One of the new images to be carried by YellowKorner is “that moment….just before”. You're beautiful".She stopped, turned to face me and replied "so are you". On leaving that final day I shouted from the car as she walked away."Margo. ![]() Then again can you really save somebody from themselves. I felt, and still feel I could have saved her. I wanted to turn back time to when she was just a girl. Her youthful beauty twinkled beneath the facade of years on the street. I guess I fell in love in a strange kind of way. We developed quite a bond over the few weeks that followed. Stood before me, as we later joked in "full hooker mode". If I had to describe my “method” I would sum it up with one word. After I had spent five minutes with the girl I realised it was this level of intimacy that was required – not anything about the picture, the picture has become the last piece of the jigsaw, it is the closing of the relationship. ![]() Everyday people have a couple of possible reactions to the homeless – look the other way and try not to think anything about it, or fear. I was shamed into approaching directly and properly I suppose you could say. It was the other people around that created my deep embarrassment – I felt the whole world judging me on what I was doing and rightly so – I didn’t know what to do.’ I’m not the give-up-and-run type: I went over and started talking to her. My feelings around love and death, her compassion for the homeless, amongst that experience in Rome have the biggest influence on my pictures now.’ And now I can return to the London story: The first time I made an “approach” to get such a “homeless” picture was in London –I was going to run the marathon on the Sunday and the day before I thought I’d try my hand at a bit of street photography… I started shooting from across the street and the girl kicked off at me. She lived in the US and the biggest thing to recount was that her mother, a devout Catholic, was diagnosed with cancer and I ended up going to Rome to get her Rosary reblessed in the Vatican and then get it back to her before she died. She was a photographer and her influence over a series of events has continually washed over me. I’m from Manchester, but the majority of my work has been done in the usa….the real reason, as some might guess, lies with a relationship rather than amongst the more commonly recounted tale of getting sidetracked when I was supposed to be thinking about running the London Marathon (I’ll revisit that aspect later): The real reason is that I met someone, ten years ago now. I see myself as a lonely individual and my ‘Lost Angels’ work is for the large part an antidote to this engrained feeling. Its truly ‘personal’ ……‘a bit of a long story’, but more accurately it’s rather like the ones most people are not actually prepared to tell.
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