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. 

 

 

NIGHT AND THE CITY

 A friend gave me a mighty pile of old copies of the London Review of Books - over a decade’s worth - and I’m very slowly working my way through them.

 

Victoria Roth

Inevitably I’m not reading them in historical order, and one of the most tantalizing things in any issue is the Letters page in which correspondents react to reviews from the previous issue, which I’ve generally not seen.

 

In the issue from May 2 2017 there’s a letter from Iain Sinclair reacting to accusations about his ‘failure to supply an adequate headcount of female characters (or influences) in any text I have written.’  To defend himself he calls in the chapter fromThe Last London‘celebrating the flaneuse and photographer Effie Paleologou.’

 

I remember thinking when I read the book that the name seemed so improbable it might be Sinclair’s fictional invention, although in that case I thought he’d have chosen something less improbable. But no, Effie Paleologou is a ‘real’ person with a considerable presence outside of any text by Sinclair.  Her work looks like this:

Most of Paleologou’s work that I’ve seen features this kind of nocturnal cityscapes in London, Athens, and for one project Hastings.  Her books and collections have titles like Mean City and Tales of Estrangement and at least one of the sources I’ve read describes the spaces she depicts as nightmarish, but I don’t find them that way.  I don’t even find them especially mean or estranged.  I just like them is all.

 

It seems that a fair amount of walking must have been involved in taking these pictures, and we know that nocturnal wandering is a very different thing for women than for men; the nocturnal flaneuse seems to be a special category within the ranks of flaneuses.

 

Paleologouis in some sense a street photographer: if you’re an urban walker and you take photographs you’re likely to be a street photographer one way or another.  

 

On many days of the week I think street photography is a dying form, which seems a terrible shame and means that that many of photographers I like - Garry Winogrand, Diane Arbus, Vivian Maier, Bruce Gilden, Helen Levitt, Daidō Moriyama - may be the end of a certain line.

People are increasingly touchy about those who brandish a camera in the street, with its overtones of intrusion, stalking and sexual harassment.  And when it comes to children -fuggedaboutit:

Helen Levitt

Of course taking photographs at night when the streets are empty is one way of getting past all that.  And in any case it must be as Joe Jackson put it, ‘It’s Different for Girls.’

Therefore I was pleased to discover the work of a ‘global community named Women Street Photographers  - there’s an Instagram account and a website. Some of the work seems to stretch the definition of ‘street photography’ but no doubt that’s the point.

Here’s a great picture by Marisa Popovic titled 'Mrs. "Sarma", Skopje, North Macedonia,' 2019.

 

There may be life in the old form yet.

https://www.womenstreetphotographers.com/photographers-ii

 

JUST LIKE CROSSING OVER

I wouldn’t say I ever had serious ambitions to be a ‘real’ photographer, but I did used to 

fantasize about it once in a while.  I suppose I still do. I never wanted to be a fashion 

photographer or a war photographer or a landscape photographer: I wanted to be a street 

photographer, you  know like Winogrand, Cartier-Bresson, Bruce Gilden.  It’s a genre that 

allows, in fact demands, the photographer does a lot of walking.

 

Susan Sontag backs me up on this. ‘The photographer is an armed version of the solitary walker reconnoitering, stalking, cruising the urban inferno, the voyeuristic stroller who discovers the city as a landscape of voluptuous extremes. Adept of the joys of watching, connoisseur of empathy, the flâneur finds the world "picturesque".’

 

Well that’s good enough for me, although over the years people have come to disapprove of the term ‘shooting’ to describe taking pictures so lord knows how we’re supposed to feel about being ‘armed.’

 

Therefore, given the previous post about Rainbow crossings, I thought you might like to see some street photography of people crossing the road, in some cases waiting to cross the road.

TOTTERING IN TOTTENHAM COURT ROAD

I was meeting a friend in the big open area inside Tottenham Court Road tube station, which has a big, rather fabulous tiled wall.  The friend was “running late” as they say, which is clearly very different from just “being late,” so I took this photograph of the wall while I waited.  

And then, being the aesthete that I am, I thought obviously it would be better if there were some figures walking in front the wall – to provide a sense of scale, drama, variety of shape, and whatnot. So I took maybe ten pictures none of which turned out to be all that great.  

But as I was snapping, a recorded female voice boomed down from on high, only just audible, which said something along the lines of, “The taking of photographs of children is strictly forbidden in this tube station.”

Now, I can’t swear this was addressed specifically at me. though I don’t doubt that I was being watched and filmed by security cameras, but it seemed an odd thing in any case.  First, there were absolutely no children around, and if there had been I certainly wouldn’t have taken been taking pictures of them.  I don’t much like children.  I used to be one and I was forced to hang out with other children – god, it was awful.

PEDESTRIANIZATION

I went to see the exhibition at the Hayward Gallery: diane arbus: in the beginning (which for some reason doesn’t require capitals).   It's photographs she took between 1956 and 1962, and printed by her: Diane Arbus did not conspicuously spend a lot of time perfecting her darkroom skills.  

Taking pictures at the exhibition was forbidden so this is a publicity photo:

I am, like you, a connoisseur of art-speak and was thrilled to read these lines in the mini catalogue:

         ‘Even in her earliest studies of pedestrians, her subjects seem magically, if just momentarily, freed from the flux and turmoil of their surroundings.  The result is a singular look of introspection.  In reacting to Arbus individuals are revealed almost as if they were alone.’

There really aren’t many photographs in the exhibition of what you and I would call pedestrian, though there are one or two:

Do these people have a singular look of introspection?  I dunno.  I’m inclined to  say not.

Do they look as if they’re almost alone? I have no idea because “almost alone” strikes me as a meaningless construction – you’re either alone of you aren’t, you know, like you can’t be almost pregnant.  
         But art-speak aside it’s a pretty good exhibition.

