The Tregerthen Horror
LONDON RECLAIMED
Paul Newman looks at a photographer who decides what he would prefer to see through his lens.
John Smith – the name’s a joke. People talk of "your average John Smith" in a condescending, dismissive tone. For such a being is surely not a character, more a cipher, a genre. John Smith stands for everyman, for a totality of representative ordinariness, for your average unprotesting citizen who has to suffer whatever the government, law or planning officer throws at him. Hence, if attached to a piece of artwork, the hackneyed name acquires a sophisticated halo of irony: John Smith the photographer who has the audacity to look beyond his subject to what he would prefer to see. For this unique John Smith happens not only to be a photographer of technical excellence, but also has a little of the architectural fascist in him. He prefers a certain ensemble of buildings to look like this rather than that. Fascism is usually considered a dirty word, but the majority of us are topographical or landscape fascist. Not only in our mind’s eye, but often in our daily practice. We want to saw down that tree or remove that wall, so that we will be able to admire the view or, conversely, plant that tree or build that wall to retrieve our privacy. In such small ways, we all become crotchety patriarchs, cocks on our small dunghills prepared to fight to the last.
REINVENTING THE LOST
Naturally much of this is rooted in our pastoral tradition. Usually if not inevitably we prefer a version of our city, town or village that refers back to a period when there was less development, more space to refresh the eye and fewer people to hustle or engage us. This kind of thing, if operating at a political level, would represent the most blatant tyranny since the days when wealthy squires moved whole villages in order to improve the view from their ornamental lookout. However, when applied at a purely digital or conceptual level, no walls fall or spires crumble. Only the imagination is physically touched by the finished result, and that often turns out to be a familiar scene that has been enhanced in such a way as to make spectators breathe more freely as they flow into the panorama of space and tranquillity that is presented.
To look at, John is of medium height, stocky and solid. In physical appearance he resembles Blackadder’s sidekick, Baldrick, as conveyed by Tony Robinson. His expression conveys a similar doleful-comic resilience to which may be added a trace of puppy-dog enthusiasm as he relates his adventures and insights into such realms as cinema, architecture, reading, motorbiking and playing golf. Born in Essex, John spent his early years in south west London suburbia. As a young man, after working first in a bank then as the "grease monkey" in a garage, he studied Photography and Cinematography at Guildford School of Art. During the 60’s he worked in the film industry, first in cutting rooms and subsequently as freelance camera crew. Relocating to Cornwall in the 70’s he took his skills into teaching, finally ending up heading the department of photography at St Austell College. His sheer technical proficiency finds a regular outlet in photography and publishing; by now he been involved with hundreds of titles, including local history studies and major projects on artists and architecture.
ACROSS LONDON WITH A LINHOF
Although he now uses a digital camera, for certain projects he turns to his fascinating collection of traditional equipment. When he decided to photograph key buildings in London, so that he could later present them in an ideal or perfected setting, John picked out a choice vintage instrument for the task: an old Munich-made Linhof plate camera. This called for quite a bit of stamina and pluck. A plate camera and old-fashioned tripod are heavy apparatus to lug around. But John, summoning all the packhorse strength he could muster, decided that grand old London should be served by a tool of high-precision excellence. So he carried his burden on foot from locale to locale, carefully selecting his vantage points. Fortunately it was a good day, the light soft and intense, providing the right depth of field for cityscapes and architectural ensembles. He was amused when a young man, seeing him going about his work, invited him to take his photograph, so that he might post it on his website. John obliged and a week or so later was intrigued to find himself framed as "a charming old gent hauling an immense camera on his back" who had gallantly responded to the request.
Although the time at his disposal was limited, the results obtained were of a high standard. Sometimes, as in the shot of the Monument, there’s a bleak, bare, early morning feel, not especially beguiling. The view from the road is too straight and constricted to allow for any playful diversion in the guise of a curve or pavement pattern. The phallic challenge of the monument is itself wedged between office blocks, yet achieves elegance of outline and an almost eccentric dominance, the gold beacon at the top adding a jewel-makers flourish. The sad, little cluster of people at the base lack even the animation of Lowry figures, utterly nullified by the soaring impersonality of the shaft of stone that does little save draw attention to their puniness. But many of these points are endemic to the site itself rather than the treatment by John. Justice has been done to a famous landmark erected in memory of the Great Fire that, ironically, inaugurated the architectural renaissance of London.
By contrast, his presentation of the Victoria and Albert Museum is superb. If, in some instances of John’s work, a building gains in heaviness and presence, in others it is the opposite. This masterly portrait emits a ‘faerie’ lightness, drawing strength from the palatial solidity of the Romanesque facade. The building’s ethereal glow suggests companionship not with the heavy grey paving stones that bind it to the street but with pale, delicate sky itself, a vision the architect would have been delighted to achieve. How, too, the trees set off the scene, with their outspread self-sufficiency, and the foreground telephone box strikes a cheerful, sentry-box note, emphasising the huge scale with which it is competing.
