A Wandering Eye

 Picture this......

All pictures are in the past. Even what you think you saw just now, for example Anthony Michael Gordon's 55th minute goal against Argentina happened fractionally before you could experience it, with the light travelling through your lenses to your retina then crowding down your optic nerve to be processed by your brain.....  Nothing is what you think you saw.

And so it is with art.....  Hockney has gone the same way that T S Eliot took.  Words and pictures still with us, but the light has gone.....

I am in London again, roaming the interstices of  life and love, wandering partially for the sake of it, partially because to stay still is also an illusion.....

Although I think I prefer my rustication [sic] in far flung Norfolk there is a vibrant stimulus in the hectic miasma that is London.  Almost an aversion therapy......

So I prowl about, a camera, or an iPhone, at the ready, snapping images that later may help me remember where I have been or what I saw. Pictures which, along with the estimated 5 billion to 5.3 billion photos that human beings currently take every day worldwide, will mean less than nothing to no one. 

This figure equates to over 61,400 photos snapped every single second, resulting in roughly 50 petabytes of new image data captured daily, which average leads to more than 2 trillion photos taken annually across the globe, of which around 90% are now captured using smartphones, leaving conventional cameras and film to account for less than 10% of daily images.

So, there we aren't.  Here I am.  

Yes, here I am.  Competing with the rest of the world, remembering that the essence of competition is that there are always losers.......

But.....  WTF?  Other people breathe. That doesn't mean I shouldn't.

And, as Hiromix says:

Though what she doesn't say is that every image, whether it is a painting or a photograph or (perhaps) a sculpture, is a selfie.....  It's not a new thing.  The first artist ever was expressing something of his or her self.  The last artist ever will still be trying to say something that emanates from the self.....

Here is David Hockney telling us about his house in France, wanting us to appreciate his life, possibly subconsciously wanting us to share his life, without - obviously - intruding......

And here is Andy Warhol vicariously extending his world to tantalise us with fame and luxury:

And here is Christo wrapping the desirable away so we can only dream of what lies beneath:

While Bob Dylan entices us to follow his lines into the distant imagination of an evanescent world:

Of course, you cry, [Who are you to patronise?  Ed] there are images that involve no artistry, such as those of the Camera Obscura..........

But this device is only designed to monitor or assist imagery. It doesn't happen by itself.....

So what about nature?  The circle of life?  Why are flowers so attractive?

Aren't they just saying, Come, look at me?  Come, smell me?

Come on, come on, come on, come on

Now, touch me, babe

Can't you see that I am not afraid?

What was that promise that you made?

Why won't you tell me what she said?

What was that promise that you made?

Touch Me

The Doors

Anyway, this, by a circuitous route, brings me to Kew Gardens, a somewhat pricey outskirt of the metropolis.  Here, where foxes and badgers rule supreme and hedgehogs are no longer happy residents, a series of sinuous sculptures punctuates the park, courtesy of the late Henry Spencer Moore (not knighted, by the way, in 1951).....

Having recently visited Barbara Hepworth in St Ives, (and having previously written about Henry Moore at Perry Green in https://www.richardpgibbs.org/2013/05/feeling-henry-moore-ish.html) I am shy of opining about the abstract.  There is something grand, something liberating, however, about being next to a substantial three-dimensional art work in an open, natural environment.  

As Moore wished, the work expresses itself from all angles.  You wander around it and it presents differing ideas/thoughts/possibilities as the lights changes as the shapes interact.....

As Moore himself said, in Unit One, edited by Herbert Read in 1934, All art is an abstraction to some degree (in sculpture the material alone forces one away from pure representation and towards abstraction).....

Or, as he wrote in The Listener in 1937, Each particular carving I make takes on in my mind a human or occasionally animal character and personality, and this personality controls its design and formal qualities, and makes me satisfied or dissatisfied with the work as it develops......

Makes me satisfied or dissatisfied...... Art as an expression of satisfaction. Art is an expression of the self.  Not to deny anattā - the Buddhist concept that there is no permanent, unchanging, soul or 'self' but that there is a flowing collection of consciousness, sensation and perception that allows a more sensitive and imaginative connection with the world.....

That may be a hazy view of the life outside the window.....

But a two-dimensional swimming pool is just as elusive......

I must wrap my car......

But I will let Raye say her piece:

And I don′t really like my body

But knowing it′s my only body

I should probably call somebody

I should really show you how I'm feeling inside

Matter fact, I′m glad you called me

I been hiding, I been high and I been sleeping hungry

Body Dysmorphia 

Rachel Agatha Keen, Michael Harris Sabath

Now I'm gonna love you

Till the heavens stop the rain

I'm gonna love you

Till the stars fall from the sky

For you and I

Touch Me

The Streets of London

 All the lonely people.....

So, what in the world's come over you?

