an infinite mix

I love to discover other creative forms of expressing city life.

Currently showing at a former office block on the Strand is Martin Creed's short film Work No. 1701. Describing it as a sequence of individuals crossing a street in New York with a garage punk soundtrack doesn't do it justice. The individuals all have idiosyncratic behaviours, food and drink from a street photography point of view, evoking Bruce Gilden.  

However these aren't snatched shots in a crowd but composed portraits in a relatively isolated back street. In a way nonjudgmental, as much as any posed image can be, the subjects are given time to be themselves, the viewer to contemplate.

 

It made me consider my image making process. It also lets the viewer make up their own interpretation about the image - good - but gives no control to the subject - bad?. 

This form of candidness is a hallmark of my form of photography. The artist/subject relationship is well debated across the history of art, let alone photography, but perhaps street is one area where it's unequivocal. Perhaps candour photography is a good description. Fancy running with that?

Anyway the film's available online so I recommend finding a big screen and turning up the volume.  

Coincidentally it reminded me of Shadow Walker by Mark Wallinger, a film I saw earlier this year. This takes the form of a self portrait made by the artist recording his shadow walking along Shaftesbury Avenue. Interesting how such work can be described - adequately but so poorly - in a single sentence.  

It's similarly beguiling.  

in this film provided by the point of view, from and towards a place one seldom if ever takes, and the related choreography, performed subconsciously by any individual on the street navigating their way without incident. There's no explicit explanation for this piece i.e. What's the purpose of the walk, what symbolism should we look for.  I think it's richer for it.  

Very street.

bodies, rest and motion

Well I've spent the first weeks of Autumn doing something else I've not done before on the streets. Gosh, twice in a year. I feel almost giddy.

Following my adventures in eye-level photography I've now being learning how to stand and shoot. I know it all seems very basic but, after 30 years of taking pictures on the hoof, for me an unnerving experience. Why torment myself so? What if I missed that perfect picture waiting around the next corner? Well I really wanted to follow through on my musings about digital and see where they took me.

I decided to use a particular feature of my mobile camera called video collage. It appealed to me as it felt I was actually using a function that wasn't simply a replication of a stills camera. The concept was interesting. 6 seconds x 4 "scenes". Easy to shoot. Easy to share.

Interestingly enough despite its modernity the format reminded me of stereoscopes. The intent then was the illusion of depth of vision. My intent was the illusion of depth of thought!

Again taking advantage of another attribute of using a mobile device, the immediacy of results, gave me the opportunity to experiment. Fixed camera position, fixed subject area, movements of both by degrees left and right. The possibilities were endless. There was still the sense of the unexpected so, you'll be glad to hear, I wasn't totally in an unfamiliar world.

So what have I learned? Well it's still a work in progress but I do like the mini narratives that build up even in such a short space. In a way they remind me of The Present by Paul Graham. They layer further ambiguity and possibility on an already uncertain scene. Just my cup of tea.

for the grace of god

Memories of New York in the 80s recently hit me watching a film about Bill Cunningham, a chronicler of Manhattan street and society fashion. His way of working can be characterised by a comment he makes to someone concerned he's missed dinner at a charity event he's photographing. "I eat with my eyes" he informs her. And so he does, not just eating but living and breathing it too, out on the street with a degree of fanaticism and "in your faceness" that reminded me of Bruce Gilden but, significantly, without the aggression or latent hostility. Bill Cunningham is more a butterfly catcher than a hit man, pinning the exotic, the ephemeral to a page in the New York Times for dissection and classification.

His technique of riding a bike, eyes more on the sidewalk than in front of him, affords him the ability to anticipate opportunities that a foot-bound mortal would miss. I'd love to know how many of his 27, and counting, stolen bikes were sacrificed for the prize of a picture of a pair of Manolo Blahniks.

The overwhelming emotion I felt was of the capricious nature of street photography. Its promise of the perfect picture, always just around the corner; the nobility of the endeavour, chasing rainbows not the Dollar; its intrinsically subversive behaviour, breaking conventions of a polite society. Falling into temptation is to embrace an alternate state of body and mind. Intoxicating. Liberating. Addictive.

I confess to have fallen from grace several times. Certainly not to the heights of Bill Cunningham but the streets, of New York in particular, called me and I was a willing follower.

step in time

I'm back on my reading habit and enjoying London: The Biography by Peter Ackroyd. I'm only half way through it but I've already been struck by some fabulous images

If you stand in Lombard Street at any time of the day, for example, that narrow thoroughfare like others in the vicinity echoes to hurrying footfalls. It has been a continuous sound for many hundreds of years, in the very centre of the City, and it may be that the perpetual steady echo of passing footsteps is the true sound of London in its transience and in its permanence.

and this

It is a city always known for its vivacity and its restlessness. We learn from Thomas Burke's The Streets of London that the citizens' 'progress through the streets is marked by impetuosity and a constant exertion of strength'. We learn further from Pierre Jen Grosley's A Tour of London in 1772 that 'the English walk very fast; their thoughts bring entirely engrossed by business, they are very punctual to their appointments, and those, who happen to be in their way, are sure to be sufferers by it; constantly darting forward, they justle them with a force proportioned to the bulk and velocity of their motion'.

