Real England

amsterdam's red light district is perhaps the most real england place i've ever been. even though so much of the touristic persona is defined towards the terms of the english visitor they still manage to make a grotesquery of it.

also iirc imago was initially unreservedly positive about the blackpool photoset

thanet ive got some links to and its certainly nasty in a way that thug clive gets and probably confounds realness tourism, its a hard place and there are no daytripping factory workers from oldham there for a fight and a fuck all in good humour

the bourgie south of the english riviera also has an undercurrent of nastiness and serious criminality, dorset yacht clubs with spiritual links to south america

Went to a Tony Ray-Jones exhibition last year. I suppose that is what this guy is riffing off from.

Felt Ray-Jones quite liked the people and places he went to.

nice

speaking of south coast brutality, just recalled business legernd nicholas van hoogstraten

was saying to nakh that his kind far transcend the more capital-based guvnors and manors novel. no compunction in evidence

his wikipedia entry is magnificent reading fwiw

Margate is indeed an interesting place. Chintzy niceness rubbing up against kitsch dereliction.

did a long run in the sussex weald on saturday, the exact area where hoogy has built his ridiculous marble palace. lots of sprawling properties owned by weekend country gents with their bentleys and beemers; expensive pubs that you'll probably never hear the football scores in; private fishing lakes with only the odd lone angler dressed in his drab jumper and greasy jacket, hunched over his maggoty bait box, just getting away from it all on his collapsible camping chair; desperate farmhouses with shit-stained concrete courtyards, depressed-looking cows, derelict tin barns full of rusting and useless tractors of ancient vintage, a dog that won't stop barking and no-one ever in sight; the less desirable villages that the lorries still rattle through, ugly huddles of cottages with flakey paint on their window frames, pavements barely wider than the width of the kerbstone and one shop that sells only ginsters, lucozade and awful chocolate bars. wait, there's ham and milk in the fridge, a few cling-filmed blocks of cold dead cheddar, could probably assemble a passable sandwich if there was any bread left on the shelf. at one point i had to run right through a duck hunt - heard the guns a mile off and hoped it was only clays the were shooting but no, it was all these hateful old cunts in their white shirts and tweeds taking pot shots at panicky pairs of mallards overhead. with every gunshot, one bird's flightpath would turn into this arcing plummet into the ground. footpath zig-zagged right through middle of it all, feathery corpses littering the grass. nearest shooter called a warning to his cohorts and gave me a chipper sort of smile; i just wanted to punch him in his fatuous fucking face. got chased by a ram, ran though a grim grey field of free-range chickens. good mobile reception though

every so often this thread will turn out a post of the month contender

if October beats that I will be amazed

wonder if there was any sign of a more DIY malevolence, a kind of instinctive semi-organised corralling of resources in the service of some black market laird who'd sell his mother for property rights

guess the cunts with guns are in that ballpark - the entropy of old money

yes Margate is an edgy kinda town. ffs.

Went to a Tony Ray-Jones exhibition last year. I suppose that is what this guy is riffing off from.

Felt Ray-Jones quite liked the people and places he went to.

― xyzzzz__, Wednesday, October 1, 2014 4:29 AM (3 hours ago) Bookmark

Think the other half of that exhibition, Martin Parr was more responsible for honing it into its present day iteration through the introduction of lurid color

Problem with the Shoreditch photos is that they add nothing to the sense that Parr captured 30 years ago in the Last Resort https://www.google.com/search?q=martin+parr+last+resort&tbm=isch

Parr has also been accused of depicting his subjects in a contemptuous way. Why does street photography always have a suggestion (in this DW case a lot more than a suggestion) of the grotesque? That's how it seems to me, and I generally don't like it for that reason.

thanks imago, too kind etc. you would have thought that big hoogs would mingle more freely with the murderous denizens of fringe agriculture, but no... outside of nobbling business rivals, cheerleading for corrupt regimes and terrorizing his tennants, he's more the lone psychopath locked away in his fairy castle

There is a lofty, lonely, Lohengrenic castle in the clouds --
I draw my murky meanings there,
but seven years' dark luck is just around the corner
and in the shadows lurks the spectre of utter, self-serving, pompous, drivel

Think the other half of that exhibition, Martin Parr was more responsible for honing it into its present day iteration through the introduction of lurid color

Disliked it myself in comparison to Ray-Jones, who I think had an eye for humour and detail lacking in the Parr.