The view of St Paul's emphasises a large spacious area of pavement and a straight sweep of almost empty road with two red buses moving up by the pillars of the church. The powerful lines of the cathedral are underplayed. It is as if the subject matter is not the architecture but the spaces through which people walk and appreciate their surroundings. Nor is there is anything striking in the human element, only small figures moving at leisure. The noise level of the buildings has been toned down; advertising placards are non-existent and slight features like pavement posts are far more prominent than is normal. There is a brooding massiveness of atmosphere that does not exactly entice together with a sense of subdued grandeur. The cathedral appears to be crouching rather that asserting its usually prominent dramatic qualities. There is also the problem that, without curves, the dense regular line of the road is dull and distracts from the richness of architecture by the sheer impact and acreage of its deadness, demonstrating how John's technique can betray itself by showing how dreary are large strips of asphalt.
THE CITY OF HEAVEN
In his rendering of Trafalgar Square, the insectoid bustle of the crowd has been drastically reduced. What few individuals there are seem more at ease with themselves, more attractively self-contained, as if the city is for them personally. They grow in stature as they numerically decrease and the brightness of the sky and fleeciness of the clouds supply a wandering, vagrant quality offsetting the mild formality of the buildings. The pavements are no longer mean thoroughfares in which elbows and bodies clash and rub sparks off one another but generous avenues that openly invite. Classic bits of London like the red buses add a dash of business-as-usual prosaicness and the rubbish-free pavements make interesting, continuous curves and parallels. No hoardings shout from the buildings; no traffic threatens the pedestrian. This is indeed the urban equivalent to the city of heaven bathed in celestial light.
EDUCATING THE EYE
However, a proper appreciation of depopulated images demands a small effort. Ask anyone to look at an original John Smith. "That’s nice," they usually say. Not many register that the city has been groomed and tranquilised for the eye and, when that is pointed out, they invariably murmur, "Oh yes, that’s clever." Some would cite this as evidence of the concept not working, but what is more likely is that peoples’ perceptions have been dulled by the dense assault of visual information in any given modern cityscape and are unable to negotiate a dramatic modification. (One might experiment by digitally expunging important landmarks from photographs and seeing what proportion of the public picked up on their absence.) As John Berger and other art critics, psychologists and anthropologists have stressed, seeing is an aspect of education, of cultural training, of formulating an almost Pavlovian response to certain visual signals while blanking out others. (Place an Aborigine in the centre of London and he may find the perspectives astounding, bewildering and contradicting his sense of geometry and order; place a Londoner in the middle of the Australian desert and the sheer vastation may overwhelm, and yet actually he is being presented with as great a crowding of shape and natural detail as there is in the capital.) Looking at John Smith’s work is a way of counterbalancing and pacifying any turmoil that may arise from an urban situation. Fluent line and space, the recovery of a rhythm hitherto concealed, is satisfying and healing in itself. For though you are not taking in less than before, you are re-establishing contact with forms and arrangements that time has pasteboarded over. It calls for an effort on behalf of the perceiver to recognise how different is the state of affairs from the present.
THE VISION OF HANS MONDERMAN
Aside from evoking a more tranquil age, John’s photographs are rooted in modern ideas of town planning and street design. They embody a conscious tribute to the Dutch traffic engineer and street designer, the late Hans Monderman (d.2008) who pioneered the ‘naked street’. Monderman pointed out how many allegedly functional aspects of urban design were not only aesthetically offensive, they were also misleading and potentially hazardous. Simply there was too much visual clamour. European roads were staked out with bossy signals, warnings and paint markings that irritated rather than communicated. Often certain fitments or notices had been fixed in place to counteract an original error or lack of foresight in design. Surely this ridiculous overload was not the way forward for drivers or pedestrians. "The trouble with traffic engineers," Monderman observed, "is that when there's a problem with a road, they always try to add something. To my mind, it’s much better to remove things."
The logic is simple. To most drivers it is obvious from a street’s design where a junction or bend is about to occur, and the lack of signs may actually improve highway etiquette by rendering drivers extra watchful and considerate. So why not reduce the clutter of motoring signs to none, enabling driver and pedestrian to establish a civil and responsible relationship appropriate to people whose lives are always literally crossing each other’s paths?
In the New York Times, Sarah Lyall described how Monderman led her to the famous Drachten intersection in his native Holland that he had personally designed. It was a bare brick square, stripped of all lights, signs and road markings. Neither was there any division between road and pavement. "But," she went on, "in spite of the apparently anarchical layout, the traffic, a steady stream of trucks, cars, buses, motorcycles, bicycles and pedestrians, moved along fluidly and easily, as if directed by an invisible conductor." When Monderman deliberately crossed the street failing to check for oncoming traffic, the drivers slowed for him. No one honked or swore at him from the window.
"Who has the right of way?" Monderman asked rhetorically. "I don't care. People here have to find their own way, negotiate for themselves, use their own brains."
In human terms, paradise is a relative state. Hence, if by means of a clear-visioned, cutting-to-the-quick practicality, Hans Monderman established amid a wilderness of signboards and vehicular mayhem an oasis in which calm, clear thinking could prevail; here, in the West Country, John Smith’s work transfers the same to the more rarified atmosphere of gallery and exhibition space: sanity, order and the peace in which one can appreciate continuous line and form. And if ever that should cease to satisfy, only a street away can be found billboards, honking horns and road rage enough to satisfy any devotee of chaos and Apocalypse.