The Library: Unofficial Britain by Gareth E. Rees

Read by Marcel Krueger:

During the first weeks of Coronavirus lockdown in the Republic of Ireland, where I live, everyone was confined to a two-kilometre radius around our houses to help prevent the spread of the virus. I was lucky to have an obvious sliver of Irish history within my 2 km-circle, a sliver that shows that even a small town like Dundalk has its place in history and displays that proudly when you know where to look: on my street is Seatown Castle, actually the bell tower of a 13th century Franciscan monastery. It was once plundered by invading Scots, Scots brought over by Edward the Bruce in 1315 in his claim for the Irish crown. He crowned himself High King of Ireland in Dundalk the same year, just a few streets away, where today Micheal McCourt’s pub can be found.

But just around the corner from that pile of medieval stones, on Mill Street, is another reminder of history, one that is not as flashy as the Seatown Castle but maybe as equally important for the town. Sitting in the sidewalk is a rusty-brown water meter cover, one that must have been set here at some point in the 1980, when (long before water meters were a political issue in Ireland) someone in Louth County Council bought these from Wabash, Indiana, a small town of 10,000 inhabitants which produced the hexagonal water meter covers that to this day are strewn around this equally small town on the east coast of Ireland and proudly bear the inscription “Ford Meter Box Co., Wabash, Indiana U.S.A.”.

In his latest book, Gareth E. Rees equally focuses on these unobtrusive landmarks of the quotidian (albeit more bigger ones), landmarks that form the backdrop to our lives every day that might get unnoticed by many but are, after a fashion, holding the fabric of the world together. While in his previous books, Marshland (Influx Press, 2013), The Stone Tide (Influx Press, 2018) and Car Park Life (Influx Press 2019), Rees mainly focused either on a specific place - the  Hackney Marshes or Hastings - or on an ultra-local theme like that of car parks, Unofficial Britain is a more wide-reaching book that covers most of the island of Great Britain in search for what the author calls “anaologue relics of a bygone era before digital technology, mobile phones and the internet“, the structures of modernity that have existed for the last seventy years everywhere around us: electricity pylons, power stations, multistorey car parks, suburban housing estates. 

The book is divided into nine chapters plus introduction and epilogue, each dedicated to the “non-places” of today and their mythology, located in Scotland, England and Wales. By mixing architectural details with urban legends, ghost stories and bits and pieces from his own biography when writing about ring roads and roundabouts, flyovers and underpasses, Rees – who is also the founder of the Unofficial Britain website that was around long before the book and equally dedicated to the mysteries of the quotidian - shows us that these locations and buildings are as important as the holloways, medieval churches and cursed oaks of a British countryside. And even more important than the idea of a countryside that in many cases only exists in the imagination of over-romantic nature writers and the xenophobic fever dreams of UKIP and Britain First, like when he writes about the Redcliffe Flyover that existed in Bristol from 1967 to 1998:

Like the Eiffel Tower, built as a temporary structure never intended to be an enduring Parisian landmark, the Redcliffe Flyover became totemic. It came to represent fun, thrills and amusement; rare moments of child-like wonder in the midst of a tough, troubled city. A similar process of appropriation can happen to other unlikely landmarks such as chimneys, communication masts and factories. As we grow up among them they become ingrained within our memories and shared history. What can seem at first ugly and soulless can gradually come to accumulate emotional resonance through the sheer power of persistence.

At the same time Rees is stocktaking: with Unofficial Britain, he has created the standard reference for landscape punk and urban place writing in Britain 2020. Besides his own concrete experiences he uses examples of the works and lives of other important urban explorer artists like Salena Godden, Gary Budden, Nick Papadimitriou, Olivia Laing or Clare Archibald, a veritable who's who of deep topographers. With its honest narration and its accessible language this is the perfect introduction for anyone wondering what the whole psychogeography hogwash is all about; a wonderful ramble through the Brexit Britain of today - warts and all.

But isn't this how we experience a place? For a place is more than bricks and mortar. More than a map. More than a bunch of articles about social deprivation and sneery lists of Britain's worst towns. A place is made of stories and you read and rumours you hear. It is made of prejudices and anxieties, shaped by our past experiences. It is an atmosphere - a synchronicity of light, sound, smell, texture and temperature. 

The only thing I wish Rees would have done was to include Northern Ireland - as wide-reaching as his account of unofficial Britain is, I would be curious to see what the Troubles meant and mean for the urban fabric of the quotidian in this part of Britain across the water; and if what he might have found here made would have been vastly different to those in Scotland, Wales and England. 

