ISSN 1758-6488
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From 'Edgelands' Non-fiction |
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We need not fear. If anything, the metaphor should become more accurate as the technology changes. If a tungsten bulb has (as its proponents often argue) the edge over low-energy alternatives because of its instant ‘on’ and ‘off ’, then surely it falls down as a metaphor on these same grounds? How do ideas come? Well, mostly they emerge. To borrow a gardening metaphor, you get the seed of an idea in an instant, then it grows as you dwell on it, until it comes to full fruition. If so, that sounds far more like a low-energy bulb. In this case, then, perhaps the technological change will serve to strengthen the metaphor, and we will still be drawing light bulbs (albeit perhaps in a different shape) over people’s heads for centuries to come.
The artist Richard Billingham is probably best known for the photographs he made of his family, collected in Ray’s a Laugh, but towards the end of the Nineties he returned to Cradley Heath in the West Midlands and started photographing again. By 2003 he was working on nocturnes:
I felt a great longing for these little places, street corners, bits of waste ground and brick walls, places that I would play in as a kid or pass through on the way to school or to run an errand for my mom. I also realised my relationship with my home town had begun to change at this time . . . I wanted to see how my relationship to my home town had further changed. This time I decided to take more detailed photographs on a medium-format camera and at night using long exposures. Making much slower work in this way forced a different kind of attention before taking each picture. I also found that my senses seemed more heightened at night due to the silence and the darkness and the fact that no one else was around.
Billingham’s images of the Black Country from this period are arrangements in black and gold, post-industrial Whistlers. Cars parked up for the night; deserted streets; gaps in crumbling walls that lead on to waste ground. The yellowy, sodium light of street lamps is intensified during the long exposures, gilding and burnishing brickwork and pavement. We’ve all seen these places without really looking at them, but in these photographs, instead of an attempted beautification, the stillness and abandonment of our edgelands at night, in their never-dark, is allowed to slow-burn through.
Where there are lights, there are cameras. Artificial light and surveillance have long been associated with one another, even before photography was possible. In fifteenth-century England persons on the street at night were required by law to bear a lit torch, so they might make themselves easily visible. During the French Revolution in 1789 gangs of protesters worked their way through the Paris streets smashing the lanterns they associated with an oppressive regime. These same mobs hanged their victims from street lanterns. Street lighting was seen as a means of control and order. Our cities today are policed with the help of telecoms, lighting and CCTV. The cameras move, guided by toggle switches in monitoring suites: the twenty-first-century panopticons.
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