always first steps

I'm really enjoying my participation in the my local London Independent Photography group. I'm in my second year which feels like a (small) achievement after previous failures to commit to group photography projects.

As well as showing and discussing photography the group is actively involved in local exhibitions. Last year's group show had a really interesting theme and this year's is just as good. So good I've ended up in the team organising it!

Oblique Strategies is an approach that Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt evolved in the 70s to overcome creative blocks. I remember interviews with David Bowie talking about his writing technique of cutting up words so it was fascinating to see how this had been formalised, industrialised even, into a process and used on his Berlin albums produced by, guess who, Brian Eno.

Each of the group were drawn a statement from the set of Oblique Strategies to respond to with a photograph. Always First Steps was mine. Well how easy was that going to be? Despite an aspiration to try different techniques by joining the group I do find myself back in my safety zone. So how about a blur of shoes on Waterloo Station's Odessa Steps? Perhaps a crowd crossing Oxford Circus Shibuya-style? Over complicating it? OK then, a kid on reins. Job done.

Well not quite. 

To do justice to the project - and Brian and David too - I felt I needed to dig a little deeper. One of the many exciting aspects of talking photographs on the street is, one of my favourite words, serendipity. That moment when two, or more if you're especially fortunate, elements come together. They are rare but incredibly rewarding. 

So what did I come up with? 

This.

The reason why I don't title any of my pictures is just to let people read whatever they want into them. It was one of the motivations for The Ambiguous Project!

It's fascinating showing this image to people, revealing the "title" and listening to their interpretation. I'm sure there's some psychological process at work here. The same way perhaps we make connections between images and soundtracks we need to rationalise what we're seeing, no matter how arbitrary. To achieve dissonance is a real challenge. Aha. 

I feel another project coming on...

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.

dear, damned. deceptive city

I'm always on the lookout for photography books about cities - London in particular of course - so I was really pleased to discover both a wonderful book and a photographer I'd known nothing about. It affirms my faith in the photobook as a 

Londýn 60. let / Sixties London by Miloň Novotný affirms my faith in the photobook as not just a nostalgic trip to the past or an arms length glimpse of a  another world but as much a reflection on our own place and times. I found myself visualising the exact spots where Novotný would have stood in Picaddilly Circus, Tottenham Court Road or Cornhill. Reminds me of the Street Museum idea that I still would love to do something with. Oh dear. Too late.

 

For me there's a connection to the work of Markéta Luskačová and Sergio Larraín which makes it all he more interesting, a kind of cross referencing of people and place with the eyes of a outsider.

Social class as explicitly referenced in the photographs of the City and the East End is a common denominator but so is the less stratified world of the West End. It resonates with me as I've always enjoyed the social mix drawn by the shops, businesses and tourist attractions there. The City has some of that and arguably the East End is on its way. Maybe it's the South Londoner in me that's behind this so I love to see how photographers from different backgrounds approach the city.

I couldn't resist titling this post with a phrase A.G. Hughes uses in his essay accompanying Novotný's photographs. Dear, damned, deceptive city. It's a dramatic phrase, in a way at odds with the images at first glance. Yet thinking of the times these pictures were made London was undergoing enormous social and physical change, transforming the city in similar ways to our present time. I can't see it appearing as an advertising strap line on the Tube but I feel it around me. 

 Dear, damned, deceptive city.

BST

Ah the Spring Equinox is here. No, I've not suddenly converted to pagansim, although it's somewhere in my roots. It's my time to come out of hibernation and start to take pictures again. I often wonder why I make things so hard for myself. 

I love making photographs in the sun. In London. Yes London.  

I like working during the week. The West End at the weekend just doesn't have that mix of people and purpose I love. 

Oh yes and I love film. 35mm, 36 frames. 

Let's do the maths. 

Optimal light, Spring to Autumn Equinox, 26 weeks. Tops.

5 days a week. Not sunny every day. Call it 1 day a week. Average. It's London remember?

1 roll of film a day. Sometimes more. Sometimes less. It's expensive.

Makes 936 pictures by my reckoning.

Total.

For the year.

Now we can begin.

5% of those 936 are worth looking at a second time.

Half of those 46 a 3rd look.

Of those, 5 (6 if I'm lucky) might have something about them. Not always obvious but just enough.

So you can see why I'm excited. The new year is now.

Can't wait to see what it brings me.

Busy Sean Time.

street philosophy

I see a new book on Garry Winogrand is about to be launched. Written by Geoff Dyer whose book The Ongoing Moment I really enjoyed for his lateral take on the history of photography I'm sure it'll be a good read.

Garry Winogrand is such a go-to reference for what I'll call classic - and others may call old fashioned - street photography that it's curious I honestly was not aware of his work when I started practising. Apologies if that's disingenuous. I can see my work reads like a Winogrand-lite tribute act. 

But my inspiration I recall was through the documentary work of Don McCullin's Homecoming and W. Eugene Smith's Minamata. Back in the day what became known as street wasn't publicly available, in the UK at least. Yes it feels a little sepia toned even writing this. Let me fetch more ink for my quill...

At that time I actually made this type of work, in style and in conscience. Now, in retrospect, it's one of those what-if questions about life (in)decisions. I know I struggled with the anthropological/us & them approach to documentary work which I why I admired for example Jim Goldberg's Rich and Poor project that found a way to break down the viewer/photographer/subject relationship into something fresh. 

I have to accept my own style can easily be seen as making no challenge to those relationships. There's no collaboration between myself and what I photograph. They are still subjects. I seek no deeper insight into their condition. My only only nod to objectivity is not to caption the picture. And yet it's that very ambiguity that I find fascinating and enduring. Geoff Dyer comments in his book on a particular Winogrand photograph from the late 50s/early 60s

In colour, people seem necessarily to be walking into the future (when the overwhelming bulk of photography will be colour); in black-and-white, they are emerging from the past (when black-and-white was considered the only medium for serious photography).

It's a question I've thought with regard to my own work. Is it simply a nostalgia trip, a re-tread of old tropes that were new and radical back in the day but now really saying nothing new? I've fallen back on on jazz, one of my favourite comparisons, and the way that standard compositions can be endlessly re-interpreted. I guess the challenge for me is to stay Miles Davis and not Kenny G...

I'm now looking back at my work from thirty years ago and, yes, those people are still emerging from the past...as they are from last year too. Does that continuity, that plus ça change, say anything worthwhile? I hesitate to use the phrase human condition as for me it's rooted in that black and white world of Life and Picture Post photography that in a contrary way reinforced social stereotypes while ostensibly celebrating them. But hey are we any more sophisticated now? 

Perhaps I just need to appreciate these pictures for what they are. Tiny breadcrumbs of my life. Watch out. Sounds like a book title...