cut scenes

image via

ricky tick

Maryon Wilson Park / between

'… the constant motion in the leaves rendering his landscapes confused and unmeaning… [T]he same objection necessarily applies to all moving objects, which can never be properly delineated without the aid of memory'. Only after it had fallen to the ground was a leaf available for impression, when it rejoined the world of inert things.

Aby Warburg and the Image in Motion p44 commenting on Daguerre's experiments.

blow up / consort road

blow up / maryon wilson park / appearance to disappearance

these marble steps

D. O. M.
SEDENTE BENEDICTO XIII
PONT. MAX.
L U D O V I C O X V
IN GALLIIS REGNANTE
EIVSQ. APVD SANCTAM SEDEM
NEGOTIIS PRÆPOSITO
MELCHIORE S. R. ECCLESIÆ
CARDINALI DE POLIGNAC
ARCHIEPISCOPO AVSCITANO
AD SACRÆ ÆDIS ALMÆQVE VRBIS
O R N A M E N T V M
AC CIVIVM COMMODVM
MARMOREA SCALA
DIGNO TANTIS AVSPICIIS OPERE
ABSOLVTA
ANNO DOMINI MDCCXXV

Benedict XIII sitting in the papal chair as Pontifex Maximus; Louis XV reigning in France; Melchior de Polignac, Cardinal of the Holy Roman Church, and Archbishop of Aquitaine, being his minister at the sacred see; these marble steps, in a manner worthy of such auspices, for the ornamentation of the sacred temple (the church above) and the beloved city, and for the convenience of the citizens, were completed in the year of our Lord, 1725.

spike

skid row / consort road / gordon road

Camberwell became a Poor Law Parish on 28 October 1835, overseen by an elected Board of Guardians. In 1878 the Camberwell Board of Guardians constructed a new workhouse on Gordon Road. It was intended to house 743 able bodied inmates. Males chopped wood or broke stones; while females were employed in laundry work.

In 1930 the Gordon Road Workhouse was taken over by the London County Council and became the Camberwell Reception Centre for homeless men. The building has now been converted to flats.

Census of a Reception Centre

GRIFFITH EDWARDS M.A., D.M., D.P.M.¹, VALERIE WILLIAMSON B.A.¹, ANN HAWKER ¹, CELIA HENSMAN M.A.¹, and SETA POSTOYAN B.A.¹

¹ The Alcohol Impact Project, Institute of Psychiatry, Maudsley Hospital, London, S.E.5

1. The history of Reception Centres is briefly reviewed. A 100-item structured questionnaire was administered to 279 men entering the Camberwell Reception Centre, London, on the night in April 1965.

2. Demographic data are presented, information on incidences of some physical illnesses, on mental hospital admissions, and on criminal involvement.

3. Aspects of drinking behaviour are examined: about 25 per cent. of men are chemically dependent on alcohol.

4. A correlation analysis shows the considerable interrelatedness of different symptoms of pathological drinking, explores the relation of demographic and social facts, etc., to drink being a problem, and to some extent differentiates London-born from non-London-born and early from late comers to the Reception Centre.

5. The heterogeneity of the Centre's population is noted and an attempt made to delineate subgroups. Future planning should be for smaller hostels in which the special requirements of particular subgroups can be met. A Hostel Service is needed.

Submitted on August 18, 1967

Don McCullin in conversation

julio cortazar

(now a large cloud is going by, almost black)

reservations of the marvellous

Where, you might wonder, does such a history start? What are its objects? Where did the sleep of the bourgeoisie take place? in many odd parts of the city, Benjamin thought, but above all in the arcades. The 19th century had been extraordinarily rich, almost prodigal, in its production of 'dream houses of the collective'; at one point Benjamin draws up a list of 'winter gardens, panoramas, factories, wax museums, casinos, railway stations', and one could easily add to this from other sections of the book: the Crystal Palace [ground zero of the bourgeois imagination], the Eiffel Tower, the unearthly reading rooms done by Henri Labrouste for the Biblioteque Nationale and the Biblioteque Sainte Genevieve, maybe Hector Guimard's Metro entrances, certainly the lost Galerie des Machines. But the arcades are central for him, because he senses that only in them are the true silliness and sublimity of the new [old] society expressed to the full. The arcades are thoroughgoing failures and abiding triumphs. They were old-fashioned almost as soon as they declared themselves the latest thing. Their use of iron and glass was premature, naive, a mixture of the pompous and fantastic. they were stuffy, dingy and monotonous; dead dioramas; perspectives etouffees; phantasmagoria of the dull, the flat, the cluttered. 'The light that fell from above, through the panes … was dirty and sad.' 'Only here,' De Chirico said, 'is it possible to paint. The streets have such gradations of grey.' They were always 'close' [to recall a word that seemed to dominate my childhood], there was sure to be thunder by the end of the afternoon. Drizzle was their natural element. They did not keep out the rain so much as allow the splenetic consumer to wallow in rain publicly, his breath condensing drearily on the one-way glass. [In this climate glass roofs could never be kept clean.] 'Nothing is more characteristic than that precisely this most intimate and most mysterious affair, the working of the weather on humans, should have become the theme of their emptiest chatter. Nothing bores the ordinary man more than the cosmos.' Rain was the guarantee of boredom, thank God, since it meant that one could not 'go out'. The arcades allowed a whole century to be housebound and a t loose ends in the company of strangers. They were waiting rooms, caves containing fossils of the primitive consumer, mirror worlds in which out-of-date gadgets exchanged winks, front rooms on endless Sunday afternoons with dust motes circulating in the half-light. Odilon Redon was their painter - his very name sounded like a ringlet on a cheap black wig in the back of the shop. They were waxworks of the New. Arcs de Triomphe [commemorating victories in the class struggle].
For all these reasons they were wonderful. They were a dream and a travesty of dreaming - in the golden age of capital, all worthwhile utopias were both at the same time. ……

T.J. Clark's great review of The Arcades Project
London Review of Books Vol 22 No 12 22 June 2000

The Discrete Image

The image in general does not exist.

image-object
anima
cinema

Thomas / Blow Up
the conditions of belief / evidence

l'écran
l'écrit

red desert

Once there was a girl on an island. She was bored with grownups, who scared her. She didn't like boys, all pretending to be grownups. So, she was always alone, among the cormorants, the seagulls... and wild rabbits. She had found a little isolated beach... where the sea was transparent... and the sand pink. She loved that spot. Nature's colors were so lovely, and there was no sound. She left... when the sun went down. One morning... a boat appeared. Not one of the usual boats, a real sailing ship! One of those that braved the seas and the storms of this world. And, who knows... of other worlds. From afar, it looked splendid. As it approached, it became mysterious. She saw no one aboard. It stopped a while... then veered... and sailed away... silently, just as it had come. She was used to people's strange ways... and was not surprised. But, no sooner back on shore...
there! All right for one mystery, but not two! Who was singing? The beach was deserted. But the voice was there... Now near. Now far. Then it seemed to come from the sea, an inlet among the rocks, many rocks that... she had never realized, looked like flesh. And the voice at that point was so sweet.

Who was singing?

Everybody. Everything.

edward hailstone/ optical daywear