For the time being, we keep on living in the pandemic dead future of the 60s and 70s in a time where the future only seems to promise more ruins, more cracked concrete and more neglected estates as government funds run out or are shovelled into offshore accounts while the sea levels are rising. This book is a sober account of the dreams and nightmares of our environment, of the bridges and buildings that really form the fabric of our lives and not the rose-tinted utopias of the past that all the right-wing nincompoops try to sell us; and it will all be just more water meter covers, more concrete poured into flood defences and refugee camps from here on. 

***

Unofficial Britain is published by Elliott&Thompson. 

Marcel Krueger is the Books Editor of Elsewhere: A Journal of Place. His writing has been published in numerous places both online and in print, and he is the author of Babushka’s Journey: The Dark Road to Stalin’s Wartime Camps (I.B. Taurus, 2017) and Iceland: A Literary Guide for Travellers (I.B. Taurus, 2020). You’ll find him on twitter here.

Printed Matters: Flaneur

Photo: Diana Pfammatter

By Sara Bellini

To relaunch our series on physical magazines, we started from the city where, for very obvious reasons, we have spent almost the entirety of the past few months. At the same time we wanted to reach out to the world, to emphasise what has become particularly evident since the beginning of the pandemic: How local and global are connected. Flaneur is a Berlin-based publication that aims at exploring this connection by centering each issue on a single street in all its details, and on how the details that build the individuality of a place also fit in a universal framework. 

Flaneur has a multidisciplinary and collective approach to its subject. This translates into physically exploring a place while collaborating with local creatives and stretching the artistic possibilities across different fields and beyond a predefinite structure. The launch of the Taipei issue in summer 2019 was a twenty-hour festival at HKW in Berlin, merging performance, exhibition, readings and music, to transcend the medium of the magazine and highlight the social fabric at the base of the publication.

While Covid has delayed their production process, we caught up with Flaneur publisher Ricarda Messner and editors in chief Fabian Saul and Grashina Gabelmann.

What are the goals and motivations behind your publication and why did you choose the physical magazine as a form?

Ricarda: The idea for the concept to go with “one street per issue“ was a personal tool to reconnect with known territory. I was born in Berlin and spent most of my life here. There was an urge for me to find my own place within the city without being too overwhelmed, so I started with something that was familiar to me, not knowing what would come out of it. Grashina and Fabian came up with the brilliant editorial framework around this very concrete concept, translating it into an unpredictable but still conceptual approach. So I guess, looking back, it wasn’t so much about the idea of making a magazine but more about establishing this “inner journey“ in an artistic, collaborative way that people can associate themselves with.

You define your creative process as “collaborative, impulsive and unconventional” - what do you mean by that?

Grashina: Since we often arrive at a place without knowing the city, its inhabitants or the street we will choose, having no flat-plan, editorial plan, or financial structure, we consider our method to be quite impulsive and unconventional. I think any magazine is collaborative but we emphasise this point as the content isn't written by us about artists but is made by artists specifically for the magazine and its concept.

How do you pick a place and what makes a place?

Grashina: We arrive in the chosen city oftentimes without knowing it at all. We might have one or two contacts but we basically start from the position of knowing nothing and no one and just walk. We mostly walk alone, sometimes with locals who we meet somehow and listen to their stories. Mostly though we let our intuition guide us and the street choice is based on a certain feeling, a sense of curiosity we feel or something disturbing or something for us unusual. Once we decide on the street - and this can take two days or two weeks - we spend almost every day there [for a couple of months].

Fabian: In collaboration with our contributors, we immerse ourselves into the place beyond what meets the eye and beyond the narratives of positivity that travel magazines perpetuate. We allow multi-voiced pieces that not always form one solid perspective but rather create a fragmented image that does not confirm [standard] exciting narratives but allows for contradiction. It is a very psychogeographic approach. The flaneur is concerned with things that may soon vanish and thus he walks the line between being a melancholic nostalgic but also being able to project into the future and beyond the realm of the visible, an avantgarde figure. Flaneuring is about seeing the plurality of truths in the urban fabric that surrounds us. It is those dark sides flaneuring can lead us to and the plurality of truths that form the literary realm we see the magazine in.

Photo: Diana Pfammatter

What’s your relationship with the creative scene of the cities you feature?

