SAME OLD TOPOGRAPHICS

 Walking is crucial for a certain kind of photographer, and these tend to be the photographers I like, Vivian Maier, Garry Winogrand, Daido Moriyama, among many.

Moriyama has even published something, not quite a book, titled Random Walk, an empty album that comes with 62 black and white, and 38 colour Polaroids that can be put into the album in any order, thereby creating a ‘random walk’ through the streets where Moriyama took the photographs. Pretty cool huh?

And I see there’s a new edition of Robert Adams’ book Summer Nights, first published in 1985 and now expanded and retitled Summer Nights, Walking. 

 

The publisher’s blurb says  ‘In the mid-1970s, Robert Adams, began recording nocturnal scenes near his former home in Longmont, Colorado. Illuminated by moonlight and streetlamp, suburban houses, roads, sidewalks and fields seemed transfigured.’ I wonder what the neighbours thought about this man wandering around in the dark taking pictures.

 

I’m not trying to compare myself with Robert Frank or Daido Moriyama, or any other ‘proper’ photographer, but I do sometimes take pictures while walking in my own neighbourhood, and just once in a while it gets me into a small amount of bother.  I had an unnecessarily confrontational episode came one afternoon right after I’d taken the picture below.

 

    Some youngish fellow came running out of his house demanding to know what I was up to.

 

Now, Bruce Gilden (above), a photographer I admire, and once interviewed, has or anyway had (he’s now 77 and may have slowed down a bit) a confrontational, in-your-face style as a street photographer.  His reaction if anybody objected to being photographed was to shrug and say, ‘Got a problem with it?  So call a cop.’  And if fists started flying, he was more than ready for that.

 

But I took a more conciliatory approach with my neighbour.  I could have talked to him about New Topographics but I thought it was probably better not to.  I said I’d recently moved into the neighbourhood, which was true, and that I was taking pictures to share with my friends, to show them where I was now living, which was slightly less true.  I don’t think he was convinced.  I can’t really believe he thought I was doing a reccie for a gang of burglars but it did seem that way, but in any case I shrugged and went on my way and we didn’t come to blows.

 

I can only imagine how more much worse the altercation would have been if I’d been walking around taking pictures at night.