Calls of Duty
At eleven o’clock last Sunday, Parliament Square fell into that awkward silence again when politicians look down guiltily at the ground and service men and women wearing silverware look up at solemn grey skies.
Under the surveillance of a pair of rooftop police binoculars, I was standing in Parliament Square beneath the 12-foot bronze of Churchill’s stooping figure listening for signs of dissent.
It almost came from the crowd when a loud Dutch tourist group whose naïve laughter spread like a linguistic gas attack around the piazza. But as the second artillery field gun salute boomed across the capital to mark 11.02 I noticed the deteriorating pacifist Brian Haws by his tent village leaning heavily on two crutches, his greying beard and rough lines creased across a face that has glared over the road at parliament for the past 3,079 days.
Fresh faces that will never grow as old stare up from small wooden crosses, pegged into the soft grass in Westminster Abbey’s eastern churchyard. Many are in battle desert fatigues or ceremonial number ones, grinning from ear to ear as if it were Christmas, or graduation day, with hopes of long lives. Sadly their now empty smiles sit incongruously next to poppies just like their great-uncles from the Somme were inscribed on a Portland Luytens panel.
In the sanctuary of this miniature garden are the young casualties from Afghanistan, while in another are those lost in Iraq and other ‘recent conflicts’. Add to their number many more noughts and you have a lost generation whose lives sank in Flanders mud or the sand of Gold Beach. After their service careers they might have run their own profitable businesses or perhaps invented gadgets that changed the way we thought; written great literature; inspired and led or headed governments that altered more terrible history. But all their aspirations ended by an explosive jolt from an IED, a last blip of life support apparatus or later, hopelessness or a suicide leap away from PTSD.
We’ve seen it coming so we weren’t surprised when our 11 year-old came down this morning to announce optimistically that he really wanted the 18+-rated Call of Duty 2 that is launched today, obscenely close to Britain’s eleventh hour, eleventh day, eleventh month. The PRs have worked overtime on this one and if you Google the brand, 43.6 million hits are out there for the taking as opposed to the words ‘Iraq casualties’ which yields a little less.
This is the age of interactive warfare and fantasy soldiering. Of a violent, meaningless but highly-addictive childhood that our kids are accessing while all around us the real thing is more real than any top notch graphics card can simulate. But who knows if any of the young faces shown above engaged their first insurgent from within a 1280 x 960 pixel monitor leading eventually to a cosy chat with Lord Kitchener?
Young people of Britain, your country and Activision need you.
Filed under: England, Landscape, London, Photography, army, history | 1 Comment
Tags: afghanistan, call of duty, dead, games, pacifist, remembrance, soldiers, war
Watching the Hood
Sit for long enough at your desk at home and the sounds from below become familiar to the point that you learn to identify a neighbour’s faint mumble, the rumble of wheelie bins towed to the kerb or even the Woodpecker’s toc-toc-toc-ing a dying Ash.
As I was reading about yesterday’s boy-in-the-box-not-in-a-helium-balloon sensation, a man-in-a-van stopped outside and pulled out a set of ladders. I watched from my first-floor window as he reached up to position a yellow sign but realised I couldn’t quite make out its writing so grabbed a pair of binoculars that are kept at hand to spot any impending mischief around here.
I peered through the glasses and the words Neighbourhood Watch came into focus. I was .. watching the neighbourhood.
God, it felt great to be here. Looking and listening, sharp as a razor, athletic and honed, on guard, on my toes and and prepared like a scout: This eagle-eyed citizen spy maintaining his surveillance from the safe-house, a sentinel in the canopy, a lookout scanning the horizon from his cliff-top lighthouse. I was Jimmy Stewart sitting by a front window and it smelled like .. victory. Oh, yes!
*
Three months before. A summer dawn, 4.15am and there are noises downstairs. An elbow has nudged my ribs awake and very slowly, I realise there is someone halfway up the stairs. And it’s not one of us.
I don’t notice the glass in my bare feet as I pad along the carpet, nor the last faint disturbance from outside when I pad sleepily through the ground floor. Nor does it occur to me why there is a faint cool draught blowing through the living room or that the shattered aperture punched through the double-glazed window panel might be anything more than a sleep-walking collision.
Lights are on and my wife is standing in the doorway holding a tennis racket, a grimace of adrenalin and fear in her face as if she’s about to fight for her life .. on Centre Court.
