London England: Facade Fun - Poetry vs Photos
It seems the weirder the place, the more I like it. Berlin was definitely weird with its graffiti filled streets especially on the east side. Portland prides itself on being weird. But London perhaps beats them both for being weird.
One of my takeaways from London was it had some of the craziest store fronts and some of the strangest names for businesses and buildings of any city I have visited. The streetscapes are less generic than North American cities, which all look the same with national chain stores dominating.
Beat Generation: Cut Up Method
Recently I have been reading a lot of Beat literature, ironically picked up in thrift stores in Portland. The Beat Generation was a literary movement started by a group of authors whose work explored and influenced American culture and politics in the post-war era. The bulk of their work was published and popularized throughout the 1950s. The best know Beat artists were probably Jack Kerouac, John Steinbeck, Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs.
Link: The Beat Movement
One of the creative writing experiments of Beat artists Brion Gysin, William Burroughs and others was the cutting up of their writing and then pasting it back together to create a random juxtapositions of the ideas thought to reflect the randomness of everyday life. They called it “The Cut Up Method.”
Link: The Cut Up Method
When I was reviewing my London photos I decided to create a file of building “façade” photos – ones I felt were both visual and verbally interesting. In further reviewing them, I noticed the names of the buildings and businesses seemed to tell a different story of London’s street life than the photographs.
I decided to type out the words from each photograph from the first to the last in the order there were in the file to see how it read. The result, I thought was interesting…so I played a bit with the structure, but without editing the words or the order.
London’s Street Life
Save the children….Mary’s Living & Giving
I cut….No 1…Fast break
The Black Cap at Kirkaldy’s Testing & Experimenting
Elephant at No 8 or Sixty Six
Eggslut…London spirit?
Two Nine five…Nimaya mindstation
A space to take away your stress and realign your mind
Telescope House & Zeppelin Building
Passing Alley to Royal Free Hospital?
The klink….
The crisis….This shop ends homelessness….
Get Stuffed?
Abstracta… Therapy… Bash St.
Bounce…the home of ping pong
Eye Level & pinkberry
Hello Sweetie….
Welcome to our Mind Shop!
The Department of Coffee and Social Affairs
Facts not opinions at Kirkaldy House
The Enterprise & The Chapel
Reuse, Rewear… Relove
Retroliving…Eyediology
Raw Store? Fags & Booze!
The energy to seek…
The taste of silence…
The place nobody talks about
Slideshow London Facades
Last Word
For me the photographic images were colourful and playful, but the verbal messages are almost a polar opposite - sad and strange. Indeed, the street life of any city’s downtown is an intriguing juxtaposition of visual and verbal.
Love to hear what you think? Do words speak louder than images, or is it the other way around?
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