too shy to try

yesterday i was walking along the thames south bank, crowded with every sort of people. the weather was great. not london-great, really great. and as i was looking around and visually exploring all different facets of humanity, i found the perfect shot. the perfect guy and the perfect shot. well, not in absolute terms. i mean, for sure it wouldn't have been the best photo of the year, not even of the week or day or hour, but still for my standards... it was the perfect shot.

take out my camera, start playing with the settings, don't even need to frame - it was already the perfect shot. but i take too long. i always take too long. what can i say, i'm just a beginner. too long. enough for him to spot me. to notice something's going on, even though i'm kind of behind him. still he stays there, but looks weird, moves his book. and there it is. PANIC.

i panicked. as i always do when i feel i'm intruding. a theatre director once told me i seem to walk through the world without wanting to bother a single human being. never thought about that before, but kind of makes sense. i don't like to impose my presence. pathologically shy. and with a camera, that's pretty difficult. especially when your favourite subject are people. and you end up shooting at buildings, landscapes, everything but people. because you're shy.

so that's what happened. he noticed. surely didn't come there and ripped my camera off insulting me. he just (looked like he) noticed. and i panicked. and backed away. didn't shoot. walked a few steps away, standing by the river, waiting for time to go by. basically waiting for him to leave his bench. waiting for the perfect shot to dissolve, and for regret to settle in.

regret. regret i didn't shoot. regret i'm freaking shy. regret that in the end, i won't have the perfect photo. probably it wouldn't have come out the way i saw it, i'm not half that good. but still. i could have had it, and checked how bad it would have come. upset and disappointed, i start walking again. after all i was heading to tate modern.

and funnily enough, besides the dada exhibit i was expecting to find, a new one just opened a couple of days ago...
Street & Studio - An Urban History of Photography
hahaha

amazing. well, not everything, but most of the stuff. simply amazing. a collection of pictures from the end of XIX century to present day. i have to admit that, clearly, i didn't find (most of) the studio pictures extremely exciting. but the street ones... awesome. a photography class couldn't teach you more.

or serve as inspiration. just an hour ago i had panicked while intruding into someone else's day. hanging on the walls, i was now acknowledging hundreds of intrusions. intrusions telling stories, narrating bits of history. history from people's point of view. street history.

now, i'm not that ambitious. being shy, can't possibly have ambitions. but not only for ambition, even just for fun, shyness isn't a light load to carry around. should properly dispose of it one of these days. at least some of it.

here's not my favourite picture of the exhibit, but the comment... pretty much what i needed to read:
"Far off, amongst the walkers, she stands out like a golden pheasant in a hen house. She approaches... I'm shy, trembling a little. Twenty meters... ten meters... eight... six... and click! The shutter of my big camera makes so much noise that the lady jumps almost as much as I do. It doesn't matter a bit, except to the man with a loud voice accompanying her who, with a furious look, starts to get hold of me... What does it matter, though, all that counts is the pleasure of having a new photo."

J. H. Lartigue
photographing ladies at Bois de Boulogne, 1910 or so...

london reflections

have been thinking a lot lately. walking around london. and thinking. clearly didn't come out with any useful thought, but still. have been thinking.


sometimes looking at things from a different perspective helps. defocus. maybe you see that things are not so bad after all, and stop whining. maybe not, but still you've gained a different frame. which helps. sometimes.
like looking in the opposite direction when you're crossing the street. surely helps. at least i'd stop bumping into cars.


many things are pretty different here. not only because they drive on the wrong side of the road. a lot different. better?? huh, dunno. different, for sure. just wondering whether it looks appealing just because it's different...


appealing... big word. plus not entirely true.
would i see me here? maybe. but doing what... would i see me here with astrophysics? mmm tough call. probably more than how i see me doing it now. but is it enough? can't really change things just by changing places. at the end of the day, nothing has changed, after all.


curiosity. that one i have, for sure. but curiosity mixed to fear is not the best cocktail. guess i'm curious to see what could happen if i were doing something else. if i were a different person. but it's probably too late for that.


and it's probably too late to be thinking about that.
too late.
time to sleep.

voices from a different time

recently this song came into my mind. a couple of days before i came to london. couldn't avoid thinking about stuff like the first scene of blow up. not that i was expecting to find anything like that nowadays...


but still, couldn't take it off my mind. and somehow drifted me to this song, and the way Baricco reviewed it:

"After all, it's just a record. But still. You put it on and you feel an old man's voice coming from far away, one of those old men who stand and it's a miracle, kept upright by the long coat and the smell of mothballs. The old man's singing. With a tiny voice, quietly, but in tune, and sweet, somehow you sympathise with those trembling high pitch notes. In them you feel all the teeth he's got no more, shortness of breath, arthritis and everything else. There's nothing more: just his voice, singing without pause the same refrain, peaceful, melancholic here and there. No background music. Some noise, voices from far away. You don't understand a word. Not because it's English. With no teeth, at his age, words become ghosts. Sounds. What a damn record is this?

It's currently [note: 1995] in the British top hit. And it has a weird story. In 1971, a musician named Gavin Bryars starts recording the voices of the homeless living in Waterloo station, London, for the soundtrack of a documentary. He records every kind of stuff. Then, one day he meets this old man. Homeless as well. He hears him singing. He records his voice and takes it back home. Listens to it again. And he's like hypnotized. The refrain comes from a religious song (Jesus' blood never failed me yet) and he finds out it's like a ring: you can repeat it at infinity, it's a neverending lullaby. He works on it for years. A first record appears, a cult for very few people, then he starts working on it again, and after 10 years this cd comes out: 75 minutes where the homeless guy sings with no pause the 25 seconds of his reprise. You may think it's fool, but that's just because you haven't heard it yet.

After a couple of minutes you feel a string orchestra coming along, slowly, behind the old man's shoulders, and taking over on his voice, wrapping it into a blanket, so to speak, and carrying it around. The voice's always the same, but it starts sounding different. It's getting warmer, slightly, you don't even realise it and there's a harp and bells, and a choir, and drums, a flute, two clarinets, an oboe, and trumpets, trombones (but gently, in order not to smash anything), even an organ, some kind of gong and who knows what else. The voice of the homeless guy is still embroidering its lullaby, but it's now become a sacred relic to be carried in procession, a tiny little bone of the saint, watching right at you from the top of an opulent procession: it slowly oscillates, and goes, along the streets of your mind.

It would have already been enough now - you can feel it - that music has tricked you. But it's not over. At some point, during the big procession, another voice comes out, sounding like it's amplified by a megaphone, it's getting closer, and then you recognise it, it would be impossible otherwise: Tom Waits. Who else? Tom Waits - for those few who don't know it - is a guy who sings and in his voice there are all the drunken homeless voices of the world. It's not a voice, it's a public dumping ground, it's a years long cigarette, millions of beers and miles, hundreds of loves and motels. It's one of the most exciting voices you have ever heard. And now it's coming there, duetting with that old man who's dead by now, but it doesn't matter, because his voice never stopped, both of them swinging on that eternal refrain. Tom Waits. And the old drunken man. Sons of a drunken God. It looks like they haven't done anything else in life. Just sing along, all the time. And drink beers, of course.

All in all the procession goes away, as it arrived it's leaving, fading out inside the stereo, leaving behind itself a few violins hung on very high pitch notes, and pieces of Tom Waits, shooting notes as if they're teasing the world. The drunken guy has already disappeared. And you're wondering about his name, and when he died, and where and how. And whether he knew other songs like this one."

A.Baricco, Figli di un Dio ubriaco, Barnum