*
The man was from Lambeth’s Graffiti Squad and had been up since four-fifteen too, patrolling the borough for graffiti and fly-posters. Later, when his team are out themselves scraping and steaming the offending street art off, he can be found gauging his verticals with a spirit level at lamp post 7.
“I’m pleased because stopping this makes a difference to the community,” he beams, “it sends out a message to everyone.”
I tell him I was eye-balling him through an eye-glass – y’know, being suspicious, which is pretty .. comical, didn’t he think? He shrugged and quickly added how many he’d put up yesterday and how his granddaughter wants to study Forensic Science at Cambridge – to ‘do her degrees’ – and I thought of the young lady SOCO who came to dust our woodwork with aluminium powder and found .. Nought. We on the other hand, now imagine breaking glass every night.
I am the Warden, I am the Watchman, goo goo g’joob.
Filed under: England, London, Photography | Leave a Comment
Tags: buglary, crime, Lambeth, neighbourhood, vigilante
50th Summer
Alive and alert though absent-minded, I have triumphantly reached my 50th Summer. That’s, what – about 18,250 days of thriving health and Neolithic survival though there have been weekends when I have curled up, whimpering with man-flu as if the plague cross was being daubed on our door.
I may be riddled with angst but apart from an Alpine icicle that almost finished me in 1977, no other life-threatening events have so far endangered me:
I’ve played no pranks that meant a solitary night in a cell.
Nor seen a friend nearby take a bullet meant for me.
My body (that could run an epic schoolboy hundred yard dash) has not fallen apart needing repairs to right self-inflicted wrongs.
I’ve not had any teeth whitened, eyes tightened nor hair cultivated. Yes, I am pretty much still together as in that week in 1959.
I did almost cheer hair-loss but the final arrival of cataracts or liver spots on shrivelled hands will be difficult, as will be the first time a young mother offers me her bus seat to me – the elderly gent needing to sit. Wait, though. By that time, on-one will be so chivalrous and as a grubby septuagenarian, I’ll be left standing in Oxfam shoes and a limp from a failed acetabulofemoral joint.
A 50th Summer is a year of prolonged naval gazing and introverted ponderings: How many hours have I wasted asleep, or in post office queues? How many miles have I paced in pursuit of pictures and my how many times has my heart contracted to make that happen? Where is that elusive marvel of literature? That guru, that Rioja, that piece of Electronica or breathtaking place on earth that can alter a purpose in life? And like a last blink on the world, what will my last photograph be about and will everything I have created for posterity be deleted to save a few measly megabytes, one drizzly January afternoon?
I sometimes look in the mirror and wonder when and how I will die.
And about fates and catastrophes: Of approaching asteroids, swelling sea levels and declining bees. A future without me, and cars, eardrum-piercing sirens, litter – nor enough protein for millions. And all without the knowing smile from one’s long-dead family who were alive and ever-present in the noisy days of carefree youth .. all of whose sudden demises are now barely mentioned. Like dear old Harry Patch, everyone around us are eventually all gone and forgotten within 20 years, existing only as vague entries on a family tree. Their lives as ever-haunting as Tallis Fantasia.
Three thousand years ago, a Bronze Age elder shivering in his Hill Fort was a white-haired and toothless crone at 50 while as late as 1870, the average life expectancy for industrially-thrashed men was 41.
My own 50th Summer is a fast-forward, accelerating rate of change. A concertina of experience and memory. I am as old as some of the 20th century’s most important inventions: Castro’s Cuba, Motown, Sleeping Beauty, Barbie, David Archer, the postcode, the M1 and by Toutatis! the anti-Roman hero of my childhood in Brussels, Asterix. With the motorway especially, empty promises of modernity, innovation and progress tends to pass over me like the temptation of the Sixties road-building revolution. With their minds still set in an era of Chesterton’s rolling English roads and larks ascending, 50 year-old anti-modernists think they’ve been born 50 years too late.
So what to do on the big weekend? A long walk to prove the legs and knees of a 16 year-old (spent climbing Great Gable in the hot summer of ‘76) can still carry me the length of Hadrian’s Wall or a Wainright coast-to-coast; a health retreat where a Swedish masseuse (see, always the 70s teenage fantasy) digs talons into delicate muscles; a wild weekend with some lads (any lads, really) in a seaside town of their choice, pretending we are still in our oaffish, staggish prime.
