Brendan Bernhard says:
People need food. To get it, they generally need money. And judging by the size of the sign in the window of the bluntly named fast food joint pictured here, they also need to eat more of it than they did in the past.
I've placed this photograph by Andy Peters at the start of this gallery of his street photography because in its sardonic coupling of food and cash, the smooth technology of the ATM machine and the primitive bleating of our bellies, he displays a dry wit you'll become familiar with while putting us on notice that here is a street photographer with an instinctive sense of how a consumer society works. Yes, you need money for food. You also need it for clothes, shelter, smart phones, streaming music and all the shiny accessories that separate society's winners from its losers. In other words, this is a photographer who is doing more than just looking for a sufficiently cute or quirky visual "hook" to hang a usable street shot from, despite a keen interest in aesthetics. He aims higher than that, and more often than not, he gets there.
Brendan Bernhard says:
Impressed by his street photography, I sent Peters a brief note over Flickr mail. Among other things, I asked him whereabouts in England he lived. The next day he uploaded this photograph -- a response that not only answered my question, but did so with impressive economy and wit.
Like a lot of Peters' photos, this one is both socially informative and subtly menacing. Although the tribally tattooed street cleaner in the foreground has his eyes on an ad to the left for a dog-rescue company, the power of the image derives from the sense that he may not just be following but stalking the well-dressed man in front of him. If so, the crude yellow of his shirt, and the dehumanizing municipal information printed on it, only adds to the undercurrent of class-division and potential harm that permeates this image of life on one of England's "charming" cobble-stone streets.
Both men have shaved heads, but there any similarity ends. The Worcester City Council employee has embossed his football-shaped skull with designs of aggressively in-your-face ink, while that of the man in front of him is sleekly entrepreneurial. That the street-cleaner is "at work" is humiliatingly obvious from his uniform. The other man also looks as if he is on his way to work, only to the sort of upscale employment our friend in the foreground will never experience. Whether read as a social document or as something more psychological, like a scene from a novel by Patricia Highsmith or a satirical snapshot in the vein of Martin Amis, this is a dead-on slice of contemporary Engish life.
Brendan Bernhard says:
Although he already knew his way around a 35mm camera by 1982, Peters stopped taking photographs in 1996 and only started again when he got a Canon 350d in 2010. (He now uses a Fuji X100S.)
It's possible that the long lay-off may have sharpened his receptivity when, after 15 years or so, he began walking the streets with a camera again, armed with nothing but an artist's eye and a native feel for English history and culture. Like someone who returns home after a lengthy period abroad, he was fully alive to the changes English society had undergone.
Brendan Bernhard says:
This is the center of London, probably on a Friday or a Saturday night, when similar scenes are played out in city centers all over England. Peters has several photographs like this, and they may remind some of Maciej Dakowicz's famous portrayals of binge-drinking chaos in "Cardiff After Dark."
I chose this particular photograph because it catches a moment of real violence, and because I like the odd balance between the action-packed left-hand side of the frame versus the comparative emptiness of the right-hand side, with the dividing line provided by the classically distraught date or girlfriend of one of the three fighting men as she looks on helplessly, clutching her smart black pocketbook...
Like her, the men are young, white, draped in expensive clothes, and probably employed by well-established companies. "Street Fighting Man," "Saturday Night's Alright for Fighting".... The English have always liked to fight, but in the past they used to fight other countries, or other races, or even just the fans of opposing soccer teams. Now they mainly seem to fight each other, whether they have any reason to or not.
Brendan Bernhard says:
There are police all over the place in Peters' street photography, although it's often hard to tell what they're doing exactly, or why they're in certain places and not in others (see photo above, for example).
The woman in this photograph has attracted the attention of no less than three police officers. The look of mildly bewildered curiosity on her face suggests that she has absolutely no idea why. Perhaps she has been charged with the crime of sitting on a doorstep. (The poet W.H. Auden once noted appreciatively that if nothing else, the earth, "our solar fabric," is an entity "on which the clumsy and sad may all sit down," but this may no longer be the case.) It is also possible that she is a foreigner who doesn't speak English, or that the police themselves, captured by Peters' camera in mid-discussion, are as confused about what is going on as she appears to be.
Brendan Bernhard says:
A bit more mayem. Note how the passivity of the bystanders in the background neatly mimics that of the figures in the advertisements lining the shop windows behind them. ("You are what we advertise" would be a good neo-Orwellian slogan for our times.) Note also that almost all the onlookers are south Asian, while the men being handcuffed and the plainclothes officers cuffing them (so that's where the police are!) are white. The English used to go abroad and boss the "natives" around, if more kindly than most imperialists. Now the "natives" go to England to watch the English boss each other around.
Brendan Bernhard says:
This lushly gorgeous black and white image by "andypeters 1958" (his Flickr moniker) shows how you can still find plentiful examples of what England would have looked like, more or less, in the year (1958) Peters was born. Even in color it would be jarringly alien.
Nostalgia for the U.S. of the 1930's, '40's, and (to a lesser extent) '50's, has always had the star-studded, glamor-drenched iconography of Hollywood to keep it alive and kicking in our imaginations. France, being French, has managed to perform the same trick largely on the strength of unbeatable elegance and enough talented artists of all kinds to record the scenes.
Perhaps the English feel differently, but to a foreigner the same period in England tends to feel more quaint than alluring. One can be touched by it, but not excited. For me, this photograph illustrates that notion with almost eerie precision.
Brendan Bernhard says:
There are hints of comedy and satire in many of Peters' photographs. This is an excellent example. Taken in isolation, that's all it is. Viewed along with the rest of his work, it becomes a witty epigraph for a society that has chosen willful myopia over anything approaching 20-20 vision.
Brendan Bernhard says:
In Peters' vision of contemporary England, only children and dogs are innocent. The children are generally cute -- and in his portraits of them, lovingly idealized -- while the dogs tend to be the solid, reliable, no-nonsense canines favored by the homeless, by gangs of endlessly lounging, defiantly scruffy street kids, and all those who've regretfully concluded that the society of humans, especially in its corporate and commercial aspects, has no "immediate" plans to include them in any of its future economic schemes....
So while children are essentially celebrated for not yet having had a chance to be sullied by the "system," these ultra-doggy dogs no city slicker would be seen dead with are prized both for filling a social void and as faithful symbols of fickle human dispossession.
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