Tourist (2020-2022)
GoPro camera
9/61 images. Photobook. 20x25cm

Though the circular fluorescent bulb took an age to fully fire up, Elsie Hayes would only ever switch the living room light on once the brown and substantial double-sided curtains were meticulously closed. The hooks below the pelmet with its dusted ornaments made a desperate sound across the railing, as if startled into life each night. Out of the darkness, long-dead moth silhouettes could be seen behind the patterned frosted glass of the ceiling light, before vanishing again along with a strobe-like glimpse of any face sat somewhere about the room. Nobody moved and minutes seemed to pass in the long intervals of the richest darkness, refreshed into blackness after each short blink of light. Once, my older brother dared to disrupt this routine, before the violent pull and arrangement of those curtains came in such a panic of disapproval from our nan that no one ever dared repeat this, understanding without explanation that no passer-by or anyone who happened to be looking on from another window at that very moment could ever be allowed to glimpse the life and things beyond that thick white net curtain. Its more decorative pattern at the very bottom meant someone would have to be in the rose bushes to see anything in. Just before going to bed this routine was repeated in reverse across the downstairs with every light turned off before each curtain opened, which meant only the harrowing ambient light from the silent street outside would light our way silently to bed.

I originally bought the second-hand GoPro to sit on my handlebars or helmet with the vague intention of recording my daily commute, or even to capture the increasing hostility I found out in the world on my bike—the opposite of what I expected in the autumn of 2020 due to things as they were. By winter, I realised the camera was instead providing a record of how much I browsed evening windows as I passed by. Around this time, I’d often visit the local library over my lunch break to pull the same Edward Hopper book from the shelf, who seemed to be asking questions of what it is to be in other people’s company and the lack thereof from the 1920’s onwards. It also occurred to me that Alfred Hitchcock understood the intense, delicate bond we have with one another, and what it is to be starved of such bonds and what the physical manifestation of all this loneliness and confusion might actually look like. I discovered the word crytoscopophilia (the desire to look through people’s windows when passing by) in the same library, and began to notice such behaviour in others more often until the idea became about the act of looking itself.

Having lived in a basement flat for 7 years on a street with a vets just a few doors along, I became used to a disproportionate amount of animal lovers suddenly delighting at the sight of the ginger cat often out on the damp porch’s small grey felt roof. I tore down the net curtains the landlords left behind the moment I moved in, and put a desk and computer in the mouldy room underneath that roof, jutting awkwardly out from the grand terraced building containing five flats, described as a handy cloak room and entrance by the estate agents. Either side of us at 11 and 13, the owners occupied every floor up. A pair of legs on the raised pathway from the road, would often turn into someone doubling back and crouching down making cat noises through the peeling paint of the railings, reaching across the rotting stairs that made up two-thirds of the view out of those sash windows to beckon the cat. People simply couldn’t help but look upon our life and the furniture arrangement. Crytoscopophilia. Once, lying on the sofa, I watched a woman take a video of the cat for a moment before turning her phone onto the flat. I had no desire to pull the curtains at a particular time. My annoyance and hypocrisy gave way to acceptance and I began to simply study the behaviour of those who passed by instead.

Before this, I briefly rented a 2 bedroom eighteenth century townhouse over 3 floors I couldn’t afford just along from a small public library. The house had gracefully settled into an awkward posture that pushed the window facing the busyish street into a thrillingly eccentric arrangement of convex rectangles, which seemed nothing compared to the even older building next door housing a restaurant. In the evening, I could hear muffled conversation and irregular laughter through the walls alongside the occasional heavy scraping and eventual final placement of knife, fork and spoon. Next to this restaurant further along, stood a themed café with yet more logic-defying windows where the staff dressed up in period costume to serve high tea. People posed in front of these windows and took pictures, laughing at the implausibility of it all. I gave in and put an eye-height net curtain up and observed the shapes of the figures below it, their colours, what they were saying—all these things fascinated and repulsed me.

None of this attempts to disguise the moral ambiguity of the project, but like all street photography, the protagonists are the unwitting stars, as is the architecture in the composed image here within the heavy black frame of dark. Through photography, Walker Evans and Bruce Davidson approached the same subject of the New York City Subway in different ways in the late 1930’s and the 1980’s, and at times I was reminded of both. Surreptitious, and then obvious. I looked odd walking about with the GoPro strapped to my head, but I wanted to reproduce this glance into other people’s lives without daring to stop or even reduce speed either way, to consider the lives we will never lead or hope to understand, attracted to domesticity and movement in the light. At times I sensed how Edward Hopper felt out walking the streets of New York City at night, seeking after-dark glimpses of life illuminated behind panes of glass in every commonplace setting as he passed by, or Valie Export with Super 8 cameras strapped to her body front and back, reflecting on the perception of space and literal points of view in Adjunct Dislocations.

What I eventually found was that the glass seemed to retain its authority, its barrier to the world. What I also found interesting on these trips across the South West (the place I have now lived for longer than the Midlands and still struggle to see as home), was the often much more brazen attitude of others, caught by something irresistible enough to be unconcerned by anyone else’s presence in any kind of street I went down. Stopped in their tracks and even doubling-back after a moment’s thought to look through a window, distracted by the alluring mix of the public and the private. Dog walkers seemed adept at taking the opportunity of some sniffing about or other to glare at something more interesting instead, and I began to wonder whether the occupants of the nicer houses kept themselves exposed for longer on purpose—or even exposed permanently, as if welcoming the intrusion of attention from without instead of simply being laissez-faire. I also wondered more and more over the course of the 17 month-long project, what Elsie Hayes might think of such strange etiquette on the Falcon Lodge estate.