Far more likely though, I might take a glider flight, a wisp about the clouds and thermals above Sussex for 1,500 air miles. Weather permitting.
I appear to have made it. And so far so good.
Filed under: Philosophy, Photography, Thoughts, nostalgia | Leave a Comment
Tags: 50, 50th, age, birthday, nostalgia, years
A Man Called Dan
My son and his guitar teacher were rehearsing Greenday’s ‘When September Ends’ when the phone rang. It was Alain calling and from then on, August changed and the ninth month too.
A mischievous man called Dan was in search of a writer-in-residence at Heathrow Airport among London’s literary agents and it seemed that Alain had already gnawed at Dan’s arm so urgently that the poor fellow had no choice but to appoint said author plus tag-along photographer to spend a period in Terminal 5, reporting on the daily stories of this aviation village, as an exercise in ‘transparent marketing’. This meant that if a family of cockroaches or Borrowers were discovered, we were free to crawl on all fours like David Attenborough and announce the zoology to the world.
‘Was I interested?’
Well, yes. Since being influenced by Martha Rosler’s ‘Observations of a Frequent Flyer‘, Le Corbusier’s concepts for transport hubs amid skyscrapers and David Pascoe’s musings on the social history on airspace, airports have remained my favourite nearly-places to visit. I have witnessed the debris of Concorde at its final landing site in Gonesse and we all remember the head of Pan Am’s ‘Maid of the Seas’ lying on its side like a slaughtered stallion in Lockerbie’s winter field. The miracles and catastrophes and everydayness of flight still leaves me weak at the knees while nagging doubts about corporate-sponsored journalism made me nervous about objectivity.
Ten years before, I had approached the British Airports Authority to attempt something similar during a struggling project: A personal celebration of modern air travel a century after the Wright Brothers’ first 12-second/120 feet flight at Kitty Hawk. A Heathrow diary certainly demanded attention but back then, I had ignorantly missed the whole point of marketing strategies. Within a week though, I had been handed a carte blanche wish-list, a handful of Heathrow Express train vouchers, a 30-day ID pass, a letter of intent and a small team from the airport’s Commercial and Marketing office (also our patrons) to timetable immaculately printed schedules.
Avoiding drips of something resembling hydraulic fluid, I ducked under the grimy belly of a Jumbo as its hollow wings were being filled with Jet A1 at a rate of 3,000 litres a minute and I thought of 2.2bn people – 40% of the world’s population – sitting in flying machines like this. The spell was broken when I spied my chaperone pointing at her watch to tell me that BA’s Chairman Willie Walsh was expecting us at BA’s glass-sided Waterside nerve centre. An hour later and we were squinting into bright sun with WW himself, yellowish stains from the Boeing’s toilet fluid on my favourite shirt.
A few days later, we were driven around the southern perimeter fence towards Gate Gourmet’s airline food factory. Alain had excitedly seen a main set of landing gear striking the surface of runway 27R (“Look, look at those wheels. Wonderful!” he bubbled). The night before, AOSU had walked over to us as I adjusted my tripod and crouched down at this piece of blackened concrete to touch the gluey black rubber that countless Bridgestones had skid-marked.
“I think we’d better move on,” AOSU suggested without the slightest hint of urgency. I glanced over his shoulder to see a bright diamond light growing brighter as 6 tons of Homo sapiens-created aluminium were bearing down on us – due to hit this sticky highway within two minutes.
“Now where else do you want to go .. Under an A380?” Alain and I looked at each other and nodded like primary school urchins allowed into the music room to bang drums.
The laborious and intensive making or breaking of books generally take months and even years to produce and yet Heathrow Diary has taken me just a blip for photography and leg-work. The biggest shock for me was a mid-point narrow boat holiday on the Brecon and Monmouth canal: A final day chugging up to Gilwern were followed too quickly the next morning as the lift doors separated at level 5 and there it was again .. the background hum of Departures. Instead of little vessels swaying at their moorings, there were wide-bodied airliners locked to their jetties. Never had the transition from the waterway to the taxiway seemed so shocking to an unwound metabolic rate of 2mph.
And if there were moments for me of exhilaration: I watched fellow-band members and their cellist from Oakham School inspecting her precious companion in Arrivals after its journey in the hold and a friend comically wrapped them both in the same pink towel. There was also 8 year-old Chandra – here at T5 with her family en-route between Trichy, Southern India and Washington, North America.
