Pile 'Em High...

All Images: Belgrave, North Leicester, March 2016

Part of my day job as a Secondary School Technician involves supporting Art lessons.  This, in turn, periodically involves accompanying our GCSE Photography students and their teacher, whenever they take their cameras out into the local neighbourhood.  On such occasions, I normally try to take my own camera too, partly because it feels like too good an opportunity to miss (for fairly selfish reasons), but also because I believe it’s good for students to learn by example - as well as by just being told what to do.

It seems more likely they might get the point of this stuff if they see that we take it seriously ourselves, - and not always just to fulfill a formal objective.  These days, it’s increasingly difficult for anyone in schools, (on either side of the teacher/student divide), to see beyond the utilitarian imperative to ‘get the grades, - get the place, - (maybe) get the job/career’.  Those things aren’t without their importance, but I grew up with the view that education might be a bit more of a 360-degree process than that alone.  I don’t think it does students any harm to understand that some people still do this stuff for its own rewards - and always will.  Call me old fashioned - but I also always thought that was largely what being an Artist was about; you know, - once all the external expectations are stripped away.

Anyway - polemic over.  The images here all derive from just such an expedition.  In the past, I’ve usually found myself collecting more of my habitual kind of imagery.  This time however, as our students were coming to terms with street photography - and the challenges of approaching the public with a camera in hand, I found my own subject priorities shifting a little too.  Windows have played a fairly important role as a motif for me, for a while.  However, instead of focusing on blanked-out or otherwise obscured examples of the breed, I found myself concentrating instead on what was clearly visible behind the glass.  Maybe it was just a case of recalibrating my eyes after all the neutral colour and tendency towards blankness of my current work, but I found all this complex, polychromatic content very refreshing, for an hour or two.

Leicester’s Belgrave/Melton Road, from whence most of these shots originate, is one of the city’s main arteries, and one that has featured here before.  It also provides the commercial heartbeat of Leicester’s Asian-dominated Belgrave neighbourhood, and as such, constitutes something of an explosion of colour and visual incident.  It’s not without its occasional, more self-consciously designed examples, but it was to these rather more haphazard, untutored, and, let’s face it – cheerfully eccentric expressions of the window dresser’s art, that my lens was repeatedly drawn.  There is a distinctly homespun, aesthetic at work here that differs from the average shopping street.  The two dominant rules in operation often seem to be one of 'more is more', and another of, 'just pile stuff up and get on with it'.  Anyway, in a world of ever-expanding bland conformity - the kind of individuality expressed here is only to be celebrated.