2020 Vision - how I saw the year.

Red Alert.
Soho, London. Sept 2020.

Not that anyone should be able to predict the contents of their Christmas stocking, but when this year began I would never have foreseen that Santa would be leaving, not one but, two face masks. Just one marker of what a strange year this has been.

And, of course, it is all reflected in the images I have taken too; the number of images, the location and the style and the genres captured. Or, perhaps to put it more accurately, in the images I haven’t taken.

 January saw several photo walks, both solo and accompanied around favourite London haunts – the world was seemingly unfolding as it should. Soho, the West End, the South Bank, the City and Columbia Road flower market were all exhibiting the old normal; while rumours of the far away virus caused few visible ripples. Things are never as bad as they seem.

The end of February saw me shooting in London with trepidation nibbling away at me but not enough to stop me. As I returned home I did wonder how long it would be before I returned.

One Last Time.
Paternoster Square, London. Feb 2020.

Lockdown, when it came at the end of March, seemed late. Other countries were ahead and we didn’t seem to be reading the signs – football and race meetings carrying on defiantly in a weird echo of the Blitz spirit but against an invisible enemy that wanted us to do just that. I had no idea when I would be able to reclaim my London streets from this undetectable foe. 

Only essential travel was permitted. Not being a “real” photographer – someone who could make a living from photography- I could hardly claim it was essential for me to be out and about in the capital. Yet I felt that history was being made on those empty streets and that it was running away from me.

I also needed to shoot. It’s what I do. It completes me. Balances everything else. Gives me an escape. Perhaps I am an escape artist.

I also knew enough to know I didn’t (and don’t) want this virus; thank you. 

So, as we got used to the new normal, social distancing and a distinct lack of toilet paper, so the number of photos taken dropped off sharply. Street photography where I live is a real challenge for me, as I have described in other blogs. Too many people know me. And it’s very hard to see home streets objectively. When I did go out, my camera still came with me but it was just in case”, rather than with any real sense of intent or expectation.

Increasingly, I found I was taking photos on my early morning or evening dog walks. I began keeping the camera in my hand instead of in a bag – ready. I started enjoying the walks more. I slowed down., looked around, noticing the subtle changes as spring bloomed around me and melted into a hot summer. Miraculously, lockdown weather was incredible and everyone took themselves outside to live their lives. It was as if nature was compensating.

Sweetwater, Witley, Surrey.
June 2020.

As we got used to the “new normal” and the world realised that life would have to continue to enable market forces to regain the upper hand, it began to feel safer to emerge from this bizarre hibernation. After one tentative afternoon scoping the outlying Battersea and Chelsea on foot, I finally made it back into the heart of the city at the beginning of July.

London was finally allowed to reopen its pubs, which it did in a characteristically crazed Saturday night – all or nothing, seemingly – on the 4th of July. The Independence Day coincidence was not lost. The next morning, a beautiful summer Sunday, I returned for the first time in over four months. It was incredibly quiet (see Post-Lockdown London). Sure enough, it delivered the empty streets and squares that I’d been so keen to document and was worried I’d missed. It also displayed all the paraphernalia of Covid Life – hand sanitisers on street corners and in station concourses, painted footprints strategically distanced; Thank You NHS signs and graffiti. I sat in my first café for months; all alone with a double espresso and an anxious frown on some side street in Soho. But at least I was back.

The Only Living Boy In Soho.
Soho, London. July 2020.

What turned out to be a long hot summer didn’t pass me by but afforded me a few days walking and shooting shadows along the South Bank and up into the City. It felt good to be keeping my hand in and to feel that I wasn’t losing my mojo.

A week’s holiday in Wales kept my camera firmly in reach for some coastal images – both candid, public shots and stormy sky-ed landscapes. It even had me thinking about tripods and filters - briefly.

Aberarth, Wales.
August 2020.

The autumn term (I’m a Headteacher when I’m not doing the street photographer impersonation) usually sees me taking in a few London evenings and weekends. However, as we neared what became Lockdown II in November and, then the introduction of Tiers in December and even tighter restrictions again over Christmas, I have almost entirely stayed away.

