MARKS OF WEAKNESS, MARKS OF WOE

There’s something about walking in London. Wherever you go in London you see strange, interesting and sometimes incomprehensible things. And some of us take photographs.

Of course, to be walking down a London street taking photographs may suggest that you’re a rube, or possibly a mark, but I like to think of myself as a photoflaneur, a term that I just made up, but I’m sure others have used it already.

Now, I know there are strange, interesting and incomprehensible things everywhere, but it seems to me that in London you see more oddities per mile, per street, per minute, than in any other place in England. And I’ve been wondering why this should be. Obviously it has something to do with population density. Pack people in tightly, and the weirdness will start to show. When a city acquires a certain size and mass, the population feels freer to be more eccentric, to express their peculiarities, and I’m not saying that’s always a good thing. I wouldn’t for example be thrilled to be living next to this house:

But in London my feelings would be of no consequence. The bigger the city, the less likely you are to know your neighbours, and for many of us that’s an attraction. You don’t know them, they don’t know you, and even if you did know them, you wouldn’t care what they thought about you. There’s a lot to be said for that. Or maybe it’s not so much about the city as about the walker’s perception, by which I mean that a big bad city sensitizes you. You need to keep your eyes peeled, your wits sharp, in case of real or imagined dangers, and that makes you aware of all kinds of things that are going on around you.

Ultimately I think this is only a partial explanation. Among the Instagammers I follow are Dinah Lenny, and Lynell George who wander around LA taking pictures like this in Dinah’s case:

And this in Lynell’s case:

In LA, I suppose, the real or imagined dangers would be drive-by. I also follow Carl Stone who wanders around Tokyo, which we’re regularly told is the safest big city in the world, taking pictures like this:

Incidentally, I did an online search for the world’s most dangerous cities. There seems to be some difference of opinion. Mexico seems over-represented, and Port Moresby and Caracas always very high on the list, though I’d have thought Kabul or Baghdad would be higher. I don’t doubt that these places quicken the senses, and I don’t doubt there are some walkers, observers and on the streets there, though I don’t suppose they think of themselves as flaneurs, photo or otherwise.

BACK IN THE HIGH LIFE

 

Does everybody but me know the term ‘backshot’? I took the photograph below, in 

London, somewhere near Limehouse, thinking it was the name of a ‘street artist,’ and I 

suppose it may be, but I now understand it’s also the word for a sexual practice, not an 

especially unfamiliar one, but I had no idea there was a word for it.  Ah London – always an 

education.

Yes I was back in London last week, after (OMG!!!) a 9 month absence.  The best thing I can say is that apart from people wearing masks it didn’t look or feel very different from pre-Lockdown days.  Yes, the pubs offer table service only, but I reckon that’s an improvement.

 

I wasn’t on a walking trip per se but of course I ended up walking all over the place, through Soho to the Photographers Gallery to see two exhibitions, again neither of them specifically about walking, although walking featured in both.  One was titled From Here to Eternity by Sunil Gupta, about being gay in India – apparently it’s a lot easier than it used to be, 

 

though not as easy as it was in New York in the 70s:

 

There was also Evgenia Arbugaeva’s Hyperborea – Stories from the Russian Arctic which was just fabulous.  I think there’s only a limited amount of walking to be done in those parts, but when you get out there it’s pretty spectacular:

Then a walk with an old mate from Sheffield who took us to the Tower Hamlets Cemetery Park.  Is it a cemetery?  Is it a park?  It's BOTH!!

    You want obelisks?  They got obelisks.

 

And the next day a walk along the King’s Road to the Chelsea Physic Garden - I had a coupon.  There was a plant sale (if you like that kind of thing). There was also a bloke standing next to a speaker.  

 

I think he had a microphone, but there were no turntables, which was a shame in some ways.  In other ways perhaps not.

 

ICE COLD IN WC1

During World War Two a team of scientists (American I think though I’m not certain), studied how long soldiers could walk in the desert without water.  They worked out that, if the soldiers were properly hydrated before they started, they could walk 45 miles in 80 degree heat, 15 miles in 100 degree heat, and 7 miles in 120 degree heat.  I’m getting this info from Bill Bryson’s forthcoming book The Body: A Guide for Occupants.

Well I’m no soldier but those distances strike me as enormously optimistic. Walking 7 miles in 80 degree heat without any water strikes me as quite bad enough.

