A BIT OF A BLIND SPOT

I really love street art but you have to be a bit careful if you’re flashing a camera around the artists because what they do – unless they have some kind of permission - is not generally legal.  So they are a bit sensitive.  This guy was happy enough to be photographed though when I stumbled upon him finishing off a major mural this summer. 

I’d been chatting to another street artist who was a bit more old-school  a few weeks earlier.  When the question of legality came up he shifted a bit from one foot to the other.  “It’s not entirely, er, legal….” he said.  He paused.  “….well, it’s a bit of a blind spot….”  Then he changed the subject entirely.  “……I use old emulsion and brushes and roller myself so it takes that bit longer …”

I had to smile. 

WHEN FOOTBALL WAS FOOTBALL

WHEN FOOTBALL WAS FOOTBALL

Sefton Samuels is a distinguished, Manchester-based photographer with a long career and many excellent photos under his belt, as you can see on his website. The last two photo exhibitions at the National Football Museum were excellent (see my review of its Pele exhibition in February 2018 below) so I had high hopes of this one - When Football Was Football* - featuring his work. Unfortunately, it doesn’t really do the photographer justice.

“When Football Was Football captures a long-ball world of 3pm Saturday kick-offs, Bovril, affordable tickets, packed terraces and sideways northern drizzle……Samuels shot a bygone era that’s a world away from dreaded prawn sandwiches, £100m players and proposals for a superleague.”   So says the Museum in its blurb but that is a bit of a lazy pitch and it comes a bit too close to parody for my taste.

What you actually get is thirty-odd largely undistinguished photos on panels in the entrance area to the museum.  The curatorial effort is minimal and relies mainly on anecdotes and generalities.    To my eye,  what emerges mainly from the exhibition is that football in the 20th century was mainly a working-man’s sport; that players and managers were more accessible then than they are now; and that photographic style has changed the game’s image out of all recognition.

Take this photo, for example.  (I do rather like this one, actually).

  It’s a 1948 image which shows 19 of the 22 players on the pitch plus the referee.  Okay, it’s shot from the crowd, but you just don’t get that style of shot anymore.  It shows a team game, devoid of any real drama and with individual players largely unidentifiable.   In contrast, the modern footballing image, thanks to powerful lenses and digital capture, is a close-up of a dramatic moment featuring no more than one or two players.   The team game has gone and the heroic moment has taken its place.  It’s not the game that’s changed, it’s the portrayal of it. Technology creates truth: now it’s The Beautiful Game, then it was apparently all horizontal drizzle and packed terraces.

Footnote: I just thought that I would pop in the two images below. First is a Sefton Samuels shot of children playing football. I immediately thought it looked just like an L S Lowry painting (as did the photographer, apparently). So I went looking for which one and came up with Lowry’s painting ‘The Cricket Match.’ Am I right or am I right?

* “When Football Was Football”: The Photography of Sefton Samuels continues at the National Football Museum in Manchester until 31 December.

AN AFTERNOON IN THE PARK

It was a sunny Sunday afternoon so I decided to take a walk to Alexandra Park, south of Manchester city centre.  A cricket match was under way when I wandered through the park gates so I settled down near the boundary with an ice cream to watch.  The batsmen were well on top and quite a few sixes and fours whizzed by.  All the players were Indian or Pakistani and as I lay there I listened to the waiting batsmen chatting in Punjabi maybe, or Urdu.

At four o’ clock forty overs were up, and six wickets were down for 256 runs.  Time for tea and the fielding side came and sat down near me.  Some of them started their prayers but most just took a rest.  One guy wandered over my way so I started chatting to him.

“Only 257 to get” I said.

He grinned.  “Yeah.  What’s the plan?”  He had quite a strong local accent.

It turned out that they were from Macclesfield and this was their first match of the season.  They’d be playing every Sunday until the end of August.  Plus one practice a week.

“That’s quite a commitment” I said.   “But I guess you stay fit.”

He gestured to his ample stomach.  “Well, not that much.  Plus it’s Ramadan at the moment.”

