When I was a very small child, someone, I can't remember who, said, you draw birds flying like this, and made v signs with a pencil on a piece of paper. As I grew older I came to distrust the simplicity of this advice. Now, looking at this photograph, I think that maybe it isn't wrong after all.A man sits on a bench on the station platform. He sits on a bench toying with a mobile phone. As it moves in his hand the dial catches the sun and its reflection dances on the brick wall behind him. A new and strange form of communication.
In St Leonards today we sit at the same table outside the same restaurant as on two or three occasions earlier this year, and I take the same photographs, of people sitting on benches on the other side of the road, looking towards the sea. The same? Not at all. They are different people, in different attitudes; and it is later in the year. The sun is in a different place in the sky. And Heidi and I are weeks, months older.
4 comments:
That would be a truly snob rejection of the mobile phone and the values it is supposed to enshrine: using it to communicate via Morse code. There's a need for one of those new-word inventions: deliberately going for the more difficult option. Nothing stirs in my creative lobes. I'd have become a judge but I didn't have the Latin, as Peter Cook said.
What struck me as curious was the way the reflection on the wall above the mobile users head seemed to have a life (and a message of its own). The communication was between the telephone and the wall and the rest of the world. It was immaterial that the man was an intermediary unaware of the role he played.
Your photo inspires me to paint a couple of crows in flight against a moody blue sky.
Hope you won't mind that I borrow your art to create something of my own.
You're more than welcome, dear Crow. I hope you will publish the result.
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