Tag Archives: Photography

New Kids on the Block

01/28/2012 By in Press & Media Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 2 Comments

Rarely is anyone judged for who they really are. As anyone who has ever attended a party or social gathering will already know, new friends and acquaintances will invariably want to know ‘what you do’ for a living. It’s unsurprising really. Perhaps it is just human nature for us to compartmentalise our personalities and responsibilities in this way. Graduates lose their progressive status within a year of leaving university. Thereafter some of the greatest young minds on this planet will be defined by their occupation – waitress, drug dealer and freelance blogger; or as they are more commonly known in the Eurozone – unemployed.

Our preoccupation with status has been further amplified by the sheer number of people who have a handle or profile promoting their job and lifestyle. Such a culture inevitably leads to people branding their identities and heightening status anxiety to extraordinary levels. Alas in the words of the late Virginia Woolf ‘the eyes of others our prisons; their thoughts our cages’. The lowly shelf-stacker at Tesco, who has read the works of Joyce, Mishima and Ezra Pound, is certainly not going to feel any better by spending too much time on LinkedIn.

Although there is a light blogging alternative to the online brand phenomenon, where nobody knows your name or what you do. Tumblr is an offbeat social media service with a pop-culture twist. Irreverent by nature and heavily meme based, the Tumblr generation is largely college educated and they post endless streams of fashion, photography and literacy quotes in splendid anonymity. With no comments or trolls, there is something highly refreshing about Tumblr’s eccentricity and complete disregard for how we all have to make a living. Nobody cares what you do, it’s all about what you feel and know to be true.

Predominately US-based and with over 120 million users every month, Tumblr has given rise to some of the most entertaining and offbeat blogs around today. From the sexual intellectualism of Book Porn, soppy boredom of Dogs on Trains and the late great Kim Jong-Il looking at things, Tumblr is a wonderful place to waste time. A digital scrapbook for the creative moths of this world, there is something refreshing how people can express themselves so vividly online in such a weird and odd fashion.

However, success comes at a price and while the light blogging service remains the domain of hyper-intelligent college kids. Old media organisations such as The Guardian and New Yorker now want a piece of the digital action. With traditional newspapers spreading their ‘content’ online, there is a danger Tumblr will succumb to the wishes of large media groups wanting to promote their corporate image. Indeed it has probably happened already such is the power of big business.

But while people remain weird and strange there will always be a place for the marginalised and ignored on Tumblr. It remains somewhere pure and anonymous and relatively untainted by the status obsession culture found on other networks. And while the pressure to be someone will never cease and every fresh handshake and sideways air kiss will inevitably be followed by an enquiry into your occupation. There is now a small place where outside thoughts no longer have to be our cages, and where labyrinth minds can express themselves freely on laptops in unkempt bedrooms and solitary library chambers.

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Real Venice

11/16/2011 By in Arts & Culture Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

A realist, in Venice, would become a romantic by mere faithfulness to what he saw before him.

Arthur Symons

As beautiful as a thousand suns, the lagoon port of Venice is too romantic to survive. From a distance it is like waiting for your heart to die. How such a place could ever come into being is beyond the imagination of the modern traveller. Once the greatest trading port of the Mediterranean, this extravagant casket of wonders is ravishingly sad, but no longer has an imperative. It merely exists for the eyes of others. There is a melancholy sadness on the fairytale bridges, as the inevitability of the city’s fate has become a metaphor for life itself.

Facing aquatic extinction from rising sea levels and mass tourism, Venice is most definitely in peril. Capturing the magic of the city at Somerset House, the Real Venice exhibition highlights the unique beauty of its walkways and vulgarities of modern tourism. With subsidence rotting the fabric of the city, the La Serenissima faces an irreversible numbers of visitors and slow death of its indigene population. For Venice has no purpose in the modern world. In this city of footsteps, the sadness lies in the visitors, the starling masses who take a million pictures but never open their eyes.

As a contradictory rule of travelling, mass tourism is generally regarded as a crass and vulgar phenomenon. With the world becoming increasingly familiar due to affordable air travel, the paradox of the modern traveller lies in visiting the same places but simultaneously wanting to avoid people just like them. Having previously been a recreational playground for the Victorian upper classes, the city of Venice attracted tourists long before travelling went plastic. Back then, of course, travelling had been the reserve of the rich and famous. In this nostalgic world full of surprises, the fantasy of travelling in another era feels impossibly romantic or to quote Woody Allen a ‘denial of the painful present’.

However, it is now the painful deluge of foreign visitors that spoils it for everyone. Even in a city as beautiful as Venice, there is no escaping the banality of multi-lingual tours, guidebooks, suitcases and universally branded hotels. With progress comes opportunity for all and with progress there will come a price. Venice is suffering from rising house prices and the local Venetian population are slowly being erased from history in favour of foreign tourists. The most romantic city in the world has now become a lavish peacock serving the whims of visitors from overseas. A city submerged not only by rising tides but a lack of opportunities. Nobody lives there, except on holiday. A sad reminder that you are nothing but a passing visitor, and yet that is what we all are really.

Real Venice
Somerset House
Strand
London
WC2R 1LA

Exhibition runs until December 11th 2011.


