This morning, before I got up, I continued reading Geoff Dyer’s interesting book, the Ongoing Moment. It is a brief history of photography, but rather than starting on day one and becoming a list, it flits through the decades, using a thread of various photographic subjects to hold it together.
Blind beggars, hats, hands, signs, benches, backs and stairs. I know very little of the work of the ‘masters’. I know that Ansel Adams liked mountains, Cartier-Bresson hung around on corners and in alleyways for hours to get the shots he was after, but Steiglitz, Strand, Evans, Weston, Lange, Arbus, Goldin etc, are all new to me.
There are a few pictures, badly reproduced in the book. Otherwise, I have to use my imagination and try to picture these photographs through Dyer’s description. He often assumes that the reader will be familiar with these ‘classics’.
And so this morning, I was reading about a photograph by Andre Kertesz. He, apparently, took many pictures of stairways and steps around Paris. The book discusses the different effect that shooting up stairs or looking down. It also described his view of Stairs of Montmartre that I was keen to Google when I could.
I nipped in to town today and thought I’d take the opportunity to take a couple of step shots. However, I could only think of one flight of suitable steps in Leicester, those leading up to the old Haymarket Theatre.
When I got there, there was a guy being sick on himself, a normal occurrence on a Saturday afternoon in the city, so I got to work…