Grashina: Our contributors are chosen once we get to know the place and meet people. We like to call it a domino-effect where meeting one person will lead us to meeting three more etc. In Brazil we met 120 people during our time there but of course not everyone became a contributor - that crystalizes sometimes immediately and sometimes after weeks, through an organic process based on spending time with people, trusting our intuition and having great dialogues/walks.

You are about to launch a podcast - what are your plans for it and what’s its relationship with the magazine?

Grashina: Each season will feature a street we have already worked with. Season 1 will revisit Kantstrasse [in Berlin]. The podcast - though it's almost more like an audio play - does not simply regurgitate the content that one can find in the magazine, but approaches those themes in new ways. The audio format allows us to experiment with storytelling in a different way than the magazine does. What stays the same is that the content of the podcast, like the magazine, is fragmented, literary, subjective and experimental. We performed a sneak preview of Episode 1 on the rooftop of HKW this summer. We wanted to experiment with what a live collective listening session could be. There were four performers and three musicians performing and two voices that had been pre-recorded. We intend to keep experimenting with bringing the podcast into different spaces for audiences. 

What are your plans for the next issue and how has Covid changed them?

Grashina: We were meant to start production in Paris for Issue 09 this Spring but Covid obviously delayed this. We are now back to speaking with the Goethe Institut in Paris, establishing new timelines and funding opportunities and plan to continue production this fall. Six months after lock-down began in Berlin, we feel a bit more able to assess the situation and will see this as an opportunity to challenge our own approach and come up with new methodologies.

Find out where you can purchase Flaneur in your city or order it online. Support independent bookshops and publishers!

Skytrails

By Leonard Yip:

Kruger National Park, South Africa
June 2019

We spend the day in search of lionesses – all afternoon in the jeep, through the golden dust clouds of the Sabi Sands, out onto the low bareness of the bushveldt at the height of its winter. 

Jess, our ranger at the wheel of the jeep, tears off-road across brambles and dirt ditches, stopping every so often where bush gives way to sand. The Shangaan tracker with us, aptly named Advice, dismounts here: tracing the padded footfalls of the big cats in that pliant, wind-dusted earth, ghosting into the acacias and re-appearing again with a new set of directions in which to chase.

We never do see the lionesses that day, but the journey back to the lodge is marked with a quieter wonder. The sun sets and sinks and kisses the earth in fire, composing the leafless branches of fever trees into sharp silhouettes. Dark shapes of elephant herds in the distance move along the horizon line. In between the cold clarity of moonrise and the sun’s final dip beneath the Drakensberg mountains, there is a moment that seems to hang long and suspended in the clear air. Unprepared for the quickness of nightfall in the bush, I crane my neck upwards and the oncoming dark smothers me in its sudden descent: an entire sky dissolving to black.

Staring into its enormity, I lose my sense of perspective as it settles across the ends of the veldt. I sit in mute, fearful mesmerisation, this vast and unknowable thing erasing scale and obliterating our field of vision. Landmarks disappear and the roads before us are swallowed up into an inky chasm. My stomach lurches and I feel like I’m falling, leaping upwards into the infinity of everything I do not know. I reach reflexively for the guardrails of the jeep.

This uncanny, reversed vertigo clears only when the stars wink themselves into existence. The shapes of the veldt resolve themselves again faintly by the pinpricks of light. Cloud-like, the galaxy begins to pattern itself across the sky, looking for all the world like a rippling reflection of the road below us. Jess slows the jeep and leaves the lights dead. She and Advice teach us to navigate by the stars, locating the Southern Cross, mapping a southward bearing from where its lines bisect along the axis. They tell us the stories and folktales of the Shangaan bushmen – that the Milky Way is thought to be the trail walked by the spirits of their ancestors, and how a girl once threw the sparks from an ember’s core deep into the night sky, where they gathered into the constellations that guide the sojourner and the wayfarer home. 

Sat there listening, I am amazed at how acts of imagination become so closely tied to acts of pathfinding. I think of how writers and etymologists have followed the origins of the word ‘learn’ to the Old English ‘leornian’, meaning ‘to get knowledge’. The imprint of its lilting consonants and rolling vowels on our tongues trails even further back to the Proto-Germanic ‘liznojan’; to find a track. Learning, then, carries the same sense as following a track, making known the unknown through the tracing of one sand-swept footprint at a time. Even across cultures, how we make meaning of the world so often finds its way back to the very act of finding a way – galaxies becoming ground, stars turning to soil, walking and tracking as learning and understanding. Garnette Cardogan once wrote that ‘walking is, after all, interrupted falling.’ His words spring back to my mind as Jess and Advice map out the night sky for me, the resonance of trailblazing disrupting my sensation of upwards descent.

