Me and my camera in my home town, my capital city, my london…at night
I know it looks like a hit and run, and normally I might just leave it to your imaginations but I don’t want you to think I photographed people as they were severely injured…you are looking at the conclusion of a very long run up of a drunk guy who leapt onto his also drunk mate at full pelt, causing them to career into the road and collapse. They are laughing not writhing in agony…I promise!
and so wraps up another week of London nitelife in all of its messy magnificent glory…with most of the action coming from Peckham. The relentless rise of rents and house prices have forced young people with limited funds to be pushed from pillar to post as they look for affordable places to live in our stupidly expensive city. Each time they turn up somewhere it inevitably becomes trendy and subsequently a victim of its own success which always results in rent hikes. This makes it prohibitively expensive for the people that essentially made it a happening area and they trot on to the next postcode in search of cost effective living.
They got turfed out of west london when that kicked off so went East to Shoreditch which was a brief respite before being pushed on to Hackney and then on again to Dalston and now they have ended up down South in Peckham. They won’t last. The gentrification process means its already over as it becomes more desirable and inevitably more expensive so they will be moved on again. But where? Once South goes, there will essentially be nowhere left except for the outskirts and who wants to live out there? And if they are pushed out there, what kind of a city will it become when all the young, cool people, the artists and the musicians have been ejected from the centre? It will go the way of Paris and New York, a rich boring middle.
Grayson Perry the artist stated that whenever the Super Rich move in to an area it becomes a cultural desert and its painful to watch him be proved right. The only way around this is to have rent control but in this city, that ain’t ever happening…the councils will always side with the property owners rather than the inhabitants so what to do? Berlin calling? Anyone?
This week I used sequences of photographs rather than solo shots. Bursts of stills can sometimes create a greater sense of immediacy and make you feel like you are actually there. If you had been there the brain would have remembered it in snap shot form so it somehow matches and that is appealing to our minds…although based on the state of some of the those I have captured, its highly unlikely they will remember anything at all.
p.s Happy Birthday Chris!