Martin Parr's a twunt who mistakes female curators for tea ladies, FYI.

fox hunts or at least the swirling hubbub which surrounds the possibility of a fox hunt - anti-hunt saboteurs in balaclavas & camouflage driving around in white vans, their sympathizers discretely relaying information via walkie talkie, occasional bursts of trumpeting + barking charging that turn out to be false alarms, and lots of clusters of people stood outside parked cars watching proceedings with binoculars having a Good Day Out - are a peculiar way of interacting with/enjoying the environs

you make the anti-hunt sound as much a pageant as the hunt!

you would have thought that big hoogs would mingle more freely with the murderous denizens of fringe agriculture, but no... outside of nobbling business rivals, cheerleading for corrupt regimes and terrorizing his tennants, he's more the lone psychopath locked away in his fairy castle

Does he actually live there, though? Last I heard the place was unfinished and to all intents and purposes unhabitable.

xp plenty of neutrals too. know of someone effortlessly conservative but secretly more committed to animal welfare who lets the hunt go through her land so that she can sabotage it better. not sure if this works but I suspect she just enjoys being involved. it's lonely in the countryside

oh pardon me, is this your dog I've maimed? only put these snares down for the rabbits, soso sorry! btw I've got a brew on

^^^this basically apes a sketch off of (Blue) Jam :/

the method seems better than okcupid anyhow

and yeah, jonathan meades needs to make a documentary about nvh, stat

Does he actually live there, though? Last I heard the place was unfinished and to all intents and purposes unhabitable

yeah i think yr right actually. have only had a proper view of it once, a good few years back. stopped by the perimeter fence on a bike ride for a pee and a couple of jammy dodgers. within about two minutes a couple of black-clad heavies appeared and started making their way towards me, so i left pretty sharpish. monstrous place, in size and in spirit

reminds me of tales of the Barclay Bros and their creepy Brecqhou Bond villain hideout

went to central london on the weekend, awful, gentrified, commercial, corporate, achingly emptily cool desperations, selfie sticks, $15 organic single organic cookies, no cafes, zero independants, zero young locals, 100% tourists and rich families. Really you have to go quite far to the outskirts now to find any real people or places in London. Theres miles and miles of corporate desert and it's soul destroying. Other than Bodean's there's no where to even eat. The actual independant places are just hipster run offs frequented by yuppie clients selling nothing. You've got this street Carnaby Street famous in the past for hippie culture and swinging 60s and mods and independent boutiques and you get there and it's fucking filled with Puma and Adidas stores, wtf? They play up it's heritage and put that shit all along it. Soulless. Pay £10 for a tube day pass, get onto the most grotty disgustingly unclean underground trains in teh world in my experience. Had to walk around South Kensington for a bit, just a pile of rich shit and yuppies and dead eyed tourists how can anyone stay sane there?

Cities I generally find disgusting depressing places, but I have never been more depressed and dispossessed and lacking in confidence in humanity by a City than last weekend in London.

speaking of south coast brutality, just recalled business legernd nicholas van hoogstraten

― Ƹ༑Ʒ (imago), Wednesday, 1 October 2014 09:42 (8 hours ago)

van hoogstraten is an excellent example, a dandified cadaverous psycho with impeccable threat

Why does street photography always have a suggestion (in this DW case a lot more than a suggestion) of the grotesque?

i suspect the answer is connected with my strong sense that we almost never see the middle or upper classes photographed in the style of a wildlife documentary

which is to say that whatever dignity or agency you believe street photographers afford their subjects, there is no real equivalent genre treatment of the non-marginalized

http://i.imgur.com/jOxcECY.jpg

:) i'm open to discovering counter-examples, but i think they're in the minority?

maybe it's something simpler about the way that representation delimits the subjects it uses

Semi serious answer: Paparazzi photography is literally wildlife photography

fair point, and it has got stylistic connections to street photography

unless a subject is posing (or at least pre-consenting) in some fashion, maybe they're always effectively wildlife

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v36/n19/james-meek/in-farageland