As they toured the cafes and shops to sip Mango smoothies, their suit cases were in an automated holding hangar four levels below being treated to a pampering of their own for the four hours of transit in the United Kingdom. The family’s Triple-Seven was being readied behind: Gate Gourmet meal trolleys laden with Welsh lamb cutlets about to cross the M25 at right-angles then westwards over Dinas Head where their cousins still grazed. Little tails wagging.
Chandra tossed her own cuddly animal into the air and for some time I thought it was the best picture of the project. It seemed to yell at me ‘adventure, childhood, privilege’ but like music, pictures take their time to worm their way in (or out) of one’s affections. One might start off by adoring the beautiful moment but after a time, annoying faults surface leaving only errors and thoughts of failure. Tight editing by friendly designers and editors can immortalize or cremate a picture. And it can be a painful last minute when the image drops off .. the radar.
Access to the security frisk teams took some time to arrange but I was very aware that I was being allowed to photograph everywhere that those ubiquitous signs told me I normally couldn’t. I almost fell foul of an invisible line at the feet of a man staring into an X-ray scanner screen. Simply overstepping that invisible boundary in the industrial carpet which separated airside and landside would have meant migrating from western to the eastern hemisphere at the Greenwich Meridian. Along the way, someone said to me that working within airport protocols can be like negotiating the Civil Service in its complexity and ever-shifting rules.
Cities were once defined if they had a cathedral and by the twenties, great capitals had airports as well to lend them gravitas. Given a chance to pace the floors of another glass palace of aviation as grand as Versaille, it would need to be Berlin’s Templehof but a round-the-world ticket might also tempt me to discover the world’s corrugated arrivals sheds – more legacies of the brothers Wilbur and Orville.
And all the while under the floorboards of Terminal 5 I never once saw any little people nor Blattaria orientalis.
‘A week at the Airport: A Heathrow Diary’ is published by Profile Books on 28st September but currently available at Costa Coffee in all terminals.
Filed under: Books, England, London, Philosophy, Photographer, Photography, aviation | Leave a Comment
Tags: airports, Alain de Botton, BAA, Heathrow, Profile Books, Terminal5, writer-in-residence
For a brief moment in this place’s heritage, the paths and legacies of men called Joseph and Johnnie crossed, as a man danced.
Midsummer’s eve here was the quintessential English afternoon. But as we cycled downhill through Ruskin Park to Myatts Fields Park, Camberwell, the confusing acoustics of weekend emergency sirens seemed to bounce from walls and echo around the streets.
On this 20th June, the day in 1837 when a young Queen ascended the throne, residents and members of the Myatts Fields Park Project Group held their Big Event – a re-opening of their exquisite green space, after its £3m landscaping revamp courtesy of the Heritage Lottery and the borough of Lambeth.
Once part of the 109-acre Knatchbull estate, Myatts Fields were purchased by the Huguenot Hughes Minet in 1770. But it was that celebrated tenant market gardener Joseph Myatt (born in a nearby hamlet now known as Loughborough Junction) and famous for his delectable strawberry and rhubarb varieties sold to 19th century London society, who has lent his name to a pretty oval of south London. The land was eventually designed into public space by Fanny Wilkinson, one of the first female professional landscape gardeners and a well known supporter of women’s suffrage.
Where Poly-Tunnels might now be used to mass-produce the food of Wimbledon’s hoi-palloi, Joseph’s plants would have been set in beds of well-drained soil, rich in love and humus. Perhaps beneath where the circus tent is today, the plucky Dulwich Ukelele Club were followed by street synchro dancers who leaped to rasping rhythm and vocals. At the band stand, as pristine as the day this fourteen and a half acre oasis of gentility opened in 1889, a tea dance troupe encouraged kids from the nearby Paulet Road estates to polka.
The instructor swaggered and flounced to Duke Ellington and Sinatra then slid across the floor as if on skates. Had he been in top hat, riding boots and breeches rather than 50s braces he might have resembled the character from one of the most famous and powerful drinks logos ever marketed. The Striding Man icon was sketched on the back of a napkin 1909 by illustrator Tom Browne who was asked over lunch to come up with a likeness of the Scottish farm boy-turned malt whiskey magnate, John ‘Johnnie’ Walker. Like Myatt, Walker was born into an agricultural family and the Victorian drinks entrepreneur started to sell whisky in his grocer’s shop at the age of 15, rapidly cultivating his blended Scotch whisky empire that today sells over 130 million bottles in 200 markets annually.