In the UK, the vaccine has started to roll out. Over 500 000 of the eldest vaccinated so far. It’s going to take a while to have an impact. And, in the meantime, new more virulent strains of the virus are making their presence felt. But 2021 does hold hope, certainly in the longer term. For now, I guess I’ll be reaching for that wide angle lens, walking boots and maybe even a tripod and a filter or two.

Night Grind.
Soho, London. Dec 2020.

Post Lockdown London - The New Normal

I always remember seeing photographs from the Second World War showing streets with people rushing to sand bagged air raid shelters, or newspaper boys with hoardings proclaiming the outbreak of war, or crowds dancing jubilant in Trafalgar Square on VE Day. There was something mesmeric, possibly haunting, abut the familiarity but strangeness of these images. Here were places I knew, and scenes that were familiar, but distorted by the events that had transformed them at that point in time. 

History has always fascinated me and part of it has been a desire to be able to go back and witness momentous events but to be able to do it safely. I think that would be my superpower, if I could choose one. And of course, I’d have a camera in hand. 

I have always counted myself lucky that I grew up in a generation that never experienced the world wide conflicts that took place in the first half of the last century. These were events which in many ways defined the age and the generations that lived through them. Now, this global Corona Virus pandemic has provided our defining worldwide event.

The invention of the camera, less than two hundred years ago, gave to history the means to record more objectively and instantly than ever before. As street photographers, I truly believe that it is our responsibility to record our current times for those still to come, just as Bert Hardy, Bill Brandt and Alfred Eisenstaedt did for World War Two with their images of GIs, tube sheltering Blitzed Londoners or sandbagged Whitehall. I have always felt that the ubiquitous appearance of mobile phones, ear pods and vapes would be the accoutrements that would characterise our times when people looked back. 

Then along came Covid-19.

Who could have predicted that summer 2020 would be defined by empty streets, face masks and huge government publicity campaigns? In actual fact, very much like World War Two.

So, I was keen to capture these street scenes. But not keen, also.

I wouldn’t be walking the streets of London with one eye skyward for a doodle bug, Stuka or V2 rocket. I wouldn’t get a siren warning of impending danger. My enemy was the Covid-19 virus - invisible, undetectable and potentially anywhere. After months of taking great care and working from home whenever possible, as the government advised, travelling on public transport and being out and about in London felt like a risk I possibly shouldn’t be taking. After all, I was only going to take photos. Who did I think I was? David Bailey?

But there was also a longing to return to normality and a desire to experience the creative process of making a photograph: that moment when everything else ceases to exist or, at least, to matter. Let’s face it. I needed to get back to street photography to recapture a sense of self, of what makes me me; if nothing else.

Two good reasons then - a responsibility to posterity and my own mental well being!

And so it was I found myself exiting an almost deserted Sunday morning train at London Waterloo, glasses steamed up from the mask that I was not yet used to wearing, camera clutched in my sweating right hand, phone gripped with my online ticket ready to scan at the gates.

Waterloo itself was immediately different with just a small number of people on the concourse. I wanted to capture the gates with all of the 2m distancing signage and encouragement to wash hands but was immediately pounced upon by three transport officials who wanted to know what I was doing. I suppose it’s not technically a public space so they were presumably within their rights to challenge me. I explained that I was a street photographer and they looked at each other and shrugged - seemingly proof enough of my credentials. I wasn’t quite so lucky a few moments later when another officious, uniformed woman told me I would need a permit to take photographs at Waterloo. Having shot there unchallenged many times, it did feel like a wartime restriction.

Moved along, the streets were deserted. I know it was a Sunday but it was a shock to see the streets around the station with no one on them. I crossed over Hungerford Bridge to Charing Cross. There seemed to be the lowest tide I had ever witnessed on the Thames (Sunday 5th July) which only served to make what should have been a glorious summer Sunday seem even more surreal. It was as if the people and old Father Thames were deserting the city.

In Trafalgar Square, Nelson gazed down on acres of stone, concrete and pigeons. There were the classic London red buses, making their rounds almost empty, but not a soul in the square.

The same was true of Piccadilly Circus - just a solitary figure at a hand sanitising kiosk, offering a squirt to anyone who happened to walk by. Hardly anyone did.

Regent Street was pretty much the same. Oxford Street only slightly busier, a handful of curious wanderers, but nothing like the usual melee of tourists, office workers and rough sleepers. 

