Research, unformatted.
Martin Parr
West Bay, Dorset, 1997.
Martin Parr
This photo makes me think…
1. listing the familiar ingredients of the frozen moment.
Chips. Flags. Blue skies. Sea gulls. Polystyrene containers. Concrete walls. The Seaside. British holiday resorts.
2. toying with their significance – global/universal/personal/national/individual?.
Chips
Chips are part of classic British cuisine. Pubs, cafes, restaurants, gift shops…our entire culture stinks of fried potato. Tramps and seagulls eat your leftovers from walls, pavements and benches. Some people eat them untreated; some people soak them in vinegar, ketchup, salt, mustard and mayonnaise. Some people like thin, machine-cut fries and others prefer the hand made authenticity of a finger that bursts between your molars. Chips can be part of a meal or the bulk of it. Potato will fill you up. Their heat is good for the cold climate. Too many chips may prove too much for your heart. Chips are the sign of a hungry Englishman. I like chips myself. Chips on the seafront are common; you can feed your family, united in the input. Some dads will let you apply your own condiments. I like pepper on my chips these days. Chips are always an option and open huge doors for an indecisive and polite Brit.
Flags
Flags are often-pretty rectangles that attract the eye and represent the separations of the lands of the earth which were and are a creation of a type of animal that calls itself a human. I am a human. The flag which summarises the land onto which I was born, live and have lived is called the Union Jack, the very same flag that appears in the photograph. The three colours represent three countries. England by the horizontal and vertical red cross, Scotland by the diagonal blue cross and Ireland by the diagonal red cross. Flags are harmless bits of material, but combine them with the confused political motivations of an emotional human mind and you’ll be looking at a flapping time bomb. I would recommend that we adopt a global flag and blow up Mars before they turn up in the Thames with guns and contracts.
Blue skies
The sky is the thing that we can never touch but is always above our heads. In the photograph, the sky is blue which means that at the time that the image was captured the weather was fair; the perfect weather for outdoor tourism. The blue sky means scores of holidaymakers; jars of income; pocketfuls of change and wallets of notes. Families, couples, friends – they are all underneath the sunshine looking for a new memory and something to distract them from their tedium. Everything, to me, looks good against a blue sky. The huge range of human emotions that could be teased by a photograph is annulled by the beauty that comes from such a colour – Kentish blue holds a special blend of insulations, although I couldn’t tell if the blue had in fact come from an Adobe tool. Nostalgia, longing for a place that you wish you did not dislike, making the best of a dull thing with an aesthetic shrug; this is the route by which a blue sky can override the drab truths that have breakdowns in alleyways and steal desperately from off-licences. Do these views make one a snob?
Seagulls
Why fly when you can land? The white birds inhabit the air above us, the land beside us and the seas in front of us. They dine, slightly selectively, on edibles which we do not want. Some folks throw food at them, some throw stones, some feed them by accident by their negligent use of bins. To the birds, rubbish is not rubbish, it is opportunity. They may not think in English or words at all. Life is action and survival; necessity. They will not fly into a building to check their emails or type essays about human behaviour. They love chips and compete for the food available at the time. Greed is not a sin to a seagull, it isn’t even greed, so the seven deadly sins are stupid and so is all religion. The eyes of a seagull can make me feel very uneasy; I feel that they would eat me if I wasn’t clothed and moving. If only we could find out.
Polystyrene containers
Short-sighted producers are we; these trays are non-recyclable and not biodegradable. One of the basics of civilised eating, the container, comes as standard with your food. The birds and beasts make do without, but we humans are too clever for any of that. We give a tray to the world, a tray which is ugly and wasteful. In making the tray we foul the air, in using the tray we are practical and pretentious [if a little smart for avoiding burnt hands and laps], in dumping the tray we are disgusting. The forgotten object might go on to become useful to another species, which is their problem. Evolve, you dunces. That said, we have employed some kinder devices which rot without consequence, so we need not live in fear of judgement after all. The real crime at the bottom of this whole mess is that these trays mean that you get fewer chips for your quid. Value THEN ecology, that’s my motto.
Concrete walls
These features are for sitting and sea stopping. We are united on these walls; all divisions dissolved by our recreation. On the seafronts of England, before the beach begins, thousands of strangers share the Council’s seating stones. I have sat, as did my forefathers and mothers. The slabs can be found warm, cold, covered in chewing gum shapes and surrounded by cigarette leftovers. Other walls may hold a different set of conventions and may not be intended as stations for ice cream faced toddlers and voyeuristic gentlemen. Concrete walls present an often sandless alternative to the plastic of the café and the canvas of the deckchair. If you want to meet see the varied face of the British seaside tourist, run past a concrete wall by the beach in high summer with a camcorder and a can of mace.
The Seaside
This means a place beside the sea. The location of this picture is definitely by the sea because there are breakwaters and bunting. Many areas where the land and sea met birthed incidental or man-made beaches, on which people make their livings by pretending to be puppets or women. Tourists are people who spend money in a place which isn’t their home, especially on fridge magnets, postcards and traditional sweets in contemporary tins or new sweets in old-new tins. To be beside the sea is to be an observer of the businesses which depend upon its existence, whatever the season or climate has down its collar. In my experience, the beach is a wonderful setting for a teenager to look thoughtful. And urinate.
British holiday resorts
Holiday is a word which describes a period of time when we escape a responsibility of some sort, work or education for example. The prefix British forces that duration to be used somewhere on the British Isles. On our Isles there is a heritage of indoor facilities which provide an obese selection of places to drink and become molested. The seaside is an outdoor dealer of nature and beauty, rich in unspoiled views and a good source of affordable pastimes. A resort, in regards to holidays, is the destination and surroundings of your chosen place of stay. To choose Britain, regardless of the factors of your decision, leaves you at the mercy of an unpredictable weather system and a gastronomic style that the whole human world, even the dead and the fictional, mocks with a relaxed confidence. In short, I am a biased and therefore unreliable perceiver and am given licence to criticise my homeland because I am still too young to long for its bygone myths. I love them from afar; this photo is a tunnel to their complicated exterior. Viva Britannia.
posted by Jaguar Hutch @ 9:53 pm
0 comments