Walker’s more recent campaign took the mesmerising Robert Carlyle, whose brilliant monologue tells the company history during a flawless six-minute stride through Inverlochlarig glen (“Hey, piper .. shut it!”).
If Walker carries on apace across the global drinks industry then coincidentally, Joseph Myatt’s does too. In 1906 Frank Myatt left for Australia and his grandfather’s name lives on as the 2005 Joseph Myatt Reserve – Merlot (93%) and Cabernet Sauvignon (7%) – so commemorating the Myattsfields Vineyards family’s founding horticulturalist in Carmel. WA. Much like I imagine knowledge and passion was needed for growing prize garden fruits back in rural Camberwell fields, the wine shows “concentration, finesse and balance”.
The marching progress of industrial Johnnie and Joseph’s quiet cottage-industry came, then went. Then the boy in the Celtic stripes ran across the floor, tripped .. and London moved on.
Filed under: England, London, Photography, history | Leave a Comment
Tags: dance, Myatts Fields, parks
Six Feet Under the Nun’s Head
The dome of St Paul’s peeped through a narrow gap at High Point, where fresh breezes filtered through the Horse Chestnuts. Wearing a t-shirt depicting an air-brushed angel in prayer, jet-black hair and ear studs, the young Goth politely edged between the Cow Parsley and the elderly folks’ tour of Nunhead Cemetery.
Beneath our feet, in the sacred clays of south London, the toppled memorials were barely visible beneath our feet and the wheels of trundling pushchairs. One caught my eye and after I let a young dad pass-by the exposed corner of marble headstone, I scraped at it with my boot heel to reveal more: “The Family of AC Ardley and GA Fletcher ..” The mortal remains of these Victorians are still buried in the undergrowth after a Philistine 70s council’s bulldozers rode over their many graves.
Nunhead’s occupants were some of Victorian society’s hoi-palloi: Chemist, Frederick Augustus Abel, inventor of cordite is there. So is the writer Hilda Caroline Gregg (1933) whose pseudonym Sydney Carolyn Grier wrote the first of 23 novels at the age of 13); Bryan Donkin (1855) developer of the air-tight tin can; teenage chanteuse Jenny Hill (1896) whose sweet voice delighted music hall crowds; horsepowered bus magnate Thomas Tilling (1893) owning a stable of 4,000 horses and Alfred Peek Stevens (1888) who penned the earliest known use in England of the term O.K. (“Walking in the zoo is the O.K. thing to do.”).
With needle-like nettle stings on my shins, I too traipsed along the ever-encroached paths to see yet more tombs and mausolea, some covered by mother nature, just as a thousand tragic repercussions of social expansion were now overtaken by industrial progress: the ghosts of London’s tycoons, their privileged children and their slumming workers.
In the first 50 years of the 19th century the population of London more than doubled from 1 to 2.3 million. The city’s dead were being stacked in overcrowded parish churchyards, leading to decaying matter entering the water supply and to a series of cholera epidemics. All Saints Nunhead was consecrated in 1840 and was one of the seven great Victorian cemeteries established in a picturesque ring around the outskirts of London known as the Magnificent Seven.
Henry Daniel (died 29th August 1867, age 62) was the monumental mason par excellence of Nunhead. His own memorial, with that of his wife Charlotte and son – also Henry – holds court on one of the fashionable corners, shared by city merchant bankers, the rich and influential on a sort of sweeping red carpet for the great and the good. His hugely popular architectural features show a monolith-come-billboard for the family business, posthumously advertising the much-loved architecture for faith and eternal life: Maidens, cherubs, anchors, snakes, scrolls and urns. “The dust remaineth to earth but the spirit to God who gave it,” reads the inscription of the man who helped carve the poetry of the Gothic burial age.
Queen Victoria’s 40-year obsession with grief taught a superstitious nation how to mourn, inventing an industry of hearses, rings, lockets and silk gloves bought for the undertakers to wear. If there was a corpse in the house, mirrors were covered and the deceased was taken out feet first to stop the head looking backwards for others to follow ..
Then, 80% of deaths occurred at home and the funeral industry was profitable and respectable. By the Edwardian age then the first war, with few bodies to bury nor horses to bear them, this tradition was finished, funeral staff were laid off and the ivy started to strangle the once-lavish monuments. The 50s and 60s saw the sad decline of urban cemeteries and local authorities saw this redundant, wasteland as a drain on resources, allowing them to degrade into playgrounds, toilets and the places for procreation, vandalism and theft.
