Wolverhampton. I spend my time cycling to swimming, picking up habits along the way. Always a glance at my silhouette as I ride past the car dealership's glass casing, the dainty image i wish to project on my seventies bike (you can tell by the rust) being somewhat ruined by the bulbous old school backpack stuffed with my swimming towel. Always standing up on my bike to freewheel down into the subway, always holding my nose when gliding through the urine infused alley and always being bemused that the one stretch of cycle path that Wolverhampton seems to possess, people use as an extension of the bus stop queue. If ever there was a documentation project waiting to happen, this is it. My matchbox pinhole is in progression as we speak, but I am lacking a fiddly bit of plastic that my scavenging the house has failed to yield. Though in the process I found the Rayney 'man drawer'. Coins, old and foreign, batteries of varying shapes and sizes, foreign travel adaptors, marbles and old chapsticks lay at peace in the haggard wood. Sadly none of them were strawberry flavoured otherwise I would have disturbed their dusty hibernation.
I finally did away with the entrusted cellophane that had clung to my Voyeurism catalogue. It was very much worth the sight of what resembled a plastic cloud emanating from my bin.
'A writer knows that to see people, he must remain unseen. The world changes when you stare straight at it: cowards become heroes and heroes puppets. This second world can be studied in the shop window of any provincial photographer: the frozen pupils, the feelings combed back like hair, and that undemanding game which none can resist...
But what's one to do with a camera? A camera is clumsy and crude. It meddles insolently in other people's affairs. The lens scatters the crowd like the barrel of a gun.'
'My Paris' Ehrenburg
Feelings combed back like hair. Individual traits lost. An insolent meddler. I want a camera that is an inconspicuous meddler, though being inconspicuous may undermine the meddling aspect. An inconspicuous eye. Maybe. Who knows.
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