-E
IGHT
There’s a Taiwanese soap opera that is so cheesy you wouldn’t believe.
Soft, dreamy visuals over slow piano ballads where the characters swoon and cry and laugh and yearn. My days, I’ve never seen so much yearning in my life.
I came across it when I was flicking through the channels one time, bored out of my mind. Pretty cringe, but before I moved on to the next channel, the lead female character’s stepmum was wanting to pimp her out to some sleazebag to feed her alcohol addiction, then the lead-male character finds out he has a frigging tumour on his brain, but if they operate he has a slim chance of survival, so it’s either die quick or die slow, and now I am hooked because I want to find out if the two leads make it in the end.
I stare out the wall of glass in the penthouse’s living room.
I attach my telephoto lens onto my camera, aim it at the neighbouring buildings, and watch people getting on with their lives out there.
Who knows, maybe I’ll watch a murder going down, and me and Akemi can solve the mystery, figure out what happened.
In the building in front, I see a young mother and a baby, tickling and giggling. Some days the baby is crying and although I can’t hear it, from the looks of its mother it’s loud, it’s been going on for hours.
On the floor above, a shirtless dude practising wing chun on a wooden dummy. Sweating with the effort.
In the next building along, a woman sitting at her desk in front of the window, one minute furiously tapping at her laptop with a smile on her face, the next, she’s staring out the window, looking like she’s thinking about what she’s going to eat for dinner.
In the apartment below hers, a young couple, around my and Mia’s age. I watch them cook, eat, watch TV, fight, fuck, laugh, dance, read books, throw parties.
I used to love watching these two at first, but after a little while it just made me think of Mia, how our lives were kind of like their lives.
And looking at this couple down the barrel of my lens, it just compressed everything, shoved my old life right into my new, Mia-less existence’s face, like the way telephoto lenses make the sun look huge, way huger and way closer to the mountains than it really is, so I pretty much avoid that window now.
What I do, is I walk.
Give me my camera, and I will strap the thing around my neck, and walk for hours and hours.
Miles and miles.
No playing, I’ll walk from eight in the morning until twelve at night. Sometimes even later.
Because unlike a painter, or a writer, or even a studio photographer, I can’t just think of an image in my head and make it appear.
I have to walk to find it.
I don’t even know what I’m looking for most of the time. I just walk, and watch.
Everyday life in London.
I walk and I watch, in the moment. And if I see people doing things that speak to me, I just follow my gut and shoot. Get in as close as I can.
Because if you’re not in there with them, you’re detached from the scene. There’s no intimacy to the frame.
Sometimes I get home from a day of shooting without firing off even one shot.
It’s not the easiest way to make art, I’ll give you that.
But it’s the only way I know. And the feeling when you’ve had a good day? When you’ve tapped into some next-level plane of consciousness, and everywhere you go there is an intriguing, surprising picture to be made, overflowing with the emotion, the humanity, the soul?
For true, there is nothing like it. I live for that feeling.
It’s weeks since I went street shooting, and I am suffocating.
Charles beckons me over to the kitchen table and says, I’ve got something to show you.
I wheel myself over.
In his hands is a tablet. He pokes the screen a few times, then lifts it to show me.
I take the tablet. No playing, what I’m looking at is a grid of pictures – a picture for every room in the movie star’s apartment. In the living room, I see the movie star gazing at himself in a giant mirror. Smiling.
I say, When did you install cameras in that place?
He says, When you were photographing it.
Street photography is one thing. (I mean, it is legal in a bunch of countries to take pictures of people in public without them knowing. And for sure, you’ve been filmed on CCTV hundreds of times a day.)
But spy cameras in someone’s home?
I look at the movie star again, still smiling at himself in the mirror.
I say, Isn’t this illegal or something?
Charles, he leans back, sips his tea, and says, It is.