“You’re all fasting?” I asked.  I hadn’t thought of that.  “No relaxations for sport?”

He shook his head. “Most of us.  From four o’clock this morning till eight thirty.  No food or water.”

It was a hot afternoon and they had been chasing those fours and sixes hard.

“What, no water?   Is that healthy?”

He shrugged.  “Well, that’s what we do.”  Then he said “Thing is, the food we eat is all so processed.”

I wasn’t sure what to make of that, since one of things I’ve always liked about food in Indian restaurants is that it definitely isn’t processed, it’s mostly cooked from fresh.

“At home,” he said, “it’s different. “

“Where’s home?”

“Pakistan.  We have farms and know lots of other farmers and so we get all our food direct.”

The umpire, who was wearing a skullcap, was calling them back now.  My friend’s team mates had finished their prayers and the opening batsmen were taking their place.

“What number are you?”

“Number four.”

His phone rang so I wished him luck and started walking over to the other side of the park where I could hear some live music.  There was a very relaxed vibe as I sauntered along.  Families, young couples, skaters, loungers, sunbathers and picnickers.  When I got to the source of the music, it turned out to be what I can only describe as a sort of 1960s love-in.  There was a microphone and small sound system and a chap with a guitar.  Various figures were taking it in turns at the microphone.  It wasn’t hard since all they were doing was singing and chanting one syllable - Lurrvvve  -  while all sorts of tom-toms and impromptu tin cans and skins banged out a rhythm of sorts.  An assortment of figures, old, young and in between were marking time, some with minor jigging and others with ecstatic contortions.  There were signs saying “ The Time Is Now!” and “Love Is The Only Reality”.  I didn’t see one saying ‘Tune in, Turn on, Drop out” but it might have been there somewhere.

A guy with a dark beard suddenly shook off his trousers and shirt and sandals, and clad only in underpants he made his way down to the lake.  It’s hardly the Ganges but he waded in and stood there, head raised to the sun, arms outstretched, hands posed in a thumb and index finger mudra.  A groover called out to him.

“I wouldn’t stand in there, mate.  That’s where they throw their used needles.”

The yogi clambered out sharpish, dripping.  The love chanting droned on.  A guy on a sax had got going now and was driving the whole thing along very successfully.  Someone offered me some champagne.  Love, love,love. Underpants yogi had now taken over the microphone.  Then three young women took over from him.  Next to me was a tall girl with the biggest false eyelashes I have ever seen.  When she blinked I was sure I felt a slight breeze.

I sauntered away wondering whether the love-in or the cricket match would end first.  Fasting cricketers and ecstatic hippies: it’s been a fine Manchester afternoon.

All photos taken with my Zorki 4K and Jupiter 8 50mm lens. Ilford Delta 100 film developed in ID-11.

HIGH AND MIGHTY

I’ve often thought that the skyscraper or towerblock is the perfect symbol of our economic system because it is very high and has a very small base.  It’s a picture of instability.  As I watch the towers spring up here in Manchester I feel uneasy: too many, too late, too sporadic.  One day, if you ever get the chance, stand close to the bottom of one where it meets the street.  It’s hard not to shiver in its icy maw.

Here is a picture of a pair of them which I took down where the Ship Canal meets the River Irwell, near Pomona Island. Not unusually, they reflect one another - eclipsing perspectives and setting up their own order.

BUBBLING UNDER

All cities have it, but some have it more than others.  It’s the feeling you get as you walk the streets that something is bubbling just under the surface.  From time to time you notice that it has brimmed over - perhaps in voices that you hear, or a chance turn of phrase, or some music floating out of a window somewhere, or a sign that someone has put up.  Here, in this city, I recently saw an abandoned freezer with a poem written on its side.  Pretty commonly it’s what you see on the walls though.  I took all of the photos below within a few yards or a few miles of my house.  So you don’t have to look that far.

It can be unintended - just the passage of time……

……or a few dabs with a paintbrush…….

…..or something just as simple but a little more considered…….

…….or maybe just a popular spot…..