This was the day after the Boris Johnson’s government had allowed the pubs, bars and restaurants to reopen after weeks of lockdown. Soho had apparently been heaving with little acknowledgement of social distancing, as revellers enjoyed the cork fizzing out of the bottle of pent up frustrations. The following morning was quiet. Perhaps a hangover. But there was almost no one in good old London town.

Masks, NHS rainbows and thank yous, hand sanitising stations, closed signs on restaurants, familiar buses but fewer and empty, tube exits closed, pedestrians redirected... the first signs of normality. 

Arriving home, I shared my images with intrigued friends and families, eager to see what had become of the capital city, just not quite ready to visit it themselves. And the the doubts crept in. Should I have gone? Had I caught anything? Would I be infecting anyone? 

And the wait to know I was fine began.

Last Time Out.

Waterloo, London. Feb 2020.

Fuji X-T3 25mm f2.8 1/500 sec

Whilst it also removes many freedoms, life in lockdown gives us plenty of opportunities. When have we ever had the luxury of Time that Covid19 has afforded us? Time to consider things in a far less hurried way.

“...every image seems to have become tainted by the virus...”

Without new photos to edit, many street photographers have gone back through their older images to find that precious nugget that was possibly missed last time round. Or the B List photos that never quite saw the light of the Instagram day. I haven’t quite reached there yet – but it’s on the horizon.

I postponed looking at the images from my last street photography walk for longer than usual because I knew that once I did, then that was it. No new street photos to edit for the foreseeable future.

Ride Or Stride. City of London. Feb 2020.
Fuji X-T3 26mm f2.8 1/500 sec

Week 3 of lockdown saw me take the plunge. I usually wait a week or longer if I can before editing anyway. It’s good practise, enabling me to see the images as they really are. Not subjectively.

Images that I work hard to take become invested in so much unnecessary weight because of the time spent trying to make them work or just to catch them in the first place. A week or two usually alleviates this nagging tug and I can look at them with less emotional attachment. This was now six weeks later, nearly seven. I’d done well.

“Times have changed and photos taken less than fifty days ago have already become historic images.”

What has happened this time is that every image seems to have become tainted by the virus, or at least by the lockdown situation. It’s hard to view a crowded street in the same way as it was when it was shot; or a tube train, crammed like sardines, without an element of judgement; or even a lone figure, without assuming they’re part of the isolation scenario, when actually it was just a quiet underpass.

Of course we read too much into those images with the short sighted lens of history which we are already wearing. Times have changed and photos taken less than fifty days ago have already become historic images. They speak of the past. It’s not a distant past and hopefully we will return to many of those freedoms that we took for granted sooner rather then later. But what will have changed?

One Last Time. Paternoster Square, London. Feb 2020.
Fuji X-T3 55mm f2.8 1/500 sec

For those of you who are interested in kit, gear and where and when, these images were all shot on the Fuji X-T3 with the red badged 16-55mm lens. This is not my usual lens choice. My “go to” lens is the 23mm f1.4 which I love for its clarity and the focal length (equivalent to 35mm full frame) seems to fit about the right amount of street into the image. It allows me to get close and it forces me to get close, if that’s not a contradiction. This time, however, I chose the 16-55mm zoom.

“It’s always good to mix things up.”

One reason for this choice was that I had wanted to try some images in the city where I could experiment with contracting the scene which I knew the longer focal length would allow. Secondly, I was not specifically on a photowalk. I wasn’t out for the whole day but was going to meet up with some other photographers and see the exhibition My London hosted by 3 Street Gallery featuring the work of Brandon Wong, Craig Whitehead, Joshua K Jackson, Josh Edgoose, Mavis CW, Mark Fearnley, Mo Barzegar, Sean Tucker and Shane Taylor. The longer lens, if it proved too heavy or somehow inappropriate, would be only for a relatively short time on my walk to and from the exhibition. It’s always good to mix things up.

The Last Coffee. City of London. Feb 2020

Fuji X-T3 55mm f7 1/500 sec

For those of you who know these streets, my route took me from Waterloo along the Southbank to the National Theatre and over Blackfriars Bridge, up to St Pauls and Paternoster Square, then up through the backsides of The City to Broadgate, and back to Waterloo via Bank.

Orange. The South Bank, London. Feb 2020.

Fuji X-T3 55mm f7 1/500 sec