Crit: "London" by Paul Halliday

A few caveats. First, the thing I'm looking at is a video presentation of a project that is, I think, not done. The film is shot, but we should take this as a preliminary edit, at best. Second, I think Paul is an awful human being, and so find myself prone to the "and your photos are shit!" fallacy.

Which this in mind, you can view this video at this link: Dekho Paul T. Halliday. The video production is not great, I think it's just a recorded Zoom session. The english text at the beginning is rough, but there's a language barrier so get over it. You can watch it sound-off at double speed if you just want to see the photos, all of which appear in the first 60 minutes. Paul's talk is, um, well it is its own thing which I will get to.

Let's start with the pictures, though.

Paul displays a strong sense of graphic design now and then, almost frequently. There's some really punchy pictures in here, and of the 60-odd photos there are 3 or 4 that I genuinely like. I dare say you'll also find a handful that make you think "wow, that's just a good photo" and that they won't be quite the same ones I like. The collection has that flavor. There's also some more photos that I think are OK, near misses, that kind of thing. There are really only a few that look like total duds. Again, you might find a few duds, but different ones than mine. The collection has that flavor.

He is not, however, consistent. Many of the frames are just a jumble of stuff, or some cheap "street tog" juxtaposition. The arrow points right, the people walk left. The giant hand in the poster appears to grab the woman's head, that sort of thing. Many of the better photos feel vaguely familiar, and one guesses that Paul picked them off the contact sheet because they reminded him of whatever it is that we're recalling. It's a little like looking at Vivian Maier's photos, but attenuated.

The framing is frequently a bit off. Paul doesn't seem to be able to handle his rangefinder and is constantly chopping people's feet off and more generally the photos either feel like they ought to be cropped, or got cropped a bit badly. Several times he's interested in some cute replication of subject or form, but frames the picture is such a way as to practically conceal the joke. He does not seem to have any sense of positioning himself, of moving, to get a good framing.

The influence of Cartier-Bresson is felt throughout. My first impression was these look like all the frames Henri did not circle. After another viewing and some noodling, that still seems right. Which, you know, isn't entirely bad, right? HCB rejected some decent pictures. It also feels a bit like some random would-be "street" tog's Instagram.

And therein lies the real trouble. This thing is incoherent. It's just a bunch of whatever Paul thought were "the good ones" in no particular order. There is no sense of place, no sense of time, and no sense of any relationship at all between the pictures. Two more or less identical pictures of amusement park rides joggle shoulders with a picture of a cat in a window, two nuns on the subway, and apparently endless photos of people milling around in streets. The closest thing we get to a theme or an idea that carries across photos is three pictures of people sleeping.

Let us now turn to Paul's commentary. We learn that he spent 20 years on this, 1986 to 2006 which to be fair are probably the least visually interesting years in human history. He has an archive of 120,000 negatives holy shit this is the best he could extract? He has been all kinds of minor-league academic and has lived all over London, all his life, etc and so forth. It becomes clear that he's in the habit of going out weekends and knocking out a few rolls of film. He tells us, mercifully briefly, about his Leicas.

In all this blather, he spend a lot of time justifying his pictures. He offers up "longitudinal study" which it's not because he never seems to return to the same location at all, let alone over years. Like all the other justifications he mentions it once and moves on. He proposes that he is a "critical urbanist" which means something, I guess. An urbanist is someone who favors gentrification, but not the lame kind, the cool kind that produces awesome cafes, a thriving art scene, and affordable rents.

As a critical urbanist Paul is "quite interested" in the ways people move through and use urban spaces, which I suppose explains all the pictures of people milling around. Surely there's more to it than milling around, though?

Paul is also "quite interested" in urban animals. For one frame. He's "quite interested" in gesture, for one frame. He's "quite interested" in sleeping people, for three pictures. Indeed, there seems to be almost nothing Paul is not "quite interested" in for a frame or two.

All this blather feels like he's trying to tell us what the point of this project is, but none of it succeeds. He dribbles off, and is on to a new thing for the next picture. It's clear that if he has a concept here, he is utterly unable to articulate it either with words, or with pictures.

And now the last bit. Paul is extremely woke. He operates a Master's program at Goldsmiths where you can spend a year learning Wokeology and Photography for a mere 10,000 pounds (18,900 if you're foreign.) For those of you in the cheap seats, Goldsmiths is evidently well-respected, so god knows how Paul wiggled in there. He's some sort of interstitial scholar type, a failed PhD presumably on-staff for his admin skills and ability to extract money from wealthy foreigners.

This makes the one theme which actually does run through his blather especially sticky. Paul talks a lot about consent. He's really into contemporary discussions of consent in "photoland" and it shows here in his blather. His problem, though, is that he has rather a lot of pictures of people glaring at him, and many more pictures of people who haven't noticed him. He spends quite a bit of effort attempting to explain why this is OK.

Nazis, fuck them anyways, their consent doesn't matter and anyways I saw that one eating a bagel later (?!) The nun probably recognized me because we'd been riding the train together for years, although we've never exchanged a word, so that makes it ok (the nun is palpably angry.) The people sleeping? I don't even know why it's ok to photograph them, but I'm "quite interested" in sleeping people. The girl canoodling made eye contact before this frame was shot, so that's OK. And on and on. He's always got a story, and the subject is always either glaring at him or oblivious.

I get it, his opinions have changed. He was shooting this shit starting 35 years ago. It's ok to say I wouldn't take this photo now.

It must have been crushing for Paul to see Butturini's book. The latter is focused, intense. It has a powerful sense of time and place. The framing is consistently good. The edit is tight. The time it was shot was visually interesting. I don't think Butturini's "London" is really all that, it's not my favorite book, but it is astronomically better than Paul's efforts, and this damned Italian knocked it out in a summer. Paul's 120,000 negative archive might as well go in the bin now, and he probably shouldn't have started.

Butturini's photos are geographically tight: Regent's Park, Picadilly Circus, The Underground. That's pretty much it. It's temporally tight: summer of 1968. It's focused: this is what I saw and felt in London that summer. Paul's photos, in contrast, are all over London, all over time, and to no particular purpose. Could something be made of Paul's project? Maybe. It would be completely different from Butturini's project, and Paul probably doesn't have the chops to do it.

Is Paul conscious of this? Probably not. But at some level I think he picked up on it. It's pretty obvious.