Dungeness on a sunny day is crawling with photographers. The desolate ambiance of the enormous expanse of shingle, the nuclear power station in the background, the caché of Derek Jarman's former cottage, or the picturesque decay of the boats and huts on the beach...
I was fascinated as well by some of the things sitting there in the shingle... Whether old engines on blocks, big barrels with mysterious numbers on them, or other constructions--all seemed to be somehow animated, as if possessed by spirits. I imagined them as totems, spirits of the dead, the revered witnesses of a past age. The modern day tripper still feels their presence, but cannot understand them. The local version of those Easter Island heads, really. As a kid, I would have happily spent a whole summer there, preferably early in the morning or in the evenings when I would be alone with them; I would have brought them back to life...
A few months ago, I moved out of my flat in London, which I had bought as a trainee doctor together with my German partner at the time. It had been a big, inexpensive flat, quite central on a 60's council estate in Hackney. The architecture still exuded 1960s modernist visions of community living and civic society. Of course, it was built on the cheap--floors that seemed to have been made from orange crates, crumbling concrete, peeling paint,
doors as substantial as a postcard. Years of neglect, the drunken screaming at night, vandalism, the smell of dope wafting through the corridors, and the inevitable CCTV cameras all pissed on what little was left of modernist utopia. Finally, the neighbourhood had become ultra hip--pointy shoes, Pete Doherty lookalikes and Macbooks everywhere. This abrupt change felt as odd to me as the deprivation that had preceded it.
When I finally sold the place, it was without a sense of nostalgia. It had not been a bad flat, but nothing to wax lyrical about. I did not hate it; I was just fairly indifferent to it. And yet, when almost everything was packed and the flat was almost naked, I could not just sneak away without a nod of acknowledgement of the years we had shared, the flat and I. A quarter of my life, partners had come and gone (and eventually stayed), illness, birthdays, guests, shags, flatmates, dinner for friends, and my cats barfing on the carpets... It was this intimacy of living that had turned those charmless walls into my home. I had changed the place to some extent, and I had certainly changed while living there. It had been "mine" for better or worse. I took out my camera during the last couple of hours, put it on a tripod and took some pictures that, to me, demonstrate this intimacy and this ownership. We are both naked; I face the camera; I inhabit the flat as much as my body, which bears the marks and scars of my life.
We part as friends...
a few more at
ninthplanet's photostream
