Working Methods: 'This S(c)eptic Isle', 'Childish Things' 6

All Images: Work In Progress: 'Childish Things', Salvaged Trundle Toys, May 2019

I'd really thought I might be done with these crippled toy sculptures last year, not least - because they're pretty labour intensive, and I'm still struggling to find storage room for the first lot.  Plus, I genuinely hoped that the undeniably Brexity subtext behind much of the 'TSI' project might feel old hat by now.  

But, since when has making art (particularly of this kind) been about doing the sensible or practical thing?  And, as far as the second point goes, all I can say is "Fat Chance!"  The fact that what may have started as a petulant act of national self-harming, now feels symptomatic of a much more sinister, and intensifying, far-right zeitgeist - makes it seem all the more vital to take some account of the whole sorry situation.  Ultimately, externalising one's anxieties has to be healthier than internalising them - I think.  Trust me, if this all, one day, seems like so much irrelevant paranoia - and to have thus been a complete waste of time, no one will be more pleased than me.  

But, for now, as the weather gradually improves, and the day-lengths extend, I find myself once more, out in the back yard - with abrasive paper, dust mask, and cans of grey primer.  You just can't tell some people...

Mail Shots 8

Both Images: Stokes Croft, Bristol, April 2019

Mail slots have been pretty thin on the ground on here, of late - but there was no way I could leave these two little gems uncommemorated.

Bristol Brutal

Kingsdown, Bristol, April 2019

Here's another short photo-essay from my recent Bristol dérive.  In this case, it features a series of architectural studies, of often-overlooked corners of the city - each stumbled upon, rather than sought-out, during my perambulations.

The Bristol Hotel, Narrow Quay, Bristol, April 2019

Anyone familiar with Bristol will know it's all too easy to be seduced by the Georgian, Regency and Victorian architectural styles, which still characterise much of the city - dating from the period of its spectacular mercantile expansion in the eighteenth and nineteenth-centuries.  There's no denying that there's much to enjoy there, in terms of sheer visual (or atmospheric) environment.  But it's also important to remember that much of what now appears charming and quaint was built with the proceeds from massively exploitative colonial expansion, the trades in alcohol and tobacco, and most disturbingly - slavery.  Indeed, Bristol's dirty history as a major nexus of the slave trade is still commemorated in specific place names - not least Whiteladies Road, Blackboy Hill, and the various locations named after famed slave trader and so-called 'philanthropist' Edward Colston. 

Either way, Bristol has reinvented itself more than once since those days. Notably, it has  currently thrown-up numerous pockets of much more contemporary redevelopment -  often styled with the kind of sleek, almost hyper-real, minimalism beloved of late-stage Capitalism.  Such buildings often seem to incorporate highly reflective surfaces that seem to camouflage their real intent by throwing our own image back at us - or else the kind of curtain-walled transparency that might privilege the idea of transparency over any real insight into the interior workings of a specific institution.  Increasingly, there is almost a sense of architecture as a series of monumental screens - an analogue of the pocket-sized portals to the digital realm  we all now routinely carry.

Millennium Square, Cannon's Marsh, Bristol, April 2019

In Bristol, one such notable example would be the Millennium Square complex.  Nominally an attempt to re-imagine the old quayside hinterland of Canon's Marsh, as an 'exciting' public space, there's a strangely alienating Science Fiction quality at work here, with its huge mirrored sphere, geometric reflecting ponds, and purpose-built facades (suggesting the clean machine ethic of racked server towers).  Even those original dockside buildings that remain have been spruced up to become the carriers of blandly inspirational texts, or to incorporate an actual large video screen.

It occurs to me that the two most overtly favoured forms of architectural expressions at work in contemporary Bristol thus appear to reflect the city's commercial drive across the centuries, over any more civic aspirations.  This is as true of the rapacious sea-faring mercantilism evoked in the picturesque legacy of heritage Bristol, as it is of the race to monetise services and, above all - information, that informs its most recent manifestations.   

Freemantle Square, Kingsdown, Bristol, April 2019

Kingsdown, Bristol, April 2019

Reflecting (quite literally, in certain cases) on all of this, is fascinating, but there's another, perhaps less expected Bristol too - as demonstrated by most of these images.  This is the often arbitrary intervention of certain jarring elements of twentieth-century Modernism, or else - a kind of supremely quotidian functionalism, into the mix.  Thus, I could wander through picturesque Cotham, arriving at the charming (and personally nostalgic) Freemantle Square, only to turn a corner, and be suddenly confronted by a series of startlingly antithetical blocks of tawdry Brutalist public housing.  Clinging to the edge of Kingsdown, as it descends to Stokes Croft below, these feel like ramparts, from which one might survey wide tracts of the city as if from a disconnected, parallel timescale.  They're like a point of chronological fracture, or alternative history - just as they represent a rupture in physical and architectural space.

