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DEFINITION 004 | HOPE PREVAILS

BY KEVIN MULLINS

“But he could not bring himself to say he loved her; not in so many words.”
— Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway

We have become defined, in Britain, at least, more so over the last three years than any other time in my living memory.

There are swings and roundabouts, there are ups and downs, there are good and bad, there is love and hate and there is social politics on a grand scale.

Either side of our barriers are words of wisdom, correctness, wrongness and ego.

What is defining me right now?

Being me. My family. Our lovely world. Our love for each other as humans.

In Britain, we have developed a sense of magnitude, perhaps.

A sense of fortitude, maybe?

Even, incongruously , a sense of independent structure.

But wherever I look, whatever I see, Britain, and British people are still the same.

Family first.

Crazy dips in the Ocean in winter.

Dogs.

Holding hands, supporting each other.

And for everything else, there is always a nice cup of tea.

Definition 003 | Iceberg

By Vincent Baldensperger

L’exercice le plus difficile et austère que je connaisse… moi l’autiste asperger qui délibérément choisis l’autre côté du miroir afin de ne pas croiser mon regard. J’avais préparé un autre sujet, je m’étais échappé. Me voici pris au piège pour une présentation sommaire, trois extraits d’Elles, précieuses parmi les précieuses et quelques autoportraits de la partie émergée de l’iceberg… carte d’identité timide.

© Vincent Baldensperger
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Definition 002 | God's Lonely Man

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BY DEREK CLARK

““The whole conviction of my life now rests upon the belief that loneliness, far from being a rare and curious phenomenon, is the central and inevitable fact of human existence.””
— Thomas Wolfe

I’ve never admitted this to anyone, but that quote has followed me almost all my life. It has been moving around in my mind for decades, sometimes slipping to the back, sometimes pushing to the front. I’ve spent a good part of my life being alone and you could say a chunk of my teenage years and my early 20’s being a loner. But although I’ve found the perfect mate, I have two great kids, and a small but tight group of close friends, being alone is an important part of who I am. As a general rule; the larger the group of people, the more alone I feel. But when this is applied to the streets, something is different.

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Kids have got it backward these days. They (and I’m generalizing) have this lust to be famous. To be recognised. I couldn’t think of anything worse. I love to move through crowds of people without them taking the tiniest bit of notice of me. I’m a documentary photographer and as we work through 2020 and our Definition project evolves, that should become apparent. I consider street photography to be at least part of my documentary work. Perhaps it’s the purest form of documentary?

Catching a train and heading to the city to shoot on the streets is my drug of choice. I don’t drink alcohol and I don’t do drugs (not even prescribed ones). But I crave the ultimate me-time. Just like being an alcoholic or a drug addict, a loner is always in recovery...we just fall off the wagon more often. It’s lonely out there on the street with only a rectangular box and a piece of glass for company, but I love it. I walk an average of nine miles in a typical day’s shooting. Sometimes I’ll pick a spot and shoot for a while when the light is right and falling the right way. I have places I hang around as the sun is going down because I know it bounces off the buildings and funnels into a perfect pool of light for an all too brief amount of time. But mostly I just keep walking. As Alex Webb has said 

“I only know how to approach a place by walking. For what does a street photographer do but walk and watch, and wait and talk, and then watch and wait some more, trying to remain confident that the unexpected, the unknown, or the secret heart of the known awaits just around the next corner.”
— Alex Webb

So I savour each trip to the streets. Sometimes listening to the sound of the city, the traffic, the arguments, the beggars, the over-enthusiastic preachers. But quite often I have my earphones in, listening to various movie soundtracks and making the act of street photography that little bit more cinematic (in my head at least). And if you will forgive me for using just one more quote from Robert DeNiro, this time in the movie Heat. “I’m alone. I am not lonely.” On the street at least.

This is why I don’t take drugs…you never know where they’ve been.

This is why I don’t take drugs…you never know where they’ve been.

Definition 001 | Music, Theatre & Persona

By Patrick La Roque

Two, three times—over the course of this strange, meandering life—I tried quitting. The guitar would go hiding in its case, the synths would go up against a wall somewhere. They’d gather dust for a few months but it never lasted. I once described it to myself as a sort of virus or bacteria, not so much flesh-eating as soul-eating, but just as voracious and cruel in its relentlessness. 

As a kid I’d draw fake album covers. As a teenager I’d sit for hours on end, staring at the sprawling double-canvas of The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway, imagining Slippermen and Lamias on rain soaked New York City streets. Gabriel wailing as Rael. To this day, Fly on a Windshield/Broadway Melody of 1974 affects me deeply—and Lenny Bruce remains emblematic, almost mystical because of it. Those sounds, images and references shaped my mythology and I still vibrate when I hear a Mellotron or a Solina, my brain electrified and unable to resist the drag of the machine.

That hungry, hungry Time Machine. 

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We wear masks to define ourselves. It doesn’t make us dishonest, it doesn’t mean we’re hiding behind a facade—not necessarily anyway. I think we wear masks to better understand the theatre. And on the opening essay of this new series, I need to acknowledge my very first play: before photography there was music. There will always be music.

In heartbreak
devastation & cruelty.
In freedom & blissful exaltation.