Advice turns on the searchlight, and the beam lances hot and bright ahead of us. The jeep trundles along the trail home. The air goes wild with the noise of the bush coming to life, and hyenas navigate by lone stars rising to their shadowed kills. Somewhere, lions roar into the night.

***

Leonard Yip is a Singaporean writer with an interest in landscape, people, place and faith - and often the intersections where these meet. He recently graduated with an MPhil in Modern and Contemporary Literature from the University of Cambridge, and his work can be found at leonardywy.wordpress.com. 

The Beautiful Abandoned: Andrew Emond’s photography of urban decay

Photo: Andrew Emond

By William Carroll: 

Andrew Emond’s Instagram page feels like the visual diary of an apocalypse, a compendium of photographs that chart a beautiful, devastating collapse. The gutted maws of baroque fireplaces leer out at empty rooms, with dusty tchotchkes and ripped hardcovers gathering about the mantelpieces. Old staircases, their bannisters splintered and broken, lead up and down invariably to darker unknowns. In one photograph, uploaded on April 28th 2020, a disordered back office is punctuated by an old CTR television set, showing static. A piece of stock art, parodying the halcyon days of the Hudson River School, dangles limply above it. Elsewhere, in a photograph taken in an old office complex, a prosthetic CPR mannequin sits upright among a pile of assorted metal debris. “Everything’s Fine,” Emond’s caption reads. 

Based in Toronto, and using a Samsung Galaxy S8 to take his images, Emond is a photographer to whom urban decay, domestic neglect, and the general collapse of capitalist spaces pose an irresistible lure. Mostly shot in square format, a technique which Emond admitted often confuses people into thinking he’s shooting on film, his images are like dystopian Wes Anderson still frames. Centrally aligned, with often a visual pun substituting the need for a lengthy caption, the images are frequently colourful in spite of all their internal disorder. Armchairs with stuffing foaming their edges are often captured front-and-centre, whilst mirrors (often broken) refract what lies beyond the frame ad infinitum. The sheer ubiquity of these scenes that Emond happens upon – ‘I find 95% of these places myself’ – suggests that the equivalent collapses of public space are happening everywhere simultaneously. For each new unit erected on an industrial estate in record time, all polished metal and girders, there is another hulking wreck a few miles away in which birds roost and wild animals haunt. Emond has no time or interest in the former. 

When I first came across Emond’s photography on Instagram, I was immediately struck by two particularities of his profile. Firstly, his style of so-called ‘Abandoned Porn’ – an aesthetic movement particularly in vogue during this age of ‘dark tourism’ -  was as visually arresting as it was disquieting. Whose front room is this, that lies so unloved and in such squalor? Where is this office complex, with the glass of its dividing walls and conference rooms scattered across the floor like so much snow? These spaces seemed at once anonymous and yet tied inextricably to their recent abandonment. I wanted to know where, when, who. At the same time, I was also strangely afraid of the answers. 

Photo: Andrew Emond

When browsing his catalogue of colourful destruction, I was struck by his profile’s bio, which reads: ‘Messages from the interior. ’I’d heard that before, but couldn’t quite place it. Eventually, something clicked and I reached out to Emond via direct message. 

“Is the bio line a nod to Walker Evans or am I reading too much into that?” I asked.

“Oh, it’s totally a nod. Glad someone noticed,” he replied. 

The tradition of Evans’ style is evident across Emond’s work – so often is he positioned on the threshold of some devastated scene, haunting the doorway of an apartment left to ruin or turning the corner of a long, snaking corridor. His captions, like Evans, are similarly obscure, obtuse, or metatextual, rarely betraying anything beyond the scene’s immediacy. This brevity extends to subject matter, too. Evans believed in the beauty of the quotidian, and his frequent subjects, especially during the Depression, included rustic kitchens, empty chairs, and tenant farmer shacks slowly eroding in the dustbowl winds. Separated by nearly a century, Emond’s modern answer to Evans’ vernacular, documentary style feels distinctly modern and prescient, doubly so in the current pandemic. 

