalloway was written, an experience we continue to encounter today.

The title is taken from a passage in the book that I particularly respond to:

For having lived in Westminster - how many years now? Over twenty, - one feels even in the midst of the traffic, or waking at night, Clarissa was positive, a particular hush, or solemnity; an indescribable pause; a suspense (but that might be her heart, affected, they said, by influenza) before Big Ben strikes. There! Out it boomed. First a warning, musical; then the hour, irrevocable. The leaden circles dissolved in the air. Such fools we are, she thought, crossing Victoria Street. For Heaven only knows why one loves it so, how one sees it so, making it up, building it round one, tumbling it, creating it every moment afresh; but the veriest frumps, the most dejected of miseries sitting on doorsteps (drink their downfall) do the same; can't be dealt with, she felt positive, by Acts of Parliament for that very reason: they love life. In people's eyes, in the swing, tramp and trudge; in the bellow and the uproar; the carriages, motor cars, omnibuses, vans, sandwich men shuffling and swinging; brass bands; barrel organs; in the triumph and the jingle and the strange high singing of some aeroplane overhead was what she loved; life; London; this moment of June.

loved; life; London is my first published book.
Comments welcome!