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Well it's a little fraudulent to celebrate a tenth birthday - we had a three year hiatus along the way - but I'm proud to still be writing this blog and staying true to my original intention to use it to think about how and why.
My Ambiguous Project posts drew the most visitors. I've even managed to generate the odd comment along the way too. But I'm also conscious this has become very much an interior conversation and you, dear reader, must be complimented on indulging me.
Committing to writing regularly has been really rewarding, for me at least. It's helped me think about my work. Before then I thought that would obstruct my natural, intuitive style. But hey even Barcelona need a plan.
I've enjoyed joining the dots or hyperlinking, to use a technical term, my thoughts across the years. James Burke's Connections was perhaps my favourite TV show growing up (well along with The Goodies) and he's embraced the web in the same way. Spanning time and space. Not a bad way to describe my work if I think about it.
Coincidentally it's my own birthday around this time and I was delighted to be given a book by my family of the work of a London photographer I was shamefully ignorant of.
Bakerloo by Harry F Conway is a vital record of Londoners in their moments of passing through one of the West End's arterial tube lines. The images achieve a remarkable balance of both confrontation and compassion. I really admire this work not least because it's diametrically opposed to mine in many ways. He engages with the people in his pictures, forming momentary relationships that are complex and disarming. He's a visible presence going about his business in an constricted space in an open and transparent manner.
He puts it so well
...fleeting moments of pure humanity were shared, deep underground with complete strangers.
Where people see an monotonous system to merely transport them, I saw life in all its ridiculous beauty.
Amen.
I've just
read a great
conversation between two people I've enjoyed following over the
years, Blake Andrews and Brian Formahls.
I was so
happy when Blake contributed to the Ambiguous
project. His blogging was a source of inspiration and Brian's LPV has
been a great resource to find about new street work. It was fascinating to find
out more about his recent thinking on urban walking and I must share them
For me,
when I’m on a long walk time tends to slow down and feels more abundant. Four
hours can feel like a week. It's that hyper focused attention mixed with the
ability to allow your mind to drift, that allows you to enter into a different
perceptual space. When you
add photography with meditative walking, then I truly feel that you can enter
new dimensions beyond our normal perception. Or I should say photographic
seeing because I don't think you need to actually make the photographs but
there's a lot of reverb when you see the actual photos.
I love
that last sentence.
The first
part corresponds to an approach I describe as a five act production of making
photographs...
- The
initial sense of a possible picture.
-
Choosing the moment to release the shutter. These two happen in quick
succession for me.
- The
revelation of the resulting images on the contact sheet. Some weeks/ months later,
we're talking analogue here folks.
- The
selection and making of a print. Eventually. After the Interval.
-
Re-looking, editing and sequencing those prints into a book or, even, a zine.
Each act
is just that. A set of separate actions that have their own worth not just part
of a process but greater than their sum. I could go on about actors,
narratives and drama but I think you're already there :)
Secondly
the word reverb captures
both a visceral response, not purely intellectual, and also a kind of echo rippling
out from the original act. It's also a musical reference I enjoy. I've compared
street photography to jazz in terms of technical words like standards and
improvisation as well as the spiritual and soulful. As an aside I was
fascinated to hear Mark Sealy
talk recently about how he now looks to John Coltrane as he
once did photographs for that quality of experience.
So what
about the act of walking itself. Can the definitive act of the flaneur/euse
incubate those conditions of meditation, of the satori moment?
I certainly recognise the state of attentiveness, of being immersed in my
surroundings to a point of invisibility. I remember reading Cartier-Bresson's
thoughts on Zen archery and recognising the
reference. Interestingly enough it surfaces obliquely in the conversation too.
Here's Blake
It’s strange to comment on Soth because
he actually made a direct comment on this thing years ago, that photography was
NOT a Zen Buddhist activity. Photography involves wanting, and acquisition, and
collecting, and all the little things you're supposed to let go of.
It's a
salient point and I'd only counter (between you and me) that the
wanting/acquisition/collection desire can be satisfied by simply connecting
with the world around us - in this case the streets - by focusing the mind on
people on proximity, how we move, interact, dream. On rare occasions it can
be an overwhelming experience. Even at an every day level there can still be a
common bond of emotion...simply if it's crossing Oxford Circus before the timer
runs out and the 159 bus bears down on us.
OK reverie over. There's work to be done.
Today could be hottest day ever as 39C heat roasts Britain read the headline. In my contortions over the climate emergency versus my photography, he(art) won and I found myself on the street subsumed into Manhattan-style humidity. However by lunchtime clouds were creeping over Oxford Circus with the promise of lifting later so I sought solace in the company of Trent Parke's pictures at the Magnum Print Room. It was my second contact with Magnum in recent weeks. I attended their symposium last month where interestingly enough the best part was the keynote by Mark Sealy on western photographic practice. More of that in a future post.
I was first made aware by Nick Turpin of Trent Parke's The Camera is God at a street photography symposium a couple of years ago. He cited it as an innovative development on the tradition of the genre and I must agree having seen them. The images are fascinating in themselves but I also love they are made by what are now called analogue practices in taking them on film and printing them in the darkroom.However this project is certainly not rooted in nostalgia .The literally indiscriminate practice of CCTV cameras in cities shaped Parke's approach taking 30 second bursts without specifically framing anyone. As if that would ever catch on.
The way the images are displayed form a chorus of fragmented fractured faces, discernible as human but anonymised into atoms of light and dark. However there is still just enough detail in each image to project possibilities of gender, age etc on to them. I can now see why Parke talks about creating a narrative with them. It's fascinating to read the lines from his diary describing a moment in the life of this project
Back to my corner… he emerges from the shadow of the building into the light. There he is … the big clock on the other side of the road says, right on time … the sad boy in the white collared shirt who everyday stands in the same position on the same corner at the same time. He remains motionless, staring at the street before the lights eventually change once more and he walks his same sad slow walk off into the west and the blazing setting Adelaide sun.
I wonder who he is. I wonder where he goes.
Back in London I balefully look at the blazing London sun still cloudy sky and vainly hope there will be a break as the BBC Weather app confidently predicts. I find myself not far from another regular refuge, the Barbican, my favourite building in London. The big show there at the moment AI: More than Human and one of the pieces before you get into the show caught my eye.
I couldn't - needlesstosay - avoid a connection to Parke's piece. But beyond the symmetry the concepts aren't a million miles apart either. Es Devlin's POEMPORTRAITS takes a word donated by a participant which then generates a two line poem authored by machine learning projected across the face of the donor to create a portrait. I was struck by Devlin's comment
We are predisposed to seek meaning in these fragments that have been offered to us personally, as we seek significance even in the lines we find in a fortune cookie.
In our age of selfie surveillance both projects acknowledge the omnipresence of technologically generated imagery. Both then use that as a place to reflect upon what it is to be human in that kind of world. To take Devlin's word, how we can converge?
I was left intellectually if not physically stretched in a way I hadn't anticipated and, cursing weather forecasters, descended into my own convergence with another world, the London Undergound.
New Europe has certainly benefited from new work from Berlin and London. I've now put together a second draft of the zine.
In terms of format I'm now looking at A5 pocket size and the layout is more magazine-y with images cropped and overlaid. For me it's giving more urgency and pace to the experience of flicking through it. It's about finding a (poly)rhythm that reflects the theme.
New Europe zine next draft from Sean McDonnell on Vimeo
The hard questions remain over sequencing. It's a challenge in a more traditional one-image-a-page-one-opposite but here I've sets of threes and sixes to juggle. It's great to have a collaborator in this situation and so far Fabrizio and I are still talking ;)
Take a peek.