Thursday June 25th, was predicted to be the hottest day ever recorded in English meteorology - that would be 38.5 degrees C, 101.3 F.  And I do hear most of my American contacts saying, ‘You call that hot?’  

So, being the mad dog and Englishman that I am I decided walk around London and see how things looked and felt. I also had a vague plan to plan to see the Cindy Sherman exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery.

The first think to say is that it felt nothing like a hundred degrees.  After my years in the states I’m rather more attuned to Fahrenheit.  I mean it was definitely hotand it wasn’t a dry heat, but it didn’t feel, and in fact it wasn’t, as hot as predicted – 37.9 or 100.22 at Kew and Heathrow, which is plenty hot enough, though I was nowhere near either of those places.  And although it’s possible to find weather forecasts online for the whole of the world, finding what the temperature was in central London two days ago has defeated me.

Still, as I walked around, camera in hand, it was interesting to see how people coped with the heat

Some managed to look downright icy:

 

Some tried to sleep through it:

Others were definitely suffering:

And then about 6 o’clock it rained very hard and very briefly.  That didn’t seem to make much difference to anything, though I suppose it must have cooled things down at least slightly.

Though not everyone looked any better for it:

Did I walk 7 miles in the course of the day? Yes, I think so, more or less, but I certainly took on a lot of liquid along the way.

And the Cindy Sherman? Oh I dunno.  I’m not sure that putting on a bad wig and bad make up is synonymous with exploring ‘identity,’ though I'm sure other views are possible.  And as for the clowns …  

On the other hand I still love the Untitled Film Stills, and have for a very long time. At least it used to get her of the studio and doing a bit of walking around. 

THE ONE WORLD MISALLIANCE

I’ve been back in LA, from England, for about a month now, and in truth I haven’t been doing very much walking. When the temperature reaches 90 every day (and yesterday it was 97 – that’s 36 degrees for lovers of Centigrade) it rather takes the spring out of your step.

But I haven’t been completely sedentary, and sometimes you just have to get out there,  sweat it out, and walk the hot streets. and while I’ve been doing it I’ve thought to myself, yep, I’m back, this is all very, very LA.

The classic Volkswagen beetles:

 The palm trees (and also, the giant euphorbia and the hard to fathom parking sign):

The cacti:

The stone lions

The bears:

The curious skies:

Yep, all very LA indeed, but hold on there you psychogeographers, I found examples of all these things in England. 

The classic Volkswagen beetles:

The palm trees (Is this the result of global warming? I don’t think there used to be so many palm trees in England):

The cacti:

The stone lions:

The bears:

The curious skies:

Globalizaton, innit?  Possibly.

MEANWHILE

In another country, England, London, the Barbican, a simpler approach applies.  And only to one pedestrian:

DIORAMIC WALKS

Do you know this guy’s work: Sohei Nishino?  I didn’t till recently.  He walks around cities taking photographs.  Well, many do, of course, but after he’s walked his chosen city for a few weeks and shot literally thousands of photographs, he assembles the results into a kind of collage, something he calls a Diorama Map.  So far the cities he’s covered include Rio, New York, Berlin, and London. Thus:

The works are huge, this one is 2300 by 1283 mm.  He says he had a particularly hard time walking in London because of the cold, and says the original idea came about when he went on “Ohenro”, a walking pilgrimage that involved him visiting 88 temples, though he says he walked not so much for spiritual enlightenment as for the sake of the journey, which in itself is a spiritual proposition, of course.  He took photographs as he went, as a way of recording the route.  Then he started taking pictures of cities.

“I try not to think about, or research a city before visiting,” he said in an interview with the website The New Wolf. “I want to capture an impression of each city only when I’m there. What I don’t want is to be prejudiced towards it beforehand, to be forced into thinking from someone else’s point of view.
 Normally, when I get to a city I begin by walking around it, spending time familiarising myself with its size. The way I walk depends on where I am, it’s as if I’m absorbing the energy of each individual city.”

He also says in an interview with Foam, “My passions are walking, meeting people, and discovering myself through the act of walking.”  Naturally he’s also walked and mapped some Japanese cities, including Tokyo, thus:

Tokyo is one of those places I’ve always said I want to visit, and it's true, but I’m daunted by it.  I’ve bought a few maps and guides, including this one, which despite the title is actually a book, an architectural guide to the city. 

