The case of the Chimney Pots and the Spy

This was originally posted to JPG Magazine using ShareThis with an unrevised narrative.

Look up.  Don't point your camera at anyone.  These were the thoughts that passed through my view finder and out of the lens toward objects of unsung desire.  I was walking down one of the narrow streets of Cambridge (U.K.).  And, the crowd was growing more dense as the lane ahead narrowed.

Years earlier, while I had been photographing a library in Botswana.  The images were needed to illustrate a report on preservation conditions and structural enhancements.  One of the library's readers, who assumed that I'd been photographing her, took exception.  She broke the silence of the Rare Book Reading Room with a verbally violent attack.  Her index fingers were alternately making stabbing and jabbing motions into the air as she charged toward me.  Nothing short of sharing the images I'd taken with her would satisfy her paranoia.  When she got her fill of shots of doors and windows, glass and metal, and of the sunlight pouring down through the building's perfect diamond-shaped glass ceiling, she turned to me pacified.  Adopting a conspiratorial tone, she remarked simply, "So, you like to photograph things that stand witness."

Stand they do: these five red pots on a pedestal, demanding attention.  Five little Rockettes, they might just break out into dance as stand posing.   But, it is the crowd looking on that draws my attention.

The dull pot in the foreground. And, its sibling ducking behind a dormer. A third, revealed only in the shadows, painted on the canvas of white wall.

The north/north-west facing windows, themselves.  Standing poker-faced in hear-no-evil, see-no-evil, speak-no-evil panes of three, they repeat themselves like the name, rank and serial number of a prisoner.   Turned from the interrogation of the sun, they reflect nothing.  They are not illuminated within, the life has literally gone out of them.

The drain-pipe standing sentry at the corner of the background building.  Functionally literate.  Yet, almost unnoticed among the lines of structure.  A quite character in an architectural morality play: black lines for a white building like the stain of sin or of a functional body.  The white trim of the black building, winking: only playing dead.  By nightfall each window will host a play of its own.

And, most of all, the spy in the scene.  The antenna, communicating silently with a subject beyond view.  The lie is put to it.  It turns in the shadows.  Quite unlike the dull chimney pots that present themselves forthrightly, it is smarter. Using lines formed of the painted mortar, it imagines a clock painted on the wall.  It can tell time.

I like to photograph things that stand witness, even false witness.  Everything has a story to tell.

Purple on the Green

The jewels of Cambridge are often hidden; but, they are here.  Most are secreted amid the bustle and over-crowding of the city centre.  All lay within the walls of the colleges.  When spring comes, they will be at their most beautiful.  And, for their beauty, they will be flooded with tourists.  I can live with tourists for the jewels beyond the drab gates and self-deprecating doors of Cambridge colleges.  

I passed St. John’s College recently.  In the stark light of late afternoon, the sand-coloured walls seemed stolid.  City life flowed past them like a river passes through a canyon good for fishing.  

Just as I stood opposite its entry, making my own passage over the cobblestones, the College door swung open.  Keening with the pressure of an opened sluice that held back, even protected, fresh waters, the door revealed an emerald court, and another beyond.  Each pooled amidst the same sand-coloured walls as those facing the street.  The hour was that sliver of day when sunlight crests the College roofs and cascades down upon the lawns.  

The door had been opened by a pair of professors in their flowing black robes for the singular purpose of leaving the College.  It seemed, selfishly in my mind’s eye however, as though the doors were opened simply to release the light.  Tourists on the street with me stopped to memorialise the moment.  The flashing of their cameras’ lights, then, seemed the movement of white-water.  And, their excitement vocalized as gasps and exclamations: white-water’s rising din.

But, I paint the scene purple.  

The doors closed almost as quickly as they had opened.  Saint John’s was again a reservoir, closed to the passing of the city’s turbid stream.