London Index Project II

Here are some recent pictures from my London Index project.

Taking these pictures has certainly made me think about the morality of what I'm doing. The last picture is of the aftermath of an accident where a pedestrian has been knocked down. At first glance, it looks like nothing is happening. When you then notice the police tape and look closer still at the smashed windscreen of the car it becomes clear something shocking has taken place.

I'd taken the picture before realising exactly what had happened. Now I'm not sure how I feel about including it. Someone was injured to an unknown extent. The driver of the car is out of sight and living the first few terrible minutes of one of the most significant events of their lives. It's easy to imagine the tragedy unfolding. 

It makes me think of the times I have retreated from taking pictures I know I wouldn't be comfortable showing to a wider audience. My most vivid memory is that of a young man sat on the steps to a building just south of Kensington High Street. He had blood streaming from his nose. As I passed him, we looked at each other and I instantly knew I couldn't possibly put my camera between us and take his picture. He was too vulnerable and I too shy.

I've missed a sobbing girl running toward her boyfriend, arguments, fights, incapable drunks, virtually all the rawest moments you can imagine. I've ruminated over them all wondering whether I should or shouldn't have pushed the shutter. The thing I can't resolve is whether these moments are, despite their location, public or private.

I want to make a balanced document of this city and I have to Include the good and the bad, the beautiful and the ugly. However, I can't do this without feeling a sense of respect for whoever I'm pointing the camera at. I'm in perpetual awe at the fact that Londoners continue to rub along together despite their differences. I think it's only achieved by the vast majority of people living here being fundamentally good human beings. Editing their lives by capturing them in a fraction of a second sometimes doesn't seem fair.

At My Feet

I've been collecting pictures of stuff I've found on the floor. I seem to be settling more on images of industrial detritus. It's the sort of stuff that doesn't seem to matter, but I'm finding myself drawn to looking for it.

These objects are probably produced in their thousands, employing hundreds of people to make them, shipped worldwide to fulfil a single and utterly disposable purpose. These things are the Mayflies of manufacturing. They consume huge amounts of energy and time to come into being, only to be discarded without a thought.

I don't think that these things epitomise waste. They perform a purpose, usually one of protecting something of greater value from damage and, by their design, cost the very least they can to manufacture. It's actually a fantastic example of efficiency. Their disposal troubles me, but the disposal of everything troubles me. Ideally, I'd like to see everything we consume find its way back to the bottom of the food chain.

However banal these objects could be considered, I have found a intriguing beauty in them. Something designed to be purely functional inherently lends itself to the purity of form. They're principally designed to solve a problem, so aesthetics are the first things to be lost in their production.

By putting all these images together, I've realised they've started to look slightly hieroglyphic. Their shapes are so basic, they being to resemble characters with distinct meaning, but not just a letter in a language. They're more like symbols for something universally understood.

You can see more on my Flickr stream (link at the top of the page), on the Backspaces app and on Instagram on this hashtag - #i_found_pauljames

Hipstamatic Portraits

I've been messing around with some ideas for portraiture on Instagram. I've been taking using the Tinto 1884 lens and D-Type Plate film on Hipstamatic, sticking the results through Snapseed and publishing on Instagram in sets of three so it looks nice in the grid view. I also published these on the brilliant App Backspaces - find it here - and the pictures have since been featured on the AMPt Community website.

The Backspaces App is way of publishing stories via your iPhone. I've been waiting for this and didn't realise. I like to shoot in a collecting sort of way. I'll often take pictures which I intend to put together as a set and it takes time to get enough. If I've got pictures I want to publish in between, I either have to wait or break up the set.

Backspaces allows you to do what you can't on Instagram; put your pictures in order before you publish. You also have the option of adding titles, text and captions.

The community on Backspaces also seems lively and feedback is not limited to comments like 'Awesome!' and 'Cool shot!' which, admittedly, is kind of nice but not very useful. I've found it a place where you can be honestly critical on peoples work without being considered a hater.

The subjects above are Neil Atkinson, a dude I met outside The Queen of Hoxton and Chris Perkins, lead singer of Sheffield band Section 60.

I've no plans for these pictures as yet. I want to find a way of standardising them so Im getting the best results out of each subject. I am liking the russian doll triptych effect though. I think it might have some mileage.

Find more on Instagram and Backspaces. My user name is @i_am_pauljames on both.

London Index Project

For the last few years I've been working on a street photography project of London.

I've lived here for over thirteen years and for the majority of that time my main mode of transport has been Public. For the first few years, the only physical knowledge I had of the city was measured in time and by the tube map.

Since then, my current job has allowed me to travel through the streets on a daily basis, seeing its people and its buildings in relation to one another and to photograph the fleeting moments that happen while history is slowly being made.

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The viewpoint I've had is from the passenger seat of a vehicle, which has made this city into one long film. I'm being dragged through an endless projection of events which sees time marked in both its ephemeral immediacy and its grinding unstoppable plod. I've made myself a custodian of both by recording some trace elements of the millions of events that happen every single second, of every single minute, of every single day. A tiny fraction of the hundreds of years of things happened, happening and about to happen.

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Each image is layered with strata of time. I've caught the present by freezing an individual at a particular moment in time, who is then set against the background of the city which could be weeks, months or even centuries old.

London, like any city, is like an organism; constantly in a state of decay and regeneration. I've tried to make a document which reflects that change while considering the possibility that the pictures I'm taking may be viewed by an audience decades from now.

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I've titled each picture with its date stamp. The exact moment in time it was taken.

This collection is intended to be a book. Hopefully, one of many books called London Index.

I'll be adding these and other images to my website in due course. Check here.

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