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A spider's web | photography/text: pablo luis gonzález |
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© Pablo Luis González 2004 Photographs can be used at no charge for non-commercial purposes, ie, community groups, students, schools, etc. To request an image or images email me with a description and location of the photograph(s), stating your proposed use of them. A JPEG file(s) at 300 dpi will be emailed back as soon as possible. No further copies can be made without the permission of the copyright holder. |
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6. Was I trying to adopt Walker Evans' approach to documentary photography when I was carrying out this work? Perhaps I was, although my mind does not register to have done so consciously. Certainly I knew his work and that of his colleagues at the FSA as well. The cameras which shot the images portrayed on this photographic essay did so looking at these places from without: a reptilian eye that had, and still has, no place to dwell and to say: "I'm here. This is my time, this will be my time". Perpetual wanderers, a self-winding human clock mechanism, a quality I cannot stop thinking that I share with people such as Walker Evans, although I do not claim and I have not claimed at any moment that my work has the same iconic qualities or the same historical, ideological and aesthetical relevance that his oeuvre had. However, as any other young person, or not so young at the time of writing these pages, I had, and have, dreams and illusions. Yet, what I was trying to do was work that reflected my preoccupations at the time, which were to use the camera to develop a rapport with the city, to make it my city. Many preconceived notions were also demolished. Qualities shared in not so much as in the fact of being physically roaming from country to country, city to city, street to street, or alley to alley, but rather as having an attitude of being in the mind somehow never here, not really, or there either; a condition of statelessness even when one is in one's own state, or in one's own adopted city for more than two decades, as I had been. A condition that is becoming our own, surreptitiously belonging to us all, in this contemporary world that grows and grows and, yet, a world which is also shrinking fast in breadth and depth. A young and warm Irish vicar in a church located somewhere on the edge at the east of the city, the precise time and place no longer remembered, welcomed me, the cliché of the red hair and beard having become reality for once, a man who was interested in Liberation Theology and the struggles of Latin America, the silent backdrop of the lonely nave echoing our conversation. Further down the road and time, the triangular red brick and grey render façade of another church was watching in desolation the emptiness of the ugly scar of the river of asphalt leading to, perhaps, the nearest prophetic supermarket in the outskirts of the city. The traditional ceremony, practised mostly on Sunday afternoons or lazy Bank Holidays, of leisurely strolling on the cobblestones of narrow medieval alleys, voices resonating on old brick walls and gothic stone arches as the welcoming shape of a traditional tea room became the dominant landmark in the retina, the hours incessantly gyrating in rhythm with the sails of an old windmill, now milling only whispers and murmurs. "What is going to be? Earl Grey tea? Oh, not that again! I think I'll have a coffee. I also would like some scones with butter and marmalade, thick cut, please. Pardon? No, butter please, not Flora. Thank you." The sixth former with a thin white blouse and black skirt walked away with the order, the sway of her hips following her after a few moments of indecision. The sharp laughter coming down theatrically from dusty centuries on follies that we keep on committing and committing, was still haunting me. The old stones stayed indifferent to my angst in the background, having already seen too much to be able to show any surprise or remorse to their cruelty. "Will you take our pictures, please? Oh, yes, please!" Two hopeful faces, two young girls with the twinkle of warmer days yet to come sparkling in their eyes, their lips forming questioning smiles; their colours were tantalisingly signalling the onset of spring: some white here, denim blue there, then a bit of pink and pastels elsewhere. Pirouettes performed for the impudent lens followed, my hand trying in near despair to make the camera follow their bouncy and quick dance. A backdrop of pirouetting cranes, perched high in the sky as the construction of the elephantine bridge continued unabated, completed the scene, which was then archived as a kind of film take in some forgotten corner of my memory. Hessle foreshore would become, at least for a while, a resting place for the Lincoln Castle, the last of the steam ferries that crossed the Humber from Victoria Pier to New Holland, and a target as well for the ritual Sunday peregrinations. These characteristics are features of not so much of a topography of the city as it might have been, or not, during this period, but more of a morphology of my mind, of my memory, and of an interaction with an environment which was, then, new to me; one to be viewed from this time. Pablo Luis González / Hull: February 2004 Printer friendly | Don't Miss the Sun » Comment »
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