The bronze Gilbert Scott memorial to the 9 Walworth Sea Scouts (aged between 11 and 14) who drowned in an estuary squall off Leysdown on 4th August 1912, was shamelessly stolen from here and melted down. Elsewhere, locals were encouraged to come and buy up items from shrines and families who came to pay their respects at loved-ones graves, found nothing but rubble. But in 2000, a £1.25m windfall was spent on renovation and conservation so many pieces of Victoriana have been saved from the JCB and Brylcreem boys.
But choosing a council square in which to deposit the body of son or daughter, parent or partner must be the most wretched of choices. Umar (above) was only 8 years-old when he died this month. The earth that was displaced by his small casket is still a mound above ground level, at a spot where tour groups shuffle past.
And five traffic cones that might elsewhere be part of some B-road disruption stand like pagan pyramids in anticipation of a fresh reservation.
Filed under: England, Landscape, London, Photography, Victoriana, burial, cemetery, history | 1 Comment
In the ancient streets of the Square Mile, St George’s Day was celebrated in the red and white stripes and crosses that the English relish on their national day.
In Finsbury Circus, the early summer was marked by crowds of financial workers out lunching on grassy knolls that hosted groomed beds of tulips. The suits sipped chilly glasses of Pinot Grigio while whispering about the setting up of 4 new companies; receptionists tottered on their heels (higher and sharper this year, it seems) cackling about crap boyfriends in the stretched limousine vowels of estuary English: “I’m, like, a hindrance to myself! His bit on the side was lying but, like, how did I know she was making it up?” On Corporation benches, an unmarried office spinster read The Pleasure Garden for border ideas; an anonymous businessman rubbed tongues with a plain girl for an out-of-office tryst while next door, the pinching of Wasabi chopsticks were proving that oriental sushi is still big business in London.
I crossed Liverpool Street and leaped on to the kerb opposite before a yellow Enzo ran me down me in a 3-second burst of 3,000 zipping revs. Over at Bishopsgate Morris Men were clacking sticks in the churchyard of St Botolph’s. Strings of English flags were draped along the courtyard as lunchtimers paced in the race for a prêt sandwich.
But this is supposed to be a recession for God’s sake! Elsewhere around the country, in family-run factories and high-street shops, staff are being tossed on the job-heaps, wondering how on earth to pay mortgages and utilities!
All this while the haves lunch in the sun – while the have-nots sink ever lower into debt. If ever Dickens’ opening from Tale of Two Cities: ‘It was the best of times, it was the worst of times ..’ were truer, it was in Royal Exchange Buildings at the memorial to G20 police victim Ian Tomlinson where a riot police helmet visor was papered with newsprint showing the newspaper seller’s last living moments near this spot.
Confused tourists ambled by oblivious, looking up to the tall grade II listed Victorian columns. Probably the oldest bike courier in the capital limped along Cornhill looking box-junction-weary. A commuter walked past with a colleague: “You see? That’s the guy I walked past for 13 years at the station .. that’s the guy!” Otherwise, locals smirked as they strode past carrying the FT tucked outside a briefcase or a Gucci shopping bag and even a man wearing a Che t-shirt smiled to himself, as if an economic revolution of some kind was unachievable here in this cacotopia. In a JG Ballard sort of way.
Filed under: England, Landscape, London, Photography | 2 Comments
Tags: city of london, English
Song for Occupations
Copies have already left the warehouse but from tomorrow, bookshelves will be stacked with The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work. A timely work itself between essayist Alain de Botton and myself about the modern workplace, industry and occupations.
To travel and photograph alongside that commentator on art, aesthetics and of accessible philosophy, was an assignment I somehow brought on for myself three years ago during which time I was ‘a photographer in tow’, a companion, a researcher and fixer.
Wanting to work with him in the hot-house climate of the livre d’artiste meant at first, stalking poor Alain in the hope of catching his eye by turning up at his talks on architecture then furtively slipping my card on the table where the arty faithful queued for signed books – plus sending him my own book of RAF reportage (Red Arrows, 2005).
