Final Analysis
Roger Hicks considers… ‘Boxing Day’, 2016, by Jack Simpson
‘It is a tribute to the photographer’s capacity to carry a picture through from start to finish’
This picture irresistibly reminds me of the movie Blade Runner, famous for its strange, atmospheric exterior scenes, shot in a future Los Angeles where it is perpetually raining. If you have no imagination it is easy to attack the limited depth of field, blur, unearthly colours and empty shadows. Also, it’s weirdly tall and thin. But that’s the entire point. It takes us into another world.
There’s just enough here that’s recognisable: rubbish bins with graffiti, a shadowy half-seen figure (or is there more than one?), the falling rain just blurred enough to give the impression of relentlessness. The odd format is simultaneously claustrophobic left-to-right and agoraphobic both vertically and front-to-back.
Mean streets
In a sense, it’s a frightening picture: about as mean as mean streets get. Meaner, maybe. Back alleys are seldom attractive, and bins are a powerful symbol of waste, of a society in which we would soon drown in our own rubbish if it were not hauled away regularly. Then we think of the bin lorries: huge, noisy, often operating at dead of night or very early in the mornings, gleaming hydraulic rams lending a dystopian, sciencefictional mien. And is someone raiding a bin? Almost certainly not, but they might be. The ambiguity of the picture is its strength.
It also illustrates brilliantly the ability of a picture to tell a story; or perhaps to give us a framework in which we can create our own stories. Above all it is a tribute to the photographer’s capacity to carry a picture through from start to finish, or maybe even to ‘see’ the picture after it has been taken. It’s a picture that could have been taken by anyone who was in the right place at the right time, but quite apart from putting oneself in the right place at the right time (and it doesn’t look like a terribly attractive time and place) it shows that there are countless ways of interpreting the same scene. Imagine it in monochrome, or deep-field with the camera on a tripod: completely different moods, portraying in effect very different places.
Sometimes I ask photographers for the background to their pictures. Sometimes, for example, if the picture is in a book, the background is written down. This was just one of a group of pictures jammed together in a post on the AP forum, where the photographer uses the name Done_rundleCams, but this one jumped out at me and I didn’t feel the need to know more. You can however see more of his work on nakedmanonawire. blogspot.com.