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East End Film Festival

04/30/2011 By in Arts & Culture Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

As a global audience of billions watched Prince William and Harry arrive at Westminster Abbey dressed up as The Libertines. Spare a thought for the royalist street urchins Pete Doherty and Carl Barat, who as part of the 10th East End Film Festival, will remain forever young in their famous 2001 attire as part of Roger Sargent’s exhibition at Spitalfields Market. Like the well-wishers camping outside Buckingham Palace, The Libertines believed in a poetic vision of Arcadia, a seemingly more innocent age, which in the years and decades to come, many bunting flappers will realise has no grounding in reality. The festival’s opening gala began with the world premiere of ‘There Are No Innocent Bystanders’  inside a 1930’s Art-Deco cinema in Limehouse. This much anticipated documentary explores the mythology driving the group, and their emotional ties with the East End.

Opening the festival with a retrospective documentary about a by-gone era proved to be a masterstroke in light of the Royal Wedding celebrations. Old Spitalfields Market looked like East Belfast with Union Jacks fluttering on display on every street corner. Cider street parties were all the rage, and the stylish kids descended upon The Water Poet in Norton Folgate, which is a gentrified cobbled area popular with affluent students and RBS bankers. Unruly boys who don’t know how to behave would have been at home in Norton Folgate in the 1700s. Back then it was entirely responsible for its own affairs and thus developed a reputation for debauchery. Petty crime went sky high, travellers were robbed, traitors were hidden and the area became a haven for criminals, prostitutes and drunkards.

Although times have changed and the cobbled hooves of Spitalfields appear to have been scrubbed clean with a gigantic toothbrush. Sordid outbreaks of plaque and decay have not left the East End entirely though. Instead it has spread eastwards towards forgotten districts such as Stepney Green. Deep inside this Stalinist council estate, most visitors are more likely to get stitched up than enjoy a festival screening with foreign subtitles. However, the Genesis Cinema is one of the finest independent theatres in the area. A 1980s throwback with dodgy seats, popcorn and affordable ticket prices, and while it might look a bit rough on the outside, beauty, as you know, lies within.

As Spitfires roared over Britannia’s nostalgic skies, the East End Film Festival celebrates the lives of little people in their little houses. With intelligent foreign titles, British debut features and extraordinary archive footage from the First World War up to the Golden Jubilee. The East End Film Festival thankfully remains a wily celebration of London’s rainbow population in what feels like an increasingly deferential age.

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Same Jeans

04/18/2011 By in Arts & Culture Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 1 Comment

As a Scot who once neglected to wear a kilt at a local girl’s wedding, I know from personal experience the emotional power of sartorial nationalism. On being subjected to bitter scorn for rejecting Scotland’s national dress, I had not only betrayed a local tradition but my country’s sense of identity too. Although anyone walking around Scotland today is unlikely to see any men wearing kilts on their way home from Tesco. The Highland veil of tears is nowhere to be seen on the high street and Scottish citizens wears the same jeans, t-shirts and dresses as everyone else.

Germans describe the purpose of clothing as Schutz, Scham and Schmuck - protection, modesty and ornament. Clothes are essentially a non-verbal language and wearing a kilt has always been a clear demonstration of Scottish identity. Ironically there has always been a long tradition of anti-Highland satire throughout Scottish history. Lowland poets such as William Dunbar and Sir Richard Holland caricatured the Highlander as being feckless, violent and stupid, while his costume, the belted plaid (see above) was an object of ridicule. The use of tartan to symbolise a pan-Scottish identity rooted in antiquity still resonates today but it is grossly unrepresentative of everyday life.

As illustrated in Niall Ferguson‘s recent televised series Civilisation: Is the West History?, the advent of mass consumption has now consigned traditional dresses to the laundry basket. Previously there had been a spectacular variety of styles all over the world. In 1909 the millionaire French banker, Albert Kahn, set out to create what he called an ‘archive of the planet’. The 72,000 photos he collected reveal an astonishing variety of costumes and fashions.

All over the world it was clear that clothing defined national identity. However, with the rampant power of American consumption leading to an unprecedented convergence of Western fashions, people are simply no longer what they wear. Even some of the most ornamental fashion scenes in London’s trendiest districts are grounded in uniformity.

Anyone walking down Brick Lane on a Sunday afternoon will see thousands of young people listening to lesbian Bulgarian folk music and drinking Chai Lattes. Invariably middle-class and well-educated, the young gentleman on display will be wearing second-hand jeans as oppose to anything on sale in Top Shop. Meanwhile their female counterparts will be snapping up colourful vintage dresses from pop-up shops throughout the city’s alternative style mile.

Seemingly original at first but when thousands of people start re-buying old clothes on a mass scale. Even self-styled individualists begin to look very familiar, especially when they all congregate in the same street. No more so than outside British railway stations, where teenage skate-punks loiter outside in the identikit black uniforms imported on mass from the United States of America.

Superficial groups may appear to diverge away from the majority culture but compared to the astonishing ethnic and regional diversity captured in Albert Kahn photographs. Everyone in the West wears the same uniform cottons on a truly unprecedented scale. Sartorial nationalism still manifests itself in a post-modern fashion, where countries such as Scotland celebrate their national identity by wearing kilts on formal occasions. Uniformity of course provides a feeling of solidarity, which I discovered to my cost when I wore an English tuxedo at a Scottish wedding.

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