Dark Photographs

Ed van der Elsken’s book of photographs, Love on the Left Bank, gives us a fascinating insight into the life actually lived in Paris by the future Situationists, then still rebel Lettrists or Imaginists. The central character, a Mexican—whose point of view the photographer seems to take—has arrived in Paris as a hitchhiker, sleeping out on benches. Soon he makes some new friends and wanders from café to café with an Australian girl, in search of the scene. The book consists mainly of photographs taken in Left Bank cafés, portraits of their denizens napping, embracing, drinking, putting money in the juke-box, playing chess, whispering, selling hashish, reading psychology textbooks, acting as nightclub guides for tourists, begging, playing the guitar, handing out publicity leaflets in the street, painting, grinning, eating cheese sandwiches, sleeping in a news cinema or the metro, arguing, singing, smoking hashish, flirting, getting drunk, picking a fight, dancing, making up, listening to music, just waiting, being sent to jail, dreaming, falling in love. Finally, he returns to Mexico. In fact, it is a very confined life, limited by lack of money and, I suppose, lack of focus, if that’s the word. It seems to be dark all the time. Who knows what happens in the daylight?

- Peter Wollen
'Situationists and Architecture' (NLR April/March 2001)

You mentioned your name as if I should recognize it, but beyond the
obvious facts that you are a bachelor, a solicitor, a freemason, and
an asthmatic, I know nothing whatever about you.
-- Sherlock Holmes, "The Norwood Builder"

Ground

Not parallel, but staggered,
The Lines are clenched:

Fit for a fight!
Ready to war!

Gates open.
Frames close.

A new tessalation formed.
An orbit was reentered.

Body unearthed.

"If human beings were shown what they're really like, they'd either kill one another as vermin, or hang themselves."

"Maybe this world is another planet's hell."

- Aldous Huxley

Nerve

Between two visions of death -
One of incontinent fear,
Another spluttering for help -
I lay in bed:
One eye dry, one closed.

"If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face - forever."

George Orwell

Snakes and Monsters

The dreams that fall to interpretation
We leave untouched.
The breakdown was a political gesture.

So I left myself behind,
In the snakeskin that they removed
On the operating table.
Under a blue light

I saw this other thing emerge,
A monster of excess.
But an excess made penitent by structure.