Me and my camera in my home town, my capital city, my london

I almost never take photographs of children for obvious reasons. People freak. It has basically become a total no no. It is even a no no to broach this subject. And so I flout both the taboo of the act and the chat with this week’s photographs. Why? Because it seems weirder to me to avoid than to not. In the words of Scroobius Pip: “Thou shalt not think any male over the age of 30 that plays with a child that is not their own is a paedophile. Some people are just nice. ”

There was a case a while back that a school banned adults from attending the kid’s sports day in order to prevent any potential threat…when you are restricting life to this extent in the name of protection something has gone horribly wrong with society. There are numerous incidents on Facebook when people have their accounts frozen on obscenity charges for having what are no more than innocent family snaps. Child pornography exists and is one of the most horrific things on this planet but does everything have to be viewed with that slant, especially when its clearly anything but?

I was told off once for taking a picture of two kids on a donkey on Blackpool beach, sun shining, blue skies, Tower in the background, a great shot of old school England and the guy pulling the donkey saw me take the picture and called me a pervert. And that’s how bad its got. I’m really not sure how tantalising the picture would have been for anyone to be honest, regardless of their sexual proclivity. Maybe he thought I had a thing for donkeys. Or maybe he thought I was like that woman who fell in love with the Eiffel Tower and I was secretly lusting after Blackpool’s most iconic landmark…it is a rather attractive piece of architecture I have to admit, not really my type though.

Inappropriate joking aside, you can’t even smile at a kid these days without it being a problem. Poor kids, their whole lives will be spent with people ignoring them and avoiding them. A friend of mine works in a kindergarten in America and the carers aren’t even allowed to pick up a kid and comfort them if its crying. That is pretty messed up.

Truth is, the main reason I uploaded this set of photographs was not that I particularly wanted to broach this subject at all, I really just wanted to post the photograph I featured on Monday and the others sort of followed suit. I just loved the way the old man was sat there, with his walking stick, staring at the kid whizzing past on his skateboard, pining for his own lost and almost forgotten childhood, lamenting quietly that his days of mobility & youth were long gone. This is obviously projection on my part. I guess I could have thought he was some dirty old perve checking out the kid but I just can’t think like that. If you want to that’s your business but I choose not to look at everyone with this overly suspicious paranoid mind set.

I feel sometimes that as a country we feel collectively responsible for the horrors committed by Jimmy Saville and if everyone was just hyper vigilant we could stop it from happening again but we can’t do that by treating everyone as if they were a monster like him. Yesterday Cliff Richard was the latest innocent victim of a witch hunt that seemed to serve no more purpose than to destroy more innocent lives rather than save them. We need to be vigilant and do everything we can to protect our young but treating the innocent masses based on the actions of the guilty few just doesn’t seem like a rational or productive way to go about it. Its exactly the same as saying that all afghans are evil because one massacred 50 people in Orlando. Lone destructive individuals shouldn’t be an excuse to treat an entire demographic the same way. (I will be delving into this more next week)

Please note: Normal service of photographs featuring only fully grown human beings will resume next week.

Me and my camera in my home town, my capital city, my london

Me and my camera in my home town, my capital city, my london

 

Me and my camera in my home town, my capital city, my london

 

Me and my camera in my home town, my capital city, my london

Me and my camera in my home town, my capital city, my london

All the photographs this week have been added to the gallery “dead in the mincers”. Please click here to view

Dead in  the mincers is a cockney rhyming slang expression which means to look at someone straight in the eyes (mince pies – eyes – mincers).

There is a moment when you can take a photograph of someone when for a split second they become aware of you but they have not yet become aware of themselves. In these moments you can get a true and honest reflection of the person they are, before they put their guard up. This for me, is the holy grail of photography and always worth putting yourself in the firing line for…although I have yet to be actually shot for my intrusive behaviour I have been given looks to kill. If ever this blog stops, you know what’s happened…

Me and my camera in my home town, my capital city, my london

Me and my camera in my home town, my capital city, my london

Me and my camera in my home town, my capital city, my london

Me and my camera in my home town, my capital city, my london

Me and my camera in my home town, my capital city, my london

The  photographs this week are portrayals of loneliness.

Me and my camera in my home town, my capital city, my london

 

Me and my camera in my home town, my capital city, my london

Me and my camera in my home town, my capital city, my london

These photographs have been added to the gallery “The Visibles” please click here to view.

My gaze is once again focussed on bright orange men. I don’t know what it is, but they just keep catching my eye. Someone in health and safety must have decided that we need to be able to see workmen & refuse collectors from miles away just in case we, umm, walk into them? Mistake them for civilians? Engage them in conversation? I’m not quite sure why they felt there was a need to convert all street workers into neon luminous blobs but they did and now I find myself mesmerised by their colourful outfits. I’m like a bunny in headlights.

Maybe we should go the whole hog and colour coordinate all professions rendering all individuals nothing more than their occupation. Eg Health workers in green, stock brokers in gold, white collar workers in white, politicians in bullshit brown etc etc That way you wouldn’t have to ask anyone what they did for a living.  Wouldn’t that be nice? And as people in similar professions tend to congregate together it would also look pretty as everyone would be colour coordinated. So you could judge someone immediately and it would be visually appealing – win win.

There does seem to be a dehumanising quality to uniform, it blinds you to the person inside, especially when they are in hi-vis wear they somehow become even more invisible. This is why it is always so popular in dictatorial regimes where they want you to be part of the working collective, not to view yourself or be seen as an individual.  Without being able to implement uniforms in every industry as I have outlined above, they achieve the same goal by simply increase work hours & stress and pressure till your entire existence is just your job and all you do apart from it is recover from it.

Portable devices now mean that people never in fact leave the office, they bring it with them everywhere they go. The American work ethos of always being ‘on’ seems to have now established itself fully into British society and is becoming the accepted way. There is currently a law being proposed in France which would make it illegal for you to look at emails outside of work hours. The new rolling work day is now so entrenched here I could imagine people actually fighting against it if they tried to implement here. I mean, what ever happened to 9 to 5? What happened to down time? And what about poor Sheena Easton? She’d be pissed bored waiting for her baby to come home in this day and age and then when he did just be on his android for the rest of the night. Not an actual android obviously..that’s a little further into the future.

p.s I just looked up the sheena easton 9 to 5 video to check the lyrics and found this bizarre upload…someone, in an ingenious method to not have it blocked for copyright, has spliced it together in non-sequential order and reversed it – it now makes this already bizarre video involving her polishing a  steam engine amongst other things even more surreal. Below for your viewing pleasure…

 

Me and my camera in my home town, my capital city, my london

 

Me and my camera in my home town, my capital city, my london

Me and my camera in my home town, my capital city, my london

Me and my camera in my home town, my capital city, my london

 

Me and my camera in my home town, my capital city, my london

the connection between this week’s photographs is a geographical and a temporal one..all pictures featured were taken within minutes and metres of each other on Portobello market in Notting Hill. It might sound like a bad old chinese proverb but often the less you move, the more you see. London because of its diversity is also like travelling without moving.  I like to watch as different cultures establish themselves, bringing their own way of doing things but also adopting the city’s attitude and vibe.

Julian Temple made a great found footage doc about how London’s changing immigrant population had evolved the city over the last 100 odd years. Its called London Babylon and a good film worth seeing. I am saying this because its true but also to make amends because I slagged off absolute beginners to high heaven in a restaurant unaware that the man I was sat four inches away from was old Julian himself until he tapped me on the shoulder and said “i directed that film”. Happy days