East End Film Festival
The East End Film Festival has launched its programme for this year. The brochure is full of old black and white images from my archive and the picture below wraps around the printed programme.
Man with teddy bear on settee in Cheshire Street, 1985
The sight of the man on the settee with the teddy bear drew me like a magnet. Over the years I have become quite intimate with this Cheshire Street composition as I printed it a number of times. In the 80’s I always processed my own film; this could cause problems for me in the dark room as I would sometimes leave the film in the developer for a few minutes longer than was required. This meant the negatives would often emerge with a high contrast finish. The image above was developed for too long and so I had to print it on ‘grade 1’ low contrast paper to compensate for the high contrast negative. It could take me hours to get the right tonal balance on the print. It takes a few seconds to sort it in photoshop!
The man on the settee with the teddy bear has never ceased to intrigue me. I’ve always found the street as the natural habitat for practical surrealism! This is particularly true of the East End of London. You can catch a number of other black and white images on the web site of the East End Film Festival.
Surreal is right … I used to get the same feeling in parts of Kilburn and West Hampstead … a powerful sense of individualism … and yet a community atmosphere suggesed by the use of the house furniture in a public space … “almost” … a real live stage.
the tired passenger seems vaguely familiar philip !!!!!