They echo some ideas I've just been exploring on film - the moving kind. I've been spending time in the City, London's financial district, lately. There's a particular pasage in The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs

It is a complex order. Its essence is intricacy of sidewalk use, bringing with it a constant succession of eyes. This order is all composed of movement and change, and although it is life, not art, we may fancifully call it the art form of the city and liken it to the dance — not to a simple-minded precision dance with everyone kicking up at the same time, twirling in unison and bowing off en masse, but to an intricate ballet in which the individual dancers and ensembles all have distinctive parts which miraculously reinforce each other and compose an orderly whole. The ballet of the good city sidewalk never repeats itself from place to place, and in any once place is always replete with new improvisations.

I've really felt it on the street in the City. Unlike the West End, whose morning rush hour is more distributed, both geographically and over time with shops generally opening later, the City is highly concentrated with well worn paths from tube and train stations dense with a majority of office workers determined to be at their desks for a 9am start. The sheer volume of people marching as one corporate mass is at first glance not materially different from the 19th century factory workers. On further observation, subtleties, intricacies emerge, the "ballet".

The influence of the medieval city's pattern of streets, courtyards, alleyways and lanes is enormous on the present day experience. Entering and exiting them, smoothly without breaking stride or sweat, is an art. There's as much social nuance as an Elizabethan court dance in the manner in which these steps are negotiated. Assaying one's way from the chill gloom into startling sunlight requires an appreciation of  the movement of bodies that Galileo would admire. Jousting scalding cups of latte, eye-level umbrella spokes and sharp elbows add to the drama, and exhaust my metaphor.

So it's hardly a great discovery but movement is intrinsic to this experience. It's challenged my default response - take a photograph, get close to the action, capture the essence of the moment. It feels like an opportunity to explore what the moving image can offer.

Don't worry I'm not renouncing the still! I confess it feels a little clichéd. There's certainly a tradition of street photographers taking up movie-making. Perhaps it's a natural next step. The motivation and opportunity to say something, new or otherwise, with still photography is exhausted.

Personally I'm not at that point, yet!

yesterday Derby, tomorrow the world

My little film is taking on a trajectory closer to an indie band's journey to fortune and fame.

Debuted at a festival in the Midlands, it next played to a hundred people in a small room in north London and now takes the stage at a prestigious West End venue.

The World Photo Festival opens this week at Somerset House and I've a slot at the Carousel session.

Wherever next?

ken burns is innocent

Moving pictures? Sound as well? Nah, it'll never catch on. Who do you think I am, desperate to tart up my fine art photography with a garnish of Ken Burns effects on a bed of Gerry Rafferty's Streets of London?  Well, against my better judgement, I've been thinking of putting together my pictures to a soundtrack of some description. 

It's interesting to re-consider the concept of a slide show in terms of an experience that now isn't so much about sitting in your front room comatosed by the neighbours' holiday snaps or a cold church hall camera club enthusiast only interrupted by the whirr-click of a carousel. Daddio get with the digital age. Now we can consume byte-size pieces of media on-demand. Simultaneously re-tweeting Justin Beiber while waiting to eBay bid on a collection of 60s manga we queue a YouTube sequence of skateboarding cats.

How to compete for any attention span, however shallow, in those circumstances?

As part of the opportunity to display my book loved; life; London at the Format Festival I was given the chance to participate in the Carousel Slam. I loved the oxymoron. It made me reconsider my outmoded thoughts on slide shows and I decided to jump in.

The business of editing and sequencing images was my first challenge. I had a way in by virtue by referring back to love; life; London and I soon had a rough cut of about 30 images. However just sequencing them like a PowerPoint presentation i.e. centre each image onscreen, 3 seconds each, next - next - next - etcetera - etcetera - etcetera didn't do them, nor the medium justice.   

I wanted to give some energy, some reflection of the street to the experience.This made me focus on the soundtrack. I was desperate not to contradict my no-crop no-caption maxim, not to "lead" the viewer but let them make up their own mind what they take from the picture. I didn't want to set these pictures to a song which made an overt connection to a particular interpretation (herewith known as the Rafferty Effect).

Where did that leave me?

As well as photography about the city, and books about the city, I do love films about the city too. Digging around the sequences on my YouTube channel I picked out a couple. The first was The City, an American documentary from 1939 by the splendidly monikered Willard van Dyke. It has a wonderful soundtrack which is a sampler's paradise. The vocal excerpt I picked had a marvellous quality, like a 50s government information film, but the spoken words were more B-movie panic than Keep Calm and Carry On.

To follow I couldn't resist one of my all-time favourites West Side Story. If I'd ever had a Jim'll Fix It wish (details here for my overseas friends) then it would have to be a walk-on role in that production. It's such a perfect combination of sound and vision I felt guilty running Leonard Bernstein's score against my pictures. However the segueway between it and the first piece just fell into place so perfectly I felt it was meant to be. Honestly.

Now when I reviewed the sequence I wanted to do something more with the images themselves. Working on a MacBook the Ken Burns effect, a zooming and moving effect, is a default within iMovie and I confess to having found it profoundly irritating whenever I'd seen it. However, after introducing the soundtrack the ebb and flow, rather then making me feel seasick, suddenly made sense. I applied it to all, with a little tweaking, and clicked save.

OK it's showtime...although you've probably gone straight to play this before reading of my ramblings above. I know I would.

Just this week I was invited to show this again at the HOST Gallery's Slam and this time I was to able to introduce it in person. It was a really inspirational event. A full house collectively experiencing a diverse collection of moving images, in both senses of the word. it was also great to be part of a broad cross section of photographic approaches.

This current year of street photography is wonderful. It's certainly keeping me busy. However I think it's important to recognise there's a real opportunity here to make connections in the wider community of people who care about cities, about urban places, about how we shape them and how they shape us.

And by the way, Ken Burns, if you're listening, I take back what I've said about you.