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September 12, 2005
London-becoming: Manifesto and Compilation of Photographical Disjecta
In truth, what is more pitiable than those stolid creatures who call themselves true Londoners? Who were born here, for whom the City is a true home, a negligible background, a place in which they feel comfortable, confident, to whose sophistication they feel themselves easily equal?
In fact, only those who come from 'outside' can be said to inhabit the real London ('real', perhaps, in contradistinction to 'true' – the impossibility of the transhistorical, psychogeographical real vs the prosaic, quotidian truth, a never-complete becoming vs. a supposedly known entity): only the immigrant, from near or far, the pleasure- or treasure- seeker; only the wanderer, abandoned to the drifting crowds, is wide-eyed and anxious enough to take in a little of this chaos in its raw state.
Its greatest luminaries are those who came from without. Its proper essence is miscegenation.
This is not to say that those who are born and bred in the city cannot attain this state; just that they too must cultivate their alienation, must jettison their too-easy confidence and must scrub out the veneer of homeliness they have cast over the city, must accept their fundamental utter dislocation and experience London as the perpetual cinema of that disclocation. (Equally, the outsider will often be drawn ineluctably into the illusory web of workaday normality - most often by the demon force of gainful employment – and must, by a gargantuan effort of will, extricate himself, flee back into vagabondage).
Ultimately, rather than ironic or juxtapositional reflections, social commentary, or documentary evidence, it is the non-spectacle of this infernal machine towards which the photographer must grope, one-eyed, unconscious.
London is the site where photography finds its own energy, its aboriginal purposiveness-without-purpose. Allowing the camera to operate unconsciously, to yield up to you your own sensory proclivities, your own hidden, subterranean connections, you reveal your own soul's continuity with this dense, indifferent, impossible fabric. It is in reality a surface which is all exterior, there is no dwelling within it, there is no breaking the surface (so that photographs offer a more accurate recollection than memory itself), there is no comfort but this abrasive immanence upon which one grazes and is grazed, injured, disclosed to oneself.
This is why London Belongs to Me.
Posted by robin at September 12, 2005 11:27 AM