So Andrew Schofield linked me up to an amazing photographer, Sarah Stolfa, with an amazing book called ‘The Regulars’ – I hastily clicked hoping it wouldn’t be precisely the project I’d undertaken on the premise that I’d grown up with these people around me and they were slowly fading from my life.
It doesn’t quite strike that, but it still rings home on many levels. Which gutted me somewhat. I mean, this idea, this chronology of work I’d set myself up to produce, to document and to keep had just been kinda unseeingly plagiarised by me and I felt like I’d lost originality. That sucks.
But I thought back to the amazing visiting lecturer we had this Wednesday. Dinu Li has been commissioned for a few of his projects and he made it clear that the people who commission you do so because of the way you view the world. The way you see things. Not anyone else. You. That’s why you’re being commissioned to do it. So have arrogance, know that as a Photographer you view the world in a unique way and as an individual with a journey to the present as anomalous as the next person – you broadcast an entirely different perspective also.
So with that in mind I feel despite similarities in subject matter, I had something to add to this portrayal of the Pub regular.
The most important aspect of the work of Stolfa that I saw though, was the deconstructing text residing it. It made statements I hadn’t even begin to think about; like the idea of a ‘Regular’ in a broader sense of the term as opposed to how I’ve viewed them in regards to being nothing more than a consistent visitor to a pub. It expands on the idea that a regular is more than a stranger but not quite a deep friend.
Part of me agrees, part of me doesn’t. I think that’s based on what I discussed before about the idea of perspectives. I mean, I’ve lived in this pub for a long time, this is my home as well as my work. The people that come here each and every day I see more than my own family. They feel like they are family. We seem to posses a connection outside of a friendship. It feels odd to define people between 40 and 80 as friends. They seem more like parents, or grandparents. Some I love, some I despise. Some I look up to, some disgust me. But it’s the raw honesty and the microcosm of the walks of life that appeal to me so much. In what is seemingly a quiet city centre pub, there is an overwhelming array of stories, positive and negative.
So how do I deal with that? I eradicate it all and produce the most unappealing flat representation of each one willing – and allow their face to tell that story instead. Even the term ‘Rogues Gallery’ removes the intuitive inclination that these people are regulars at a small local pub. So hopefully with that in mind and an ever expanding knowledge and depth in Critical Theory (Seriously, it’s so important.) – I think I’m going to turn this project into something really quite great.
Besides, how many rehashes of the same mundane shit do we have to see before we realise no one’s truly original anymore?