Of course I didn’t expect to be able to understand the language but I wondered whether I’d even be able to make any sense of the maps.  The answer, as you see, yes and no:

I’ve thought that one way to tackle Tokyo would be simply to book into some hotel, then in the morning get up and start walking, more or less randomly for a good few hours, and do that every day, and sooner or later I’d start to feel at home.  Or perhaps I wouldn’t.

Obviously I have no idea what the experience would actually be like, but one of my points of reference is the cityscape photography of Nobuyoshi Araki.  Along with his many photographs of women in bondage, his wife, his cat, his toy dinosaurs, he also photographs streets scenes.  I love those chaotic images, all that clutter and unmatching buildings, the alleyways, the hanging cables ...

Clearly he must have done some walking in order to take those pictures, and I just discovered a book of his titled Tokyo Aruki (since his bibliography runs to several hundred volumes it’s easy to miss one), which translates as Tokyo Walks.  I assume there’s some pun in there on Aruki and Araki, but I don’t know if Japanese puns operate the way English ones do.

I just ordered a copy of the book and I’m told it’s on its way, but for now most of what I know about it comes from a website titled japanexposures on which John Sypal writes about it, and reveals that in the back there are maps showing the routes Araki took when photographing, thereby allowing the reader to follow in his footsteps, and take your own version of his pictures if you like.  I can’t decide whether this a fun idea or just very reductive, I suppose it depends on the spirit in which it’s done.

No doubt you could do something similar with Sohei Nishino’s work, though I suppose in his case the map would have to be as big as the dioramas he makes.  Ultimately of course, in the style of Borges and Lewis Carroll, you might have to make a map that was as big as the city itself.

And incidentally I did just find this quotation from Araki: "Photographing a city that is now my own is bothersome.  To be honest, I don't have any interest in any city besides Tokyo."

Here are the websites referred to above:

Foam:  http://foam-magazine.tumblr.com/post/75893218659/sohei-nishino-featured-in-our-latest-talent

The New Wolf:  http://www.thenewwolf.co.uk/2013/02/nishino/

Japanexposures:  http://www.japanexposures.com/2009/07/20/nobuyoshi-araki-tokyo-aruki-tokyo-walks/

THE WALKING CAMERA

If I look up from my desk and peer across the room, my eyes inevitably fall on a poster of one of my favourite images by one of my favourite photographers.  It’s Garry Winogrand’s image of two women at LAX airport walking toward what’s known as the Theme Building.  It looks like this:

In fact Winogrand took a great many of my favourite photographs.  He was, you’d say, a street photographer (one of those terms that seems to mean less and less the more you say it), and in the course of his work he did a lot of walking and photographed a lot of other walkers.  He’s usually associated with New York, but he took a lot of pictures in LA too.

He even took some in London.  The received wisdom is that his London photographs weren’t as good as his American ones, that his great skill was seeing a familiar environment with fresh eyes: when confronted by an unfamiliar environment this freshness disappeared and he was reduced to taking pictures of guardsmen or men in bowler hats.  Still, I’m very taken by the odd familiarity and strangeness of this one, titled Woman Entering a Cab, London:

 Winogrand did like shooting women in the street, so to speak, which in these days of the demonized male gaze seems a dodgy activity at best, but hell he had nothing on Miroslav Tichý.  I love Geoff Dyer’s description of Tichý’s working method,  “he spent his time perving around Kyjov, photographing women.” Well yes indeed.  I suppose Winogrand’s method was less pervy because it was less sneaky, though I know there are those who’d find this an overfine distinction.

Street photography has been much on my mind lately, having been hunkered down with Reuel Golden’s London: Portrait of a City, a grand photobook, showing London, its people and inevitably its walkers, from Oswald Mosley to the Kray Twins.  Full disclosure: I am mentioned approvingly therein. One picture that particularly stays with me, is the one below by Cecil Beaton, not really pervy I suppose, since it’s obviously a set up with a model, and because the photographer’s perviness was directed elsewhere.

I like taking pictures, I do it all the time, and I’m a good enough photographer to know I’m not a very good photographer. But once in a while I take a photograph that makes me happy.  Here is the best walking I've taken in a very long time, but Garry Winogrand,  I know it ain’t.