These abandoned spaces have become familiar to many of us over the last 6 months, and the tragic decline of thriving commercial centres and local businesses has become a plague in of itself. When one set of shutters have fallen, all too often have two more followed suit. In spite of this stark and alarming present we inhabit, Emond’s recording of these spaces far before COVID-19 suggests a certain inevitably. The novel coronavirus may have hastened certain violences, certain collapses, but Emond reminds us that these scenes have been around far longer, and will continue their own ironic propagation as generations change, as the global climate passes its own event horizon, and people continue steadfastly in their living and their dying. To have such a public record of that, and to make it so readily available to anyone with a phone, feels both voyeuristic and yet undeniably creative. Emond isn’t the first person to document abandoned scenes through the medium of photography, but his spartan equipment, use of Instagram, and traditional influences mark a unique and appealing documentarian. 

Beyond the simple aesthetics, there are many literary qualities to Emond’s work and a raft of cinematic influences that likewise bleed in. Tarkovsky’s Stalker (1979) and indeed, the film’s own source material of Roadside Picnic (1972) by the Strugatsky brothers, are immediately called to mind in his darker, industrial scenes where refuse lies scattered and discarded as if by some uncaring, unseen monster. In his more colourful domestic scenes, where the detritus of family life has pooled like floodwater, I can’t help think of Grey Gardens (1975) or even modern television programmes centred around ‘hoarders’ and their obsessive inventorying of everyday life. Our own perverse interests in the spectacle of collapse are widely documented, from Freud’s ‘Death Drive’ to Suzi Mirgani’s Spectacles of Terror (2017), and Emond’s images represent all of these interests in neat, square packages that can be consumed individually or en masse. There will always be photographs to take, always rooms that have been locked for years. This is not a finite pursuit. 

Above all these converging influences and themes in Emond’s work – [which he alludes to in the interview I conducted with him] -  there is a single lyric that I find myself humming, even singing, when looking through his work. It’s from Sebadoh’s ‘Spoiled’, a song made famous for its use in Larry Clark’s controversial coming-of-age film Kids (1995) – a film in which the grimy underside of New York is not a world away from Emond’s tenement interiors. The lyric captures the lure of Emond’s work and why we, as a race, continue to find beauty in our own destruction:

We will wait for tragedy
And scatter helpless to the fire.

As haunting and pertinent as it may be, I can’t help think Emond would find it a bit too on the nose. Evans would too, no doubt. They’re both probably right.

Andrew Emond’s Instagram page

Sketches of China 01: Arrival, Shanghai

Illustration. Mark Doyle

We are extremely pleased to welcome to Elsewhere a series of illustrations and texts that are the result of a collaboration between the writer James Kelly and the illustrator Mark Doyle:

Stepping out of the airport as night falls, boarding the Golden Dragon as the clouds give way to rain, struck at once by the immensity of life on an unimaginable scale, the bus gathering pace as the mythical beast speeds across the tarmac, entering a world of towering high-rises, their windows unlit, all but a few, the empty shapes of the buildings silhouetted instantaneously by forks of lightning, cleaving the sky asunder as the rain grows heavier, falling in sheets, monotonous, unrelenting, its drops bursting like grapes on the elevated expressway stretching on into the night, keenly aware of a sense of detachment, of separating from home, cast adrift in a landscape of frenetic development, a feeling of unstoppable momentum, the bus unable, despite the distance covered, to break free from a metropolis as dystopian as it is endless, from an aberrance from nature on a monstrous scale, yet savouring all the while the promise of discovery, of adventure, immersed in the moment, looking neither forward nor back.

***

James Kelly is a writer and translator with a strong interest in landscape and time. Read more of his work at www.geosoph.scot/writing/.

Mark Doyle is an artist and illustrator working in painting, sculpture, printmaking and digital media. See more of his work at www.markdoyle.org and on instagram @markdoyleartist.

The Loch Insh Osprey

Photo: Duncan MacDonald

By Merryn Glover:

The ospreys have gone. I went away for a week and when I got back, the strath had slipped into autumn and the eyrie above Loch Insh was empty. On the same day, my two sons returned to university. Their courses will be online, but after five months of being back under parental wings they are ready to stretch their own again. They came back to our Highland home at the start of lockdown and two weeks later, the osprey arrived, flouting all restrictions in their 6,700 kilometre journey from west Africa.

The male came first and began to ready the nest, a large twiggy crater the size of a truck tyre. Balanced precariously at the top of a tree on a small island, it has commanding views of the Cairngorms to the south-east, the Monadhliaths to the north-west and the River Spey between. Their arrival always speaks to me of Mark, a wildlife guide friend who first told me their story on these shores five years ago; he was diagnosed the following April with a brain tumour and died in April two years later, leaving a wife and three sons. As he was lowered into the earth of Insh churchyard, the newly returned osprey soared above.

