erhebung

Corporate Extravaganza

Earlier today I had a look online for some inform­a­tion on Edward Whit­temore, author of The Jer­u­s­alem Quartet, but didn’t manage to find exactly what I wanted (and I’m not sure what it was, exactly, that I was looking for but know it wasn’t what I found); instead, almost as though in con­sol­a­tion, I happened upon a very good essay by Iain Sinclair (as I’ve men­tioned else­where, I think Sinclair’s writes very well about very inter­esting things). It’s an essay about a lot of dif­ferent things, but at its core is Sinclair’s dis­sec­tion, a dis­sec­tion per­formed as only Sinclair can, of the redevel­op­ment cur­rently taking place in London in pre­par­a­tion for the 2012 Olympics. Here is a snippet:

This is East London, four years short of that 17-​day cor­porate extra­vag­anza, the ‘primary stra­tegic objective’ to which we are all so deeply mort­gaged. Hag­ger­ston Park, E2, a modest enclosure repla­cing war-​damaged terraces and the demol­ished Imperial Gas, Light and Coke Company, has long been an oasis. It was opened as a public park in 1958. Its scandals are old scandals and have no bearing on the current frenzy for makeovers, peppery paths, wooden obstacles for training circuits, lam­in­ated heritage notices. Spanking new carpets are woven for clapped-​out football pitches, changing rooms erected to replace shower blocks opened in the dark ages by Wendy Richard of East­Enders. Back in the 1820s Gas Company funds were mis­ap­pro­pri­ated, illegal payments made to council offi­cials and stock accounts fals­i­fied. Now, in more enlightened times, when bur­eau­cratic mal­prac­tice is exposed and cel­eb­rated every day, urban-​pastoral reser­va­tions hidden behind high walls win prizes for vis­ionary planting schemes and restored muni­cipal beds. Unnoticed, rough sleepers in thin bags utilise the stone terrace of the park café that has been shut for years. Late risers, having nothing much to rise for, burrow deep into dismal kapok-​stuffed cocoons, while dog-​accompanists use ballistic/​prosthetic devices to hurl soggy yellow-​green tennis balls for their hunt-​and-​retrieve pets. And the stoic Chinese couple, accom­plishing their own version of the Long March, scorch rubber tread­marks around the pad­locked novelty of the pristine football pitches. Arti­fi­cial grass is better than the real thing, tougher, each blade indi­vidu­ally painted. False chloro­phyll dazzles like per­manent dew, the per­ma­frost of con­spicuous investment. […]

If you’ve not read Sinclair before, this is as good a place to start as any.

Psychogeography

I first encountered psy­cho­geo­graphy while reading about Iain Sinclair (I think an essay in Lights Out for the Ter­ritory, or some­thing else by Sinclair, had prompted some further research). My most pro­longed exposure to the idea came while reading London Orbital, Sinclair’s book about his explor­a­tion of the route described by the M25, the orbital road sur­rounding London. Sinclair walked around the cir­cum­fer­ence, seeing and recording what he saw; most import­antly, though, he thought about what he had seen, extra­pol­ating from the physical ter­ritory a reading of the psy­cho­logy, the social and polit­ical psy­cho­logy, or the space — writing a psy­cho­geo­graphy. A short review I wrote about five years ago can be found here.

More recently I have been reading Sinclair’s Lights Out for the Ter­ritory, another book about walking and seeing and inter­pret­ting. The idea never com­pletely left me, after London Orbital, but being exposed to it, to psy­cho­geo­graphy, again — re-​exposed — has started me thinking about the applic­ab­ility — or perhaps simply rel­ev­ance — of the idea to my pho­to­graphy (and also, perhaps, to my life, gen­er­ally). And then a day or so ago I rewatched, with Hugo Teixeira, a doc­u­mentary about William Eggle­ston, and suddenly psy­cho­geo­graph­ical thinking seemed to become even more per­tinent. Continue reading…