In The Art of Travel he has written glibly about photography itself. Of the camera instrument he says: “.. It blurs the distinction between looking and noticing, between seeing and possessing .. to help us notice what we have already seen.” Re-reading this notion before we set out to explore offices and shipping lanes, processing plants and warehouses, I felt intimidated enough for a small breath of wind to be taken from my sails as I imagined him being suspicious and dismissive of my first collaborative work for him.
Only once did travel weariness and the SAS of tropical mosquitoes puncturing our pallid skins happen to contribute to something like a lovers’ tiff in a space agency car park. For that I also blame the instant replay facility to view the recorded image on the back of the modern DSLR – a delightful feature for any nervous co-worker but a full-stop for the visual creator still capturing in mid-sentence.
For the author, their words are laid out on sacred ground so for the more subservient artist, the picture’s acreage is at the expense of a word count of 800 lost prose. The poetry of each medium squeezing each other for precious space never seemed a problem for Alain who was both my travel buddy and commissioning editor. He chose many of my pictures himself to position as adjacent or standalone photo-essays (designed by Joana Niemeyer) though I ensured that better alternatives got in. More engaging choices however do not appear in print, replaced by the bland that suits the tedium of the open-plan office, for example.
Months back we were like excited schoolboys when the bell goes. Sharing the parallels of eras between modern air travel and the centuries of sail, we spotted (just as Beaudelaire watched longingly at ships departing from the quays at Honfleur) wide-bodied flying machines taxiing away from Heathrow’s T5. We itched and worried about new journeys: To the Indian Ocean where on a Wi-Fi-enabled atoll, someone would help us find a dhoni that set forth at dawn for yellowfin tuna. For the fish, its story of surviving the Boxing Day Tsunami, then violently yield to provide a nourishing meal in England the Friday night after, is a narrative of the insatiable, modern age of logistics and convenience. With Poe in mind, we pondered tourists who perish in paradise and Boeings that die and recycle in the desert.
I would be the first to read the dissected anatomy of this book when he sometimes sent me lengths of writing, urging a reaction from his forming ideas. He might suggest an overnight shift at a giant logistics warehouse just off the M1 where supermarkets and the Royal Mail have their distribution centres with the resulting: “One looks up at their cathedral-like ceilings and finds, instead of angels, workaday, economical spans of steel punctuated by fluorescent strips ..”
In offices, I looked for Hopper’s women; in biscuit factories there was Fritz Lang automation and experimental dough to chew on; amid the Kentish landscape and its snaking electricity lines, there was an urban incongruity versus dead wildlife; or the “aesthetic aspects of technology” along the Thames Gateway where the Goddess of the Sea container ship nudged closer to Tilbury Docks to be unburdened of its divine deposits.
We would join the daily grind of London commuters and afterwards I relished reading his thoughts based on my images: “The train moves off, resuming its rhythmical clicking along tracks laid down a century and a half ago, when the capital first began plucking workers from their beds in faraway villages whose outlying farms had once marked the boundaries of their inhabitants’ known world.”
Onwards the passengers paced to their accountancy atriums and I was handed scraps of A4 wish-list reminders: “.. A PA .. an intern / junior .. a beauty .. a lift scene .. WC .. lobby area / receptionist / people waiting .. the view .. lunch sandwiches .. the logo ..”
Our brief partnership is pretty unlikely (a polished Swiss-Frenchman with the stretched limousine vowels of an estuary Englishman) but Herne Hill is one connection. It’s where I live now but is the same London village from where the favoured dB protagonist John Ruskin escaped for the Lakes – before the urban spread swallowed his creative juices, thereby helping create a lifetime aversion to technology and progress.
If ever there was a review to savour, it should be Ruskin on de Botton.
Filed under: England, Landscape, London, Photographer, Photography, business | 3 Comments
Tags: Alain de Botton, book, collaboration, fishing, industry, jobs, logistics, the pleasures and sorrows of work, tuna, work, workplace
The Walls Have Eyes
In 1940, the Bosch were poised to make their bold step over the English Channel and take Britain as if on a chess-board. Her Majesty’s Government’s reaction was as decisive in dispensing fear among it’s gullible population as it is today.
Its propaganda campaign fed on its citizens’ hysteria. When village church bells tolled, they were told, Nazi Stormtroopers dressed as nuns would be dropping by parachute to spearhead the invasion. Captain Mainwaring, Corporal Jones et al would be at the barricades in Walmington-on-Sea with pitchforks and WW1 rifles to give the Hun a good hiding when they came trundling up the high street. Fifth Columnist sympathisers were apparently lurking in our pubs and idle gossip would endanger lives because, as the catchy saying went, ‘the walls have ears.’ iSpy-itis was rife but no-one cared to question the wisdom or misinformation that spread so efficiently at a time when Facism was knocking at our door.
