Pretty, Vacant 5

All Images: West Leicester, June 2020

It seems that the subject matter of most appeal to me, whilst out and about with my camera, currently falls into one of two conflicting modes.  As usual, everything emerges from my immediate surroundings, but I've noticed that it's generally characterised by either a distinct emptying of, or conversely - an ever-denser occupation of, physical space.

The latter is an obvious feature of my on-going 'Constructed City' work, and I've already highlighted how the frenetic urge to build, currently overtaking several key locations around Leicester feels like a conscious filling-in of both the city plan, and the visual panorama.  The building projects that have captivated me so much over recent months, are all large-scale, multi-storied undertakings, and rapidly grow to represent significant and un-ignorable interventions on the visual (and thus, psychic) environment.  Viewed from a distance, (in my case - as approached on two wheels, like as not), they generally betray a distinctly monolithic blocking-in of any vista they occupy.  However, closer inspection generally reveals a situation of overwhelming visual intricacy, complex geometry, and almost limitless abstract appeal.  With these subjects, more is definitely more, and (as I've already discovered) the challenges of translating that in final pieces are not to be underestimated.

But however much those concerns currently dominate my imagination, there is also an countervailing pull back towards the themes of vacancy and absence which characterised my work just a few years ago.  That's what these 'Pretty, Vacant' posts are about.  For all that the local landscape is impacted by multiple, often startling, emerging edifices, it's also host to numerous examples of vacant commercial premises and abandoned real estate.  There is a palpable emptying-out to be detected in numerous locations peppered across the city.

Just a few years (or even months) ago, such motifs  seemed to speak of the economic convulsions of our age, or to anticipate the potentially catastrophic effects of insular politics.  Typically, these would include a decade of post-crash Austerity, and the inevitable B-word.  But, of course, to that list we must now add the implications of our latest pandemic  catastrophe (the C-word - I suppose).  Regardless of how severely we may or may not have been individually affected by recent events, there's a distinct mood of loss stalking the world right now.  Whether through actual loss of life, or through the disappearance of livelihoods, the restriction of economic activity, or the shutting-off of civic and social life - there's a hollowing of what many still fondly think of as 'normality' abroad, right now.  For some, this may represent a perversely welcome opportunity to re-set - perhaps on a global scale.  For others, it may resemble the latest wave of a much greater, gradually unfolding Apocalypse.  For the majority, it might just be another in an endless catalogue of (hopefully) temporary inconveniences - to be endured, and adapted to.

Whatever one's position on all that (for what it's worth, my own shifts between all three - on an almost daily basis) the empty sites I keep stumbling over still feel like a very apposite symbol of our age.  As with several of the examples I've featured in this little series, I have no evidence that this showroom's current state is specifically virus-related.  As a former Triumph motorcycle dealership, it may speak more of fluctuations in that market, to which I'm not privy - not least because another bike merchant also disappeared from the local landscape quite recently.  However my chosen images have never been about capturing specific subjects for documentary reasons alone.  The specifics of the local landscape are an inevitable part of my photographic habit - that's true, but I'd like to think they are quite quickly absorbed into a more subjective process of capturing secondary themes and multiple potential readings.  In that sense, the images here seem to reach out, beyond the simple facts of their situation - perhaps to evoke the recent denuding of our collective day-to-day experience.

As I write, Leicester's particular difficulties continue.  However, there may be a weak sense of renewed hope, elsewhere in Britain - to accompany a reported levelling-off of the daily virus statistics (although why anyone would put much faith in the official statistics - I'm really not sure).  Hopefully, this is not too misguided a hiatus, in what may still prove to be a far longer-lasting situation.  Perhaps all the empty floorspace and blank windows will soon feel less appropriate as topically symbolic motifs.  I certainly can't predict any of that.  Whatever the case, I suspect I would always be visually drawn to such subject matter - regardless of which specific readings might be subsequently attached.  That might be purely for formal/visual reasons - I suppose, or perhaps I'm just a perennial sucker for the bleak and the melancholy.  In this instance, it occurs to me that one might just as easily meditate on the paradoxical thrill of the 'everyday', or the strange resonance of contemporary non-spaces (motorway services and airports being other closely-related examples, perhaps).  The essential resonance of the location would remain undiminished - I believe.  Meanings fluctuate, just as do commercial lettings, commercial use and public health.  And window reflections and beautifully cast shadows do too, of course.  

Such morphing and layering of possible readings is the real thrill of a Psychogeographic relationship with one's own environment, and will always be most heightened in the hive of a city - or so it seems to me.  Only time will tell which may feel most appropriate in this one, over the coming months.