I got home and found myself looking a blog post by Eric Kim about walking and photography.  He says, ‘I’m not a zen monk. I’m a blood thirsty American capitalist who is re-appropriating Japanese culture for my own selfish needs."
          I like that.  He continues, ‘I see street photography and walking as a form of “walking meditation”– the more I walk, the less stress I feel. And the less stress I feel, the less shitty of a person I am to others. And the more I have a reason to live.”

         Sounds like a decent plan to me.  I don’t know if it would have made any sense to Diane Arbus, but I like to think it would. This is a pretty decent picture by Eric Kim:

THE STREET AND I

I just reviewed Geoff Dyer’s The Street Philosophy of Garry Winogrand – there’s a link below at the end of this post – so I’ve been thinking a lot about Winogrand and street photography.

Neither the book nor the review discusses walking per se, but as a street photographer, Winogrand obviously did a lot of walking, as I suppose all street photographers must.  We tend to think of his “beat” as being in Manhattan but he traveled widely and spent time in LA.  Here he is on Hollywood Boulevard; the photograph is by Ted Pushinsky.

And here’s his most famous Hollywood Boulevard picture:

Towards the end of his life (whether he knew that he was coming to the end of his life is a moot point) he moved to Los Angeles and since he was suffering from a slow to recover broken leg, he had people drive him around and he took photographs out of the car window.

In a sense this seems like no way for a street photographer to operate, and his “strike rate” for good pictures seems to have been pretty low at this stage, but it did result in pictures such as the one above.  And this one:

That link is here: 

https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/unknown-unknowns-come-sweeping-in-on-geoff-dyers-the-street-philosophy-of-garry-winogrand

TWO OTHER COUNTRIES

I was hunkered down for part of the holiday with the works of Japanese photographer Daido Moriyama, including  “Record No.36” - in Japanese “Kiroku” - the latest in his series of diaristic monographs that date back as far as 1972.  This is from that volume:

Moriyama has been around, in many senses.  Currently aged 79 he’s taken vast numbers of photographs, published a great many books (if not as many as his pal Araki), and also done a great amount of walking.  He may not, strictly speaking, be a street photographer (a term that seems ever more meaningless) but he’s definitely a flaneur.  His photographs are a record of his wanderings and also the reason for his wandering.

And of course sometimes he photographs other walkers.  And of course some of these walkers are women.

I started digging out some writings and interviews with the great man.  There’s this from the afterword to “Record No. 34,” “I am crisscrossing the central Tokyo area taking snapshots in the streets more or less on a daily basis. Within this routine, every once in a while it happens that I am suddenly overcome by a sense of bewilderment, just like a student in his first year at a photography school. What exactly am I trying to see through the finder of my camera? What is that photo that I just shot? It's questions as utterly naïve and elementary as these that occupy my mind in such situations.”

And there’s this from a documentary the Tate Gallery made about him a few years back, “I basically walk quite fast. I like taking snapshots in the movement of both myself and the outside world. When I walk around I probably look like a street dog because after walking around the main roads, I keep wandering around the back streets.”

This is probably his best known picture: of a street dog:

He continues, “My friends or critics are often surprised and ask me why I never got bored walking around for over 50 years. But I never get bored. I often hear it is said that people, even photographers, do their best work when they are in their 20’s and 30’s. I’m 73 now. But I could never see the city with an old man’s eyes, or as if I understood everything.

“Everyone has desires. The quality and the volume of those desires change with age. But that desire is always serious and real. Photography is an expression of those desires …

“I have always felt that the world is an erotic place. As I walk through it my senses are reaching out. And I am drawn to all sorts of things. For me cities are enormous bodies of people’s desires. And as I search for my own desires within them, I slice into time, seeing the moment.”

Well, the erotics of walking and the erotics of photography are not exactly the same, but there’s surely plenty of overlap.  Taking pictures of women in the street is currently regarded as a very dodgy activity.  I think it’s still OK to look at people you fancy, so long as you don’t touch or say anything appropriate.  And taking photographs creates its own set of problem.  It’s probably OK if you’re making art, not OK if you go home and lech over the images.  But who can read the intentions of the male gaze?

          I saw recently that the Christie’s website describes photographer Miroslav Tichy as a flaneur, thus: “From the 1950s to 1986, Tichý took thousands of surreptitious photographs in and around Kyjov, in the Czech Republic. With his wild hair and ragged clothes, locals viewed him as a harmless eccentric — but in many ways his art can be seen as a subversive act in response to a totalitarian regime. 

         “In the 1950s, he began to focus on photography, using an array of crude homemade cameras … He built his contraptions from scrap — cardboard tubes, tin cans and the like — sealed with tar, and operated by bobbins and dressmaker’s elastic. He cut lenses from plexiglass — even devising his own telephoto lens.  

“’These chance encounters, fleeting moments captured on film, have a distinctive Baudelairean flair,’ says Christie’s specialist Amanda Lo Iacono. ‘Indeed what we find so captivating about Tichý’s work today is how the artist acted as the quintessential flaneur, whose practice became inseparable from his way of life.’”

Well, you’ve said a mouthful there, Amanda.  Tichy’s “practice” involved wandering the streets, and sometimes hiding in the bushes, taking pictures of women, some of them walking, some of them in various states of undress.  

Geoff Dyer in the Guardian says, “Put as simply as possible, he spent his time perving around Kyjov, photographing women. Ideally he'd catch them topless or in bikinis at the local swimming pool; failing that, he'd settle for a glimpse of knee or - the limitations of the camera meant the framing was often askew - ankle.”

Yes, I suppose flaneurism is what flaneurism does. Likewise perving. But that was in another country, and besides the guy is dead.