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. 

 

 

FRIENDLY NEW YEAR WALKING

Some good walking news to start the year, and especially good news for Santiago Sánchez, the Spanish football fan who was "detained' in Iran while walking from Madrid to Qatar for the 2022 men’s World Cup, and held in Tehran after visiting the grave of Mahsa Amini, the young Iranian woman who died in custody after being arrested by morality police, for wearing her hijab "improperly."

 

The Iranian embassy in Spain said that Sánchez's release came thanks to the two countries' "friendly and historical relations." 

 

So that’s all right then.

THE CONTROLLED WALK

 I always enjoy the post-Christmas, pre-New Year walk; it’s never very serious or arduous but among other things you do get to look at other walkers.  Some no doubt are fully paid up pedestrians, but some definitely aren’t, and I imagine a certain percentage are having their only walk of the year. Still, a little’s better than nothing.  (The picture below is from a  different Christmas walk).

We didn’t go very far, up to the estuary, past the WW2 pill box, and home via the supermarket, which we surprised to find open. But along the way we did see these things, were new to me, a couple of what at first looked like pig sties, though this isn’t pig keeping territory, and they were in with grazing sheep, so I suppose they were sheep shelters, and I thought they had a lot going for them as examples of minimalist architecture.

 

I’m not pretending this was one of the great walks of the year, however as you know by now, I’m a sucker for the detritus, the flotsam and jetsam that you find while walking.  It was a good day for that.  First, this nicely distressed metal plate from a Ford – my old Escort had one of those, and it did fall off but only on the driveway so I could retrieve it, and I still have it in the archive.

The second, far more inscrutably, is the label, complete with staple marks from (I assume) a package of legally obtained drugs.  I mean I don’t suppose a real drug pusher would bother with that kind of labeling, but I could be wrong.

PROMENADING WITH PEPYS

Finding myself near the Tower of London, I decided to walk to (and in) Seething Lane Garden, a place I knew a little about but had never been to.  

Chiefly what I knew was that Samuel Pepys had once had a house there, in the Navy Office, his place of work.   Both house and office are long gone, and Seething Lane Garden, is a sliver of land tucked in beside the Four Seasons Hotel, what used to be the headquarters of Port of London of Authority.

The garden is far too small for a ‘serious’ walk: by some accounts it’s a ‘pocket park,’ which only adds to my confusion about the difference between parks and gardens, but a walk doesn’t always have to be serious.

On the day of my visit the garden was wintry and windswept, which was only to be expected in December.  Presiding over it is a very fine bust of Pepys, created by Karin Jonzen and put up by the Samuel Pepys Club in 1983.

   On the ground are some even finer paving slabs showing a map, 

 

a plague doctor, 

 

among others, but best of all is a parmesan cheese, like the one Pepys buried in his garden to save it from the Great Fire of London.

I suppose the pavers are there be walked on but I and the few other people I saw in the garden seemed to take pains to avoid them as though they were too precious for tramping feet.  The pavers were made by past and present students of City & Guilds London Art School under the direction of Alan Lamb of Swan Farm Studios Ltd. 

 

I was pleased to have walked in the Seething Lane Garden but it didn’t take long and isn’t one of the great London walks.  Rather more fun can be had in and around St Olave’s church just across the road, though the address is Hart Street rather than Seething Lane, and best known (to me, anyway), for its skull-festooned gateway.

 

Dickens liked it too apparently.  The churchyard and the garden were again wintry but there was a labyrinth – some walkers do enjoy a labyrinth: 

 

Inside the church there are memorial busts of both Sam Pepys and his wife Elizabeth; their bodies are buried in the vault, away from prying eyes.But you know, the thing that really delighted me, the small thing that made the day for me, was a piece of stained glass in the church – showing teasels.  Nature it gets everywhere

 

In fact, as I soon found out, the teasel is a symbol of the Worshipful Company of Clothworkers, of which Samuel Pepys was Master, but I’d have been perfectly happy for it to remain an enigma.

 

Pepys himself was, of course, a great walker.  The word walk and its derivatives appears 1068 times in the Diary.  There’s a really good book by Jacky Colliss Harvey titled Walking Pepys’s London.  I recommend it, though your feet will get tired.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

IT'S NOT JUST THE GRAMMATICAL ERRORS ...

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