Fast-forward to March 2009 and the authorities again hold their breath before the newest threat to our society in the years before the highly-prized 2012 Olympics. The Metropolitan Police’s recent campaign has been unleashed in our broadcast and print media to seduce Londoners, asked by security officials to trust their instincts and report “.. Some of the items/activities which may be needed by, or be of use to, terrorists.”
We heard our first radio ad at the weekend. There is some background audio of consumers out spending what little disposable income they have left, then an actor’s voice-over calmly explains a best-case scenario: “This is the sound of a bomb not going off at a busy shopping centre because a shopper reported that someone was studying the CCTV cameras.” A pause, then the voice of Big Brother again: “If you see something suspicious, call the confidential anti-terrorist hotline on 0800 789 321 ..”
Some years ago I was asked, ironically by a German magazine, to photograph a story on the epidemic of CCTV cameras in the UK and about their use or misuse. I visited Coventry where the city centre was spied upon from a secret bunker by an army of personnel who zoomed in on unsuspecting hoodies. I also roamed the City of London and made landscape pictures that revealed the sheer number of discrete wall-mounted eyes outside institutions, stations and tourist sites. We questioned whether such invasive scrutiny was necessary and whether those darkroom operators really had the right idea about state security when, instead of spotting tea-leafs, they were twisting their joysticks to peer down young girls’ summer tops as they eat lunch underneath.
Had I been given that assignment now, I can imagine the amount of trouble I would land myself in by simply taking the pictures with which to answer those legitimate questions.
One scenario might be as follows: A suit is in his office and on the phone to his wife and notices me outside photographing the Guildhall. Now he hates photographers because his sister was once stalked by the paps so he immediately ends his call and re-dials the anti-terrorist hotline. Within an hour, I am in an interview room at Bishopsgate nick with two plain-clothes officers who want to don a pair of Marigolds and take me and my hard drive away for a forensic fingering. Having done his civic duty, the suit makes a smug call back to his wife.
Just as we were told Mother Theresa would inevitably be aiming a Schmeisser at us as she dangled from a tree, we are expected to believe that a pseudo-tourist on a recce for Sheik Osama and wearing a turban and long beard is going to point their iPhone at Bluewater long and obvious enough for Joe public to smell a Johnny foreigner.
Filed under: England, London, Photography | Leave a Comment
Tags: anti-terrorism, CCTV, propaganda, public
Yellow Snow
Now the white stuff has all but shrivelled back to mother earth, a grim winter London is ours once again after the pretty respite. Unsalted pavements are passable without the worry of an ankle-wrenched hobble home. Schools are back so that our little dears can chuck whatever remaining plates of filthy slush they can find.
Last Wednesday our village primary was a trudge of exhausted-looking children after two days of more exercise and cold clean air than they have ever experienced in their short urban careers. A mum was snowballing at me her opinions of whether the school should have closed for two days, or not.
“I rang Mrs H and told her!” she sulked. “I said, if I can walk to school why on earth can’t all the others?” she spluttered, but just as she was about to add the tiresome words ‘.. and when I was at school ..!’ we reached the corner of the playground. Turning the corner I spied my 10 year-old reach the apex of his slow-mo acrobatic flip, legs to the front and arms laterally stretched. My thought fast-forwarded to the notion of him landing back on the sheet ice with the crack of an ulna and the hard bang of his head. But he bounced, got up and grinned just as another kid came around the same corner, stepped on the same ice patch and performed the same impeccable somersault. The mother had already stalked off, scattering her irrational thoughts across the square like a council gritting lorry.
Brockwell and Ruskin Parks are largely sodden fields of quagmire today. But if this were 41 degrees 43′35″ N, 49 degrees 56′54″ W in the north Atlantic, RMS Titanic would be 2,000 fathoms (12,460 ft) below my mud-spattered Ecco boots and these anarchic bergs would be wallowing two-thirds below.
Instead, terriers and assorted hounds sniff the melting snowmens’ sinking tummies to offer a token of yellow dribble.
Filed under: England, Landscape, London, Photography | 1 Comment
RSS - Posts