….or something that you notice only the twentieth time you walk past it……

…….convention plays its part, as in all creative endeavour…….

…….or sometimes a touch of the existential…..

…..or the classical (love this one……there’s such a lot in it)……

……or the straight representational…..

….you might even bump into it……

I guess it’s sheer energy, sheer exuberance. It’s very uplifting and although cities get their share of bad press you don’t find this kind of thing anywhere else really. Certainly not in smaller places. Maybe it’s a kind of communal energy or maybe spectators will always draw out a spectacle. Whatever it is - long may it last.

MANCHESTER

Part of the fun of living in the city is thinking about the city.

In Manchester for some years now there has been a series of 4 x 4 evenings in which 4 speakers are given 15 minutes each to opine on a set urban topic.  The latest one this week was “Sin City: The Morality Of Urban Growth” in which the star turn was  The Guardian’s Architecture Correspondent, Oliver Wainwright who had done some flame fanning by writing a rude article in that paper about the belt of skyscrapers currently being built around the city centre.

Usually each of the speakers gets the same time as all the others.  In this case,  OW was given forty minutes or so to set out his case. This was that the skyscrapers are ugly, out of place and will do nothing for Manchester’s economy; are mostly investment vehicles for rich foreigners; that of 15000 residential units none are affordable homes (ie let at less than 80% of market value); and that the council should be ashamed of itself for granting them planning permission.  He had even managed to get hold of an advertising promotion for the city from one of the investment fairs held in the hot places where rich people tend to congregate.  The strapline?  “Turn Your Determination Into Envy”.  Great stuff.

Consultant Shelagh McNerney was given about five minutes to reply.  This broke with the 4x 15 minutes format and was unfair given the time allotted to the main speaker. 

In her position I would have started by  introducing myself as the representative of The Devil.  Very courageously however she set to with a basic proposition that “economic growth has delivered every single improvement to humanity”.  There was no great conspiracy against Manchester and any successful city was constantly reconfiguring itself; Manchester was never that pretty anyway;  urban growth is not the cause of the city’s homelessness and other problems; and that low growth is not the answer.  Given the handicap she had I thought she made a pretty good stab at a defence.

The other two speakers didn’t add that much and at the end the chair asked each of the participants for one phrase to sum up what was needed to improve matters.  “More power to the public sector” said OW.  “More cash” said Shelagh.  There was simply no common ground between them and as so often these days you were implicitly invited to take sides – which will get us nowhere.

Oddly enough, the comment which seemed to cause most offence was that Manchester is not a pretty city.  I’d have thought it’s self-evident. I like the place very much and think it’s a great city but ‘pretty’ – such a demeaning word - is not an adjective I would apply to it. 

Visually, there are some very interesting buildings but it’s not really an architectural wonder either.  For me the real knockout visuals are the city’s engineered structures.  I never fail to feel a jolt  coming in on the tram as it whizzes past and under and over the bridges and viaducts which span the city: the bracing and girdling, the bulk and curve – the sheer mass of them.  You can almost see stovepipe-hatted Victorian engineers sucking on their clay pipes and stabbing at creased plans with muddy forefingers.

Here’s a shot I took this summer of the Castlefield Basin - which is where the Bridgewater Canal meets the River Medlock. Three 19th century railway viaducts frame the late 20th century Merchants’ Bridge. The modern one says “Look at me!” but the Victorian ones just say “Get outta my way!”. You can see a couple of those controversial tower blocks going up mid-left.

Here is the MSJ and AR again with a double bounce first over the Rochdale canal and then over the adjacent roadway. It’s a 21st century tramway that it carries now rather than the original 19th century railway.

Even the footbridges look built for a race of giants.

It didn’t stop with the Victorians, either. Here is a massive concrete column holding up steel girders to get the tram system across the Mersey to the airport. Pretty? Not really - but pretty impressive, certainly.

Apparently there are another 21 tower blocks planned for the bottom end of the city. Maybe one day they will have the same aura as the bridges but I doubt it. Bridges are infrastructure. They are for everyone.