Most osprey pair for life, only coming together during the breeding season when they return to the same place. The female arrives a week or so after her mate and my diary note from April 16th says: ‘Both perched on the nest, looking at each other from time to time and touching beaks.’ As the female adds to the eyrie, the male woos her by delivering trout. One of the few birds of prey to live almost entirely on fish, osprey can see their underwater catch from 40 metres up and have reversible talons that help them grip. Working from home this year, I paid closer attention to my near neighbours. I saw the male perform his sky dance, crying out as he rose in sweeping circles above the nest with a long reed in his talons. The female sat on the spear tip of a dead tree nearby, motionless and haughty as Horus.

By the beginning of May, she had settled down in the nest, presumably won over and incubating eggs, and I watched and waited through the lengthening days and the greening of the strath. At last, in early June, tiny heads appeared above the twigs – one, two… three! A beautiful, bumper brood and the most an osprey is likely to hatch. I caught glimpses of the mother feeding them and the gradual rise of their small, fluttering bodies.

One evening, a large heron flew up the river towards the nest and the male osprey bore down on it with vicious shrieking and flapping of wings. To my astonishment, the heron did not beat a hasty retreat but kept circling, evading the ever-more strident attack. Finally after several minutes of this aerial dogfight, the heron – twice the size of its assailant - made its stately way off down the loch.

Summer swelled and the loch thickened with green rushes and the growing company of birds: curlews, oyster-catchers, martins, geese, ducks and swans, many trailing flotillas of young in their wake. Both my boys were summer babies and these long, light days remind me of that ecstatic, exhausted time. By mid-July the osprey chicks were stalking the rim of the eyrie, stretching their wings and lifting for moments into the air while the parents sat in nearby trees calling. To urge their young to fledge, osprey gradually reduce the fish they deliver, literally starving them off the nest. We have not resorted to such ploys but, like all parents, we know the push and pull of need and independence.

Who can know if they have witnessed the first flight of a bird? I cannot, but I thrilled to see them gradually take to the skies, their voices ringing in the amphitheatre of this hill-bordered loch. Who can hold onto life? It was at this time that our beloved friends, Mark’s family, moved away.

All five osprey were in the nest when I looked in late August, but within two weeks, they were gone. The mother goes first, travelling up to 400 kilometres a day till she is back in Senegal. The father follows and then the young, flying all the way down over the Sahara. They travel alone. No one has fathomed how they know the route or the destination or how, three years later, they know the way back. It is mystery and miracle. All I know is that in the great, thick hush of these five months, when my own dear ones came and left, the osprey’s journey has passed right through my heart.

***

Merryn Glover’s stories and plays have been broadcast on Radio Scotland and Radio 4, her first novel, A House Called Askival, was published in 2014 and a second, set in the Highlands, will be published in 2021. She was the first Writer in Residence for the Cairngorms National Park and is currently writing a non-fiction book in response to Nan Shepherd's The Living Mountain. Her features have appeared in The National, BBC Countryfile Magazine, Northwords Now, The Guardian Weekly and The Guardian.

Michael Schmidt at Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin

Ein-heit (U-ni-ty) by Michael Schmidt

By Sara Bellini

When I think about the photography of Michael Schmidt, I think of Berlin. I think of his shots of Wedding* and of the Werkstatt für Photographie (Photography Workshop) he founded in Kreuzberg* in the 1970s. But you could argue that what really captures the attention in his photos is not the subject, but the way it’s presented.

Michael Schmidt was a policeman and a self-taught photographer. Some of his first notable works were commissioned by the Berlin Senate or districts of the city, as if the city commissioned him to reflect on itself. If we look at these series, like The Working Woman in Kreuzberg (1975), we see a documentary style, which became more and more abstract over the years.

The exhibition at Hamburger Bahnhof - Museum für Gegenwart is the first retrospective in Michael Schmidt’s native city in over twenty-five years. It encompasses forty years of photography, between 1965 and 2014, and it shows Berlin shifting from the post-war period to division to a re-unified city, tapering out in his last project on nature. Cityscapes, portraits, backyards, human bodies, pigs and apples find their place in the rooms of the station-turned-museum. From Wedding to Kreuzberg, from Waffenruhe (Ceasefire) to Ein-heit (U-ni-ty), from Stadtbilder (Cityscapes) to Lebensmittel (Food), from Frauen (Women) to Selbst (Self) to Natur (Nature), each project and aspect of Michael Schmidt as a photographer is there. And yet he always evades our complete understanding at the last moment, as if our reading of his work was never exhaustive.