And what in heaven's name have you done?

You've broken the speed of the sound of loneliness

You're out there running just to be on the run

I'm not alone. I'm with a small group of photographers, led by Simon Ellingworth, an international award-winning photographer and educator, who specialises, among other things, in street and black and white photography and available light portraiture. It's a day workshop in London, though I stray a little from the path.....

We start with a drink and a chat, introductions to each other, and some basic ideas on hunting, shooting and fishing - literally and metaphorically.  I fiddle with my camera to check the settings, and then we are off, a pack of photo-coyotes, eager for the kill.

I'm not alone - which is good - but I cannot deny a sense of loneliness, not necessarily in myself (though that's another story) but in many of the subjects I focus on. Some of these shots are candid - I hope no one is offended - but others are with consent. The trouble with consenting adults is that they then may pose and lose their spontaneity.....

Samuel Johnson coined the cliche that when one is tired of London one is tired of life, and William Wordsworth spouted that earth hath not anything to show more fair [than London from Westminster Bridge], but the thing about photography is that it is essentially a lonely and a probing craft. There is little point in "taking pictures" unless there is a point. Pointing and shooting won't kill the beast.

I find myself noticing elements of the loneliness of the city streets.  Above, a young man smokes and looks at his watch - is he expecting someone?  Here a woman sits alone, observed (discussed?) by three young men:

Here a young girl has a book for company - something of a rarity I think:

While just down the street, another girl has no book:

Andy Warhol's take on David Bowie reminds me that they are both dead, a thought that reminds me of life:

And life does go on, and on, and on, whether one is at work:

Or on a break:

On the move:

Or having a drink with a friend:

Or checking your phone while having a drink with a friend:

Or just checking your phone in case there is a friend out there:

Some people may be distracted from their phones for a moment:

While others aren't:

I wonder what Samuel J would say today?  When a man is tired of his phone, he's tired of life?  Or perhaps, When a man is tired of life, he rings someone....?

So, how can you tell me you're lonely

And say for you that the sun don't shine?

Let me take you by the hand

And lead you through the streets of London

Show you something to make you change your mind

I doubt I could change your mind.  Perhaps you're not lonely?  Making a phone call is not a certain indicator of isolation.  But what did we do before?  I used to queue to use phones in bars, and occasionally try via the operator to request a reverse charge call.  When I first ran a school boarding house in 1995, there was acute demand for the one payphone between fifty teenagers.....  And now......

But my images are not only of callers calling.  Simon has asked us to show him the world as he hasn't seen it before - not an easy task, and one that can lead to attempts at artifice, that ultimately lead nowhere. Framing is one gambit:

Blurring another:

Looking for colour swatches, or symmetry:

Picking out curious details:

Or trying to see the mundane in a fresh crop:

Looking for the abstract:

Or asking the Princess of Soho to strike a pose:

Or two:

Or even three:

There is a limit, for me, to how much I feel I can intrude on everyone else's world. I see individuals immersed in their own bubble, and I question what is it that makes me want to portray this?  Every day there are millions, if not billions, of pictures being recorded on smart phones and cameras across the globe, and what do we gain/learn from this?  

In a way I would like to think that somehow this will make us more aware of other people. More "tuned in" to the life of this world. But I am not sure. I love the Bar Italia in Frith Street, but more because I lived in Italy for twenty years, than because of its prices..... Photographing it makes me nostalgic for an Italy, or even a London, that has lost its way now, and quasi disappeared. So is my love of pictures a kind of nostalgia? After all, every picture you take is already in the past.....

Though to get a little bit Zen about it all, the essence of life is the infinitely expanded present, and here is a picture that works on at least one level in that way:  Michael Jackson is still with us, as is the young man with his bike waiting for instructions from another world, though time has moved on and they are already history.....

Back to the mono-polar essence of the smart phone. If nothing else, it makes you look wonderful between the pink and the blue of traditional values......

After the workshop I wander down the South Bank and keep my camera about me.  A woman in the Tate Modern Members' Bar asks me to take her photograph on her phone.  So I ask if I could take her on my camera.  What is this?  Should I have sat down and bought drinks and exchanged numbers?  Or was it just passing ships?  Is the infinitely expanded present all we can grasp?  I don't even know her name....

And then, silhouetted against the starkness of modern life a young man sounds a little Trenchtown, as people dance by, and I shoot him, as a hunter would.  Is that it?  Just another trophy?

Well, how can you ask about tomorrow

When we ain't got one word to say?

So, what in the world's come over you?

And what in heaven's name have you done?

You've broken the speed of the sound of loneliness

You're out there running just to be on the run

John Prine

Speed of the Sound of Loneliness

So, how can you tell me you're lonely

And say for you that the sun don't shine?

Ralph McTell

Streets of London

Thank you Simon