^ Haven't read this yet.

we're a farage band we come from farage land

nick you are making brighton sound like an absurdity stranded between cliff-faces and rural or meta-rural hinterlands with only the umbilical link to civilization afforded by the a23 and the railway

Why does street photography always have a suggestion (in this DW case a lot more than a suggestion) of the grotesque?

i suspect the answer is connected with my strong sense that we almost never see the middle or upper classes photographed in the style of a wildlife documentary

― Chimp Arsons, Wednesday, 1 October 2014 16:54 (4 hours ago) Permalink

which is to say that whatever dignity or agency you believe street photographers afford their subjects, there is no real equivalent genre treatment of the non-marginalized

― Chimp Arsons, Wednesday, 1 October 2014 16:56 (4 hours ago) Permalink

http://www.ampelos31.fr/le-blog/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/Ray_jones.jpg

Tony Ray-Jones is the go-to for this stuff right? He photographed all types - not just working class folks at Blackpool.

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-3XcHU_FRJpA/TiK6G1Nrn1I/AAAAAAAABEw/x97KjKFSIY8/s1600/tony+5.jpg

http://c300221.r21.cf1.rackcdn.com/tony-ray-jones-gentlemen-at-a-wwi-veteran-parade-c-1966-1362348073_org.jpg

Or he was able to foreground something else - that could be the humour generated by the situation he was depicting, or a couple showing affection.

I have a book of his photos and it's pretty clear that at least the ones collected in that volume were supposed to show the English "at play" and class, hedonism or the grotesque had nothing to do with his choice of subjects. Also, the British seaside which makes up maybe 2/3 of the book was not exclusively working class then or now.

I agree that the feeling of the grotesque is not there in Tony Ray-Jones. On the other hand, would a little of it have been there if I was looking at his photos in 1968? When looking at his photos now, a lot of my attention is taken over by the fact they are historical documents, which may overpower other perceptions. Maybe people looking at those Shoreditch photos in fifty or a hundred years will find them to be fascinating on a historical level, and they will be less (or not) interested in whether they are accurate or fair.

But, on the other hand, is it possible that, broadly, people in the west may actually have become a bit more grotesque since 1968 and this is partly the problem? The people in the Ray-Jones photos do generally seem a bit more dignified.

Another factor is technical. A lot of the modern amateur street photography looks very pumped-up with processing. (But, again, maybe in fifty years the 'hard digital/photoshop' look of today will be seen as a historical style with its own charm.)

Finally, maybe people generally look better standing still or at rest than when they are hurrying around or caught suddenly unawares by a photographer in their face.

Also, the British seaside which makes up maybe 2/3 of the book was not exclusively working class then or now.

I found v little of a discernible agenda in those photos (the weakness in that exhibition were the diary entries; there was v little insight to be gained from them, and it felt intrusive). If anything it is that the summer seaside holiday allowed for events to be documented -- could be a fair, or a rock festival (iirc) -- and people were at play in them, they would behaved differently from their stuffy selves.

Brings to mind this bit from the LRB:

In her 1938 novel The Death of the Heart, Elizabeth Bowen describes a train trip from London to the Kent seaside. It’s one of the most extraordinary journeys in English literature. Without stretching the bounds of the real, she takes her young protagonist, Portia, from a 19th-century milieu – a stuffy, oppressive, metropolitan townhouse, gloomy with servants, sexual frustration, snobbery, hypocrisy and heavy furniture – to a bright 20th-century world of freedom, consumerism and erotic risk.

However people behave differently on holiday so I'm not sure whether it is even very historical. It doesn't seem alien to me. Ray-Jones was able to capture certain emotions that feel accurate and fair and strong.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/31/Smith_Dinner.jpg

23 July 1990 Ian Smith makes a point at a dinner organised in his honour by Denis Walker (far left) at Lympne Castle, Kent, July 23, 1990. Smith is flanked by Nicholas and Anne Winterton, both MPs, and Rhodesian flags.

ive posted some shit from that persons wikipedia contributions itt before, its a treasure trove

sometimes you assume every conservative mp is a 42 yr old with an mba from an american university and a six year stint at pricewaterhousecoopers and then you realize revenants like this are still in the house of commons

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ann_Winterton