Dead Ends project

21 April 2008 | Photography

“Of the 155 homicides in the Greater London area in 2007, 26 victims were teenagers: 18 were stabbed, eight were shot. The shootings have a particular resonance, with the UK being a country with strict gun control laws. These are the streets where these eight shootings occurred.”

I finished this project in January and I still don’t know if it ‘works’ or not. In writing a bit about it I may be able to figure it out… we’ll see.

I originally thought of this project on 26 November 2007 and I know that was the day, because the following day a book review for ‘The Forest’ by Paul Seawright appeared in my RSS reader, from the highly esteemed 5B4 blog. This book seemed to be based on the same idea – ostensibly dull scenes, quite neutrally captured, devoid of people, but rendered horrific by their accompanying captions which convey the inhumanity of what has taken place there. So, thought I, if this subject matter is book-worthy I am sure my project will be valid. And off I went to some of the grimmest parts of London to get the pictures, having carefully figured out where I needed to go and plotted the locations on a handy Google Map.

Generally speaking I feel, or rather stubbornly compel myself to feel, safe walking around any part of London. I’ve been here for long enough to know where the good and bad parts are and to know the mannerisms of people well enough to gauge the potential threats. My stature and appearance are such that I like to think I avoid some trouble by simply appearing to be not worth the hassle and I don’t believe we should live in perpetual fear of unwarranted assault. Easy to say when you’re not a lone female, but still. That said I felt suitably unsettled in all of the eight places I went to photograph this project. I think the fact that they weren’t generally in the more salubrious parts of the city, coupled with the knowledge that I was standing in spots where bullets had flown and people had died, made me feel unusually unsafe. Several of the streets were dead ends (hence the name of the project) which also added to the sense of impending doom. After the first trip out I started leaving my wallet at home and only taking the essentials to get there and back and a couple of rolls of film for the thankfully worthless camera I was using.

So there I was, with my sense of trepidation, in the London winter gloom trying to make something interesting out of the largely deserted and otherwise forgettable inner city housing estates. And for what? I kept wondering. What is the point of these pictures you are trying to make? I think essentially it is summed up in the war memorial that I passed on my way to the first site I visited, which I used for the first picture. “Pass not without remembrance”. Somewhat easier to do if there’s a memorial in place. But half of these places I was visiting had no memorials that I could see, no trace of what had happened. The large murals in Fenwick Place and Marcus Garvey Way may yet be painted over and the temporary shrine in Clevedon Close probably won’t be there forever. The handwritten note clinging to the bottom of a railing in Long Walk will no doubt be gone now. So I can categorise my project in some sort of ‘raising awareness/memorialising teenage gunshot victims’ and find some validity in that. The quality of the pictures that my light-leaking, meterless camera produced is such that the whole project has probably been rendered unpublishable in any form other than on my website (see previous post for my thoughts on the mediocrity that self-publishing allows), but I like to think that a visually coherent gathering of such images makes a valid point.

And, in that, I guess I have made my decision that the project does work, for me at least. Maybe this blog writing is more useful than it might at first appear…

Besides the (valid) point…

Other interesting vignettes related to this project included walking into the middle of a double drug bust in Marcus Garvey Way and photographing the wrong car park in Plumstead and having to go back there to get the right one. The first situation lead to me being questioned by the police as to what I was doing wandering around one of the worst estates in Brixton with a camera. I got to meet senior officers at the scene and my details were radioed in to check me out. Then I got sent away, for my own safety of course. In hindsight I should have said that with twenty police officers actively searching the residents of two houses it was probably the safest that street was ever likely to be and carried on photographing. Or started photographing the bust itself, which was taking place directly behind the wall with the mural when I took that picture. Maybe next time I hope I’ll be more assertive, but in this case I had the pictures I wanted and got the sense that the police were in no mood to indulge requests from the likes of me so I trundled off to Streatham Ice Arena for the next pictures. The Plumstead situation was more stupid – having arrived, noted that Long Walk was signposted as a dead end and seen a couple of characters hanging around in the car park I circled around the surrounding streets and eventually came to what I thought was the scene via another alleyway. When I got home and cross-checked the news pictures and the map I realised I had been in the wrong place. More than annoying after the tube ride, DLR ride, cross river ferry and long walk it had taken to get there and back. In the interest of journalistic integrity I did return to the right place, and learnt a valuable lesson about research and preparedness.

2008-04-21  »  admin