Natur (Nature) by Michael Schmidt

I would recommend following the chronological order conceived by the curators to fully appreciate a changing city as well as Michael Schmidt’s evolution as an artist; from black and white to sporadic colour units to pictures of pictures and cropping techniques. From ‘The Wall’, that makes it clear where and when the image belongs, to a close-up on an anonymous wall that could be anywhere. I find it somehow poetic that Michael Schmidt’s final art book, published when he was already seriously ill, focused on the beauty of nature, transcending the urban landscape and ultimately human life itself.

The exhibition will reach first Paris and then Madrid in 2021 and will end in Vienna in 2022. Berliners will be able to see it until January the 17th, wearing a face mask and after buying a time-slot ticket - online or at the venue. Check out the SMB website for up-to-date opening hours and health measures. 

***

* Wedding and Kreuzberg are districts of Berlin

Dawn

By Emily Oldfield: 

My relationship with the dawn. For a long time I have sought the quiet spaces, the unannounced areas, the moments ripe with the tension of possibility. That is the dawn, to me – a place uneasy with potential, strange and malleable edges, inviting experimentation before the day declares itself… and the usual routines and cycles with it.  

I have risen early for as long as I can remember, at least always early enough to still catch the last imprint of dawn like thumbmarks on the morning. But to be in dawn itself is a place altogether; perhaps the inevitable edgeland, twisted in its temporality - a map of furrowed brows in restless beds, the taste of dread deep in the palette, the futile attempts to re-enter dreams in the dead hour before the alarm. The time some wish they could sleep forever. 

When, aged 18, I lived in St Andrews on the Scottish East coast, I would enter dawn each morning with two trainer-strapped feet, an oversized hoodie and leggings. 18: the same  number of degrees the sun is below the horizon at astronomical dawn. At 5.30am, the sea was a sensation, not yet separate from the sky, the air stirred thick with the sting of salt. Light diffused as a kind of colour seepage against the thick black bulk of the sky, the tide all the time turning its rhythms like endless wands of chalk worked down a blackboard. Shhht, shhht, shhht.

I set myself to that rhythm – the surge of the sea and my own ticking compulsion to push… push onwards, beyond. The cold flex of the air flashed through my lungs as I lurched out of Albany Park – the pebble-dashed plot of university accommodation in a peculiar crater by East Sands – and along the shorefront. The blanket of blackness was a comfort, billowing at its edges into a yellowing, almost coppery bruise as the first spools of sunlight fought through. This marked nautical dawn. Here the sun sits at 12 degrees below the horizon, melting like a layer between land and water…and two different bodies are born. 

It is an addictive feeling, running at the edges. Dawn on one side, my own body at the other; underfed and overstretched, burning at the chords of muscle like a candle wick collapsing into itself, light leaching out into the battered bronze of a new day. 

Within five minutes of the run I would come to East Sands harbour, making a note to hold my balance across the wooden footbridge, its slats alternately swollen and withered through the warp of the water, like teeth time-swilled with soda. The stench of gutted fish and engine oil. 

I ran very much as routine and each morning the view would typically be the same on reaching the harbour. On the end of a block of dwellings closest to the water, three men would be hunched in a paraffin-lamp lit garage, looking out to sea… to the red smears settling on water, lights of caution, of warning. Bearded and booted, they regarded my bluster past them with apparent contempt at first, which settled uneasily into a kind of acknowledgement. Outside the garage, various blue-edged ropes spooled across stone like cut-off, dried-out plaits… the hair of some washed-up marine creature, now hard and lashed under salt crust.

Approaching civil dawn – the time when most objects start to become clear, the sun at just 6 degrees below the horizon - sometimes I would have to dodge the lobster pots, their pink-orange cages and little hinged doors turning them into a sparkling series of grottoes. Seaweed was scattered everywhere in its ragged carpeting, pustules of black and grey-green bladderwrack leaking into standing water. The occasional galled cry of a gull would puncture the air. 

I enjoyed the unspoken intimacy of seeing the fishermen each morning, the suspended questions of our occupation, assumptions hanging between us, but also a kind of confirmation; you proceed with your task, I proceed with mine. Rather than uncertainty, it fused a kind of communion - solid and salt webbed and somehow reassuring. I would pass them and then make my way up the side of the ruined cathedral, suspended high on the coast edge like a shell on a spit. The pathway would be peppered with the petroleum-sheen of standing lighting, the cathedral itself once one of the largest buildings in Scotland – consecrated in 1318. Another 18. There was the cartilage of the gable walls and a section of South Transept, the bulk and body of the place flayed away over time into sea foam. It was ransacked in 1559, abandoned by 1561. 

