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