Me and my camera in my home town, my capital city, my london
Every shot this week was taken on Portobello Road as it is celebrating its 150 anniversary this year. Not that’s a huge departure from my usual fair, a lot of my shots are taken on this street. In the last decade or so it is the road I have walked along the most, almost every day. But if you are going to walk down any street every day of your life it might as well be Portobello. There is always something going on, someone great to look at, some little nugget of life playing itself out amongst the members of this community. Truth is there is nowhere near as many characters as there used to be. There are now way more tourists and definitely more poshos but it is still a endlessly fascinating street and I always manage to stumble upon something to captivate my attention in every daily journey.
I could go on about how it has changed and how more vibrant it used to be and the loss of small independent businesses and how gentrification had killed its soul but wishing for how it was to return is now, I realise, just a dead end thought process. It achieves nothing. Those people, those places, they ain’t coming back because they are from the past. Present day Portobello is yes, a different affair to what it was and I miss a lot of the people that used to be in this neighbourhood but it still has stacks of charm and character. Now that there are lots more tourists and photo shoots (see above) it has actually made my life a lot easier as I just look like one of them when I am wandering around taking photographs. These days I rarely get noticed as a result which means I can get better shots. I am actually thinking about going ‘full tourist’ as find its the ultimate camouflage for a street photographer. I’m gonna get a “My girlfriend went to London and all I got was this lousy t-shirt’ t-shirt, a union jack baseball cap and walk around looking vaguely lost and I am basically invisible.
