New York: it created me, it flayed me too. After 50 years I still hear it, smell it, feel it. I hear the rusty Econoline van driving too fast down Second, the reek of the East River where I was told small icebergs could sometimes be seen. And the excited chatter of girls on a school roof with silvered reflectors to hasten a summer tan, while below a cacophony of horns blared. I will forever see the light that passes through buildings yet simultaneously bouncing off and still causing the blackest shadows on the other side of the street.
Documenting the same place over an extended period of time is one of the most illuminating applications of photography and here I have assembled images of Paris produced intermittently over a 35 year period. The centre of the city still confers a great sense of warmth as well as a feeling of familiarity and in general it all seems to look very much as it did (excepting the latest redevelopment of Les Halles). But the act of revisiting the same location does make me wonder to what extent the place itself has changed, or are as many of the differences within myself; does the sense of familiarity I now feel give me a clearer insight or does it conceal a truth that is only evident when a place is encountered for the first time ? One thing is certain, my memory may have been sullied but the buildings have definitely been cleaned.
In the 1980s Paris and Europe seemed a long way but suddenly everything changed and I could see this happening from my window. I have limited nostalgia for grimy streets and sub-standard housing, mean shops and low-life but much of my memory of London in the 1970s and 80s is coloured by a sense of ugliness. The area around my old studio behind King's Cross Station certainly had plenty of grimness but it is now unrecognisable and in certain ways I find myself lamenting the wholesale modernisation of London ...
I knew there would be little cheer in this place. Rivesaltes camp, now designated a Memorial, generously spread out, yet hemmed in by heavy goods testing stations, warehouses, industrial boiler repairers, logistics firms, forwarding services, electrical contractors and nondescript depots. Very few of the businesses that surrounded the site made a thing; instead, they contracted, assembled, wholesaled, maintained, installed, but mainly delivered.
Today the area’s purpose of receiving, holding and forwarding applies to goods but in the forties and fifties this place dealt with much more fragile cargoes: the forced displacements of those people deemed to be undesirable or superfluous. How the Spanish Republicans and civilians must have felt fleeing the fall of the Northern front and arriving on the French side of the Pyrenees and every day having a view of the mountains from whence they came. How others must have longed to hang onto their view of these peaks, only to be herded onto trains heading for Auschwitz-Birkenau via Drancy. How the bleak prospect must have spread darkness into the souls of Jews, gypsies, Vichy prisoners, Harkis, Guineans, North Vietnamese and all those who were forced to linger here.
The carcasses of the accommodation blocks are now in ruins and would be collapsing into the mean stony ground completely were it not for reinforcement timbers and iron supports which were determined to keep the structures in this perpetual state of deterioration. Otherwise, the striking aspect is of verticality. Large poles hold floodlights to illuminate the site and remind the visitors of the searchlights that would have followed all activity. A stern group of motionless wind turbines add to this sense of heavenward supplication.
An outbreak of nimby-ism close to home, but I am astonished how on the edges of towns and villages all over France, fields are being transformed into housing developments, very ugly housing developments. A field becomes a place where homes appear as quickly as molehills; nomads setting up camp so that they can live, dream, propagate families and personalize their indoor and outdoor spaces in ever increasing numbers. I have used the destructive character of these Polaroid images as my personal wrecking ball to register a local protest.
Road rage and other roadworks (2006). A hymn to tarmac and the line painter, studies in anger and aggression as well as obedience to the power of the painted symbol, struggles to impose unity and order on the chaos that surrounds us.