Clifton, Bristol, April 2019

Elsewhere, I found found myself pausing, on the steep climb from historic Park Street - and up to Clifton (that pinnacle of old, moneyed Bristol), only to find myself peering through concrete slats into a basement car-park so baldly functional as to seem totally decontextualised - like a pocket of parallel reality, or a portal through which one might leave the world outside behind.  A little further, a battered steel box, aspirated noisily through the slatted grille occupying its front face.  It was unexplained by its surroundings, and ignored by all other passers-by, and I'm left wondering exactly what kind of hidden subterranean realm might by served by such a ventilation duct.

Clifton, Bristol, April 2019

High Kingsdown, Bristol, April 2019

Another, similar, basement space was to be observed, screened behind security gates at High Kingsdown.  This is part of a self-contained realm of modernist estate housing, inserted into the older and more organic surrounding neighbourhood, in another incidence of arresting architectural juxtaposition.  Possibly planned to provide staff housing for the nearby hospital (I'm guessing), the stylistic contrast with its neighbouring areas is so marked as to suggest it might even be some kind of independent micro-state.  I passed through freely, in the event - but expected to be challenged for my papers at any moment.   

Sir James Barton, Roundabout, Bristol, April 2019

Overlooking the rim of 'The Bearpit' at St James Barton Roundabout (itself, a whole other story - almost resembling a kind of post-apocalyptic anarcho-shanty town, these days), I found a grid of shabby mirrored windows in whose bleak signage, the commercial property boom seems to have been reduced to a kind of panicky fire sale. Nearby, a disability access lift has been inserted into a narrow aperture - resembling nothing so much as some kind of transporter unit - from which one might be beamed onto to the surface of a different planet altogether.  However, the broken bottle shards, alongside, and clearly compromised 'safety' barrier, are hardly reassuring - a situation unalleviated  by a few runs of hazard tape, inexpertly applied to the lift itself.  Would one's scrambled atoms ever be successfully reassembled in their correct configuration by such a dubious-looking unit? - we might ask (Scotty).

Sir James Barton Roundabout, Bristol, April 2019

Perhaps the most dramatic juxtaposition of all comes in the form of The Bristol Hotel & Conference Centre.  It's a building I've always found thrilling in its breathtaking incongruity.  With historic Queen's Square to one side, and the repurposed industrial archeology of the old Floating Harbour, to the other - one can only stand before its stark, pre-cast grids, and the even more dramatic latticework of its carpark facade, and marvel at the misguided conviction of its architects - that theirs' was the real future to build.

Of course, such buildings are generally regarded as little more than a pernicious blight, these days.  It's amazing just how many have already been swept away around the country, and I can only assume this one survives because it's prime city centre location has caused the hotel it houses to thrive as a business.

The Bristol Hotel, Narrow Quay, Bristol, April 2019

Much has been written about how the Modernism of the post-war twentieth century, and the brief moment of social(ist) consensus it represents, now feels indicative of a kind of future that never was.  Such ideas have spawned much of the recent pop-cultural re-imagining of the idea of Hauntology, as well as the awakening of a kind of alt-heritage impulse amongst Leftists, the self-consciously design savvy, and those inclined to embrace irony, or contrarianism.  But I think it would be disingenuous not to allow that there's probably a significant element of good old fashioned nostalgia at play too.  For some of us, of a certain vintage, such buildings represent a world we were born into - one whose naive Utopianism might have suggested the beginning of a more idealistic age, but which now seems, instead, to mark an end to innocence altogether.

If the main impulse behind my little West-Country excursion was a degree of autobiographical reprocessing (as I think it was), the meditations above are really only part of a more personal emotional journey.  They definitely represent certain familiar ideas that I've connected with in different cities, over recent years.  But, perhaps because of the even more dramatic architectural juxtapositions at play in Bristol, they seemed to swim into even sharper focus at various points during my brief stay.  Also, whatever cod-philosophy I might dress it all up in, you already know how much I love to photograph those straight edges and formal geometries, as well as all that delicious bleakness  - don't you?  

'It's The End Of The World As We Know It...'

All Images:  Kingsdown, Bristol, April 2019

I recently spent a couple of days revisiting some of my old haunts in Bristol - mostly in search of fresh sights, and perhaps - a general battery re-charge.  There was possibly also an element of processing my long-term past - with certain mixed emotions, I'll admit.  However, the overall experience was a positive one, and I returned with a camera full of new images, notebook pages of scrawled ideas for possible writings, a stack of tempting new books (purchased for a song), and a head full of competing ideas.  

It was fascinating to see how much certain areas of Bristol had changed since my last visit (nearly a decade ago), but also just how unchanged much else was - even since I lived there from 1981 - 87.  It always felt like a city of almost polar opposites - hiding behind a generally benevolent facade of slightly scruffy gentility, and if anything - those dichotomies feel even more magnified in the twenty-first century.  Thus it is that the complacency of serious wealth sits cheek by jowl with genuine deprivation, startling (almost Science Fiction-grade) redevelopment faces off against tracts of near dereliction, and aspirational lifestyles butt up against zones of experience resembling something close to the post-apocalyptic.  