The rasp and slap of the sea simmered to kind of snore as I stumbled up steps, ran past the cathedral and angled towards the town of St Andrews itself, starting at the bottom end of Market Street, the cut of the cobbles blunt on the bottom of my feet.

I ran over West Sands, past the many-starred hotel by the golf links where I worked a couple of shifts as a waitress. Strangers gazes grasping at my ill-fitting uniform, my movements clumsy and awkward. Men with their flourishing gestures and uninvited hands, the view polished and mowed, even the beach opening up in an extended flank of white sand. I staggered with a tray of gourmet desserts… and ran from that. 

I ran to the public swimming baths for a hurried shower when the shared one broke. I ran into other students, their faces closed. I ran even when a childhood friend visited in the middle of winter. After seven hours on an overcrowded coach from Accrington, she shared my single bed whilst we watched Trainspotting on the smeared screen of an old laptop, the type that permanently needs to charge. I felt a little like that as I ran, leaving my friend in bed, picking up friction from the street in a kind of necessary energy. Repeated. 

I ran when the Northern Lights swirled through the sky, a mottled green like that of buds pulsing on the edge of blossom, plucky against the dark.

When people refer to running and places – it is typically in terms of the trajectory of a beginning and end, a start and destination, to and from. For me, running became an attempt of touch; to push myself, not only forwards, but into. The thickening thud of foot through stones, then sand, then surf. I craved to feel the absolution of everything, the timelessness of land-lock. 

I was even preparing my body for it, skimming down to the quick, coaxing the bone’s proximity to skin - and then to surrounds. A closeness created through how strongly limbs felt every lurch and lift, the wind chiselling cheeks and shoulders. As the weather grew colder, I pushed – in childhood shorts and a t-shirt – to take higher and higher routes. This, after all, seemed a place of straight lines, people knew their allegiances: onwards. I could feel my legs filing down precise points, the compass needle caught in the mind’s eye and fixed on N. Nada. Nothing. None.

Running was a place during those months, just as the dawn was - their combined woozy mixture of experimentation, intimacy, release. In lectures, my legs fizzed with friction, my tailbone scoring against the skin of my lower back until it bled beneath carefully-chosen clothes. I felt everything all over. 

It was all over as I aimed for one of the rockiest routes along the east coast path, a tide-bolstered breeze buffeting my knees, dawn still dappling the pelt of the sky approaching 6.30am. It was January and spangles of orange-edged sunlight were starting to cast themselves outwards, catching gorse on one side, sheer cliffs on the other.

Brown fur suddenly stood out against gritty, salt-studded textures. Stretched a little ahead on the rock-scrambled pathway was a young rabbit, laid on its side, back legs coiled like a comma, twitching. Coming closer, its eyes were swollen bulbous in its head like two live insects glistening, fizzing beneath partially open lids. An amber matter pooled beneath, sticky and strange. 

Myxomatosis; the words wondrous and warped on my tongue as I took in the moment, my face then turning back towards the direction of the town in a kind of helplessness. Dawn-darkness still pervading, but so too the dashes of light, the red pinpoints of potential warning – or reassurance – an assemblage at the end of docks, at the tops of buildings. A reminder; here. My tears smeared the light into a lingering red gleam, the gleam of something else against the skyline. 

Red lights remind us of our capacity to go too far. How we struggle to face up to the land beneath … and yet need to. 

It is now five years since those dawn runs in St Andrews, and I have written this, the words somehow leeching out during the Covid-19 lockdown, lines unfolding in a room of a shared house in Hulme. Inner city Manchester stirs. 

Here I sit and stare out of the window, facing the news that I need to stop running again, the old ghost at the edge of my mind with its grey fingers. The buildings burr with construction, expansion, bulk. 

And at the tops of the cranes there are red lights. 

***

Emily Oldfield is a writer especially drawn to exploring landscape, the feel of place and relationships to it within her work. She is the Editor of Haunt Manchester at Manchester Metropolitan University, explored Winter Hill for the Edgelandia project, and now is probably wandering somewhere in the South Pennines. Grit is her first poetry pamphlet - published by Poetry Salzburg (March 2020) - delving into histories of the Rossendale Valley and The River Irwell, which has continued its thread throughout her life.