It was also intriguing to witness how engaged Bristolians appear to be with the whole Extinction Rebellion phenomenon, blowing up in the public consciousness, of late.  I've yet to encounter a single piece of E.R. publicity material here in Leicester - whilst significant tracts of Bristol are positively wallpapered with it.  Perhaps I shouldn't be so surprised.  For all of its somewhat laid-back demeanour, Bristol is, after all, a major economic and cultural powerhouse in the south of England, and generally much further ahead of most curves than anywhere here in the somewhat retrograde East Midlands.  I'll confess to feeling like something of a provincial hick as I collected the various examples here (all bagged within a few hundred metres).

I'm also struck by how stylish and genuinely design-conscious E.R. posters tend to be.  If we really are witnessing the end of environmental days - as many far cleverer folk than I, clearly believe - should we be genuinely thankful, or slightly perplexed, that those seriously engaging have found time to attend to the quality of the graphics?  Is that, in itself, another sign of our species' slightly skewed priorities - or should we be glad that someone understands the importance of effective communication techniques in getting a serious message across?

As can also be seen in certain of these examples, the burning issues under discussion must still fight for our attention, amongst the myriad other meanings and messages layered onto the physical street.  Exposed to the elements (however acidic or super-heated), paper  posters will do what they always have - becoming gradually absorbed into the mulch of information accreting on urban streets, in the kind of found collage my camera can never resist.  Given the overriding theme of extinction - I guess that's only appropriate, really.

John Lehr: 'The Island Position'

All Images: John Lehr: 'The Island Position', London, MACK, 2019

I recently came across these images, from a new photographic publication, entitled 'The Island Position' [1.], by American photographer, John Lehr, and was instantly drawn to them.  Anyone familiar with the kind of imagery that regularly crops up here, may find that relatively unsurprising - but I guess we all like what we like, when it comes down to it.

Certainly, shop fronts and retail windows, particularly of the smaller, more mundane variety, have appeared in my own photography, on numerous occasions.  Likewise, the integration of found texts into a visual image have long been part of my own practice - as has the focussed concentration on a specific location (or detail of).

I could even imagine having captured the image above on Leicester's Melton Road, where - I swear, I've observed essentially the same combination of neon signage, sky blue graphics and stacked packaging in at least one window, quite recently.

However, there is also something specifically American about these photos, I think.  This goes beyond the dollar signs and culturally specific references scattered amongst the signage - having as much to do with the even blast of intense sunlight illuminating each subject, and a kind of bland Modernism - typical of much (often low-rise) vernacular U.S. architecture.  These are the premises of a commercial culture which reached some kind of seeming apotheosis in the post-war Twentieth Century, as opposed to the Victorian era - as might be the case here in Britain.  They may recall the photography of Walker Evans or even the painting of Edward Hopper, from an earlier era - in terms of subject matter, but the real stylistic reference point would seem to be the Photorealist painters of the 1960s and 70s.

However, as an illuminating interview with Lehr, on www.americansuburbx.com reveals, these photos are more than simple formal exercises in a particular visual tradition.  Lehr claims to be monitoring, 

"an empire teetering back and forth over a line of regression and progress (as it has been if not morally, certainly economically) for nearly one hundred years." [2.], 

and also claims that, 

"what you see in the pictures are the outward displays of people participating in a system that will never deliver on its promises" [3.].  

In fact, what he is really documenting is a world in which money increasingly circulates through a virtual economy, rather than via physical outlets.  Even where the windows of those remaining premises might advertise themselves as portals to that online world, or stack up boxes of the very devices used to access it - they are destined to be forever behind its curve.  That would seem to be the particularly contemporary message behind the tawdry desperation really on display there.  Lehr may be part of a fairly venerable tradition - in terms of his chosen subject matter, but here - he feels like a distinctly twenty-first century outlier within it.  His is a status report from an American high street most likely to soon disappear altogether, in its accepted form.

Something else to strike a chord with me, is Lehr's assertion,

"I have nothing against a conceptual way of working, but what interests me as an artist is stumbling onto something through a process that is open to intuition and serendipity. I love the idea that I can begin my day as a photographer not knowing what I want to mean but through the process of photographing I can uncover something. It’s often the pictures themselves, not my ideas that drive things forward" [4.].

Despite my various forays into something a little more ideas-driven, in recent years, that still remains pretty much my own preferred starting point for most projects.



[1.]: John Lehr, 'The Island Position', London, MACK, 2019.

[2.], [3.] & [4.]: Brad Feuerhelm & John Lehr, 'John Lehr: The Island Position Interview',  www. american suburbx.com , March 2019.