Snaps in the city

About fifty years ago I went to London for the first time, with a bunch of classmates from Sledmere Junior and Infants School ( we didn't do Primary then, I don't think the word was even invented..) Sandwiches smelling of the plastic container in which they were enclosed, orange squash smelling of the plastic container in which it was enclosed, a great big plastic camera dangling from my young neck, and the prospect of hurtling at previously unknown speeds down a newly opened M1 motorway, are memories that have possibly never been surpassed.

I vaguely remember walking on the surprisingly solid deck of the Cutty Sark, I couldn't believe a river could be as wide as the Thames, and I had no idea that Spam was going to be my main source of nutrition for the next decade.

And somewhere there's a clutch of snaps that I took with the eyes of a ten year old.

I still get excited now at the thought of a city visit. The spaces are different, bigger, wider, and filled with a greater variety of people than our everyday norm, but it never quite matches that first time (as with so many things) nevertheless I still take pictures.

You can find many interpretations of this image of the turbine hall at Tate Modern on the internet, it simply has a scale and quality of light that draws photographers.

Tate Modern, London

One thing that strolling around a city gives me is an even greater sense of anonymity than I'm used to in my everyday life, and that's about as anonymous as you can get anyway, without totally disappearing. On the one hand such total insignificance could be a tad upsetting, considering it's taken me over half a century to get here, but there are benefits to being near invisible.

And anything that helps to hide my six foot frame and nosey parker camera is very welcome. So, a bunch of other folk doing exactly the same as me, in a space where gawping and pointing is expected, is perfect camouflage.

The Eiffel Tower in Paris is a magnet for tourists, with camera toting visitors crawling all over, under and around it. And up it, obviously. The difficulty is snatching a photograph that excludes all the other sightseers.

I found this young girl practising her handstand on this stage of stages, with myself and the young man on the wall her audience. There were a thousand people there, somewhere, but for a fraction of a second, there were just the three of us.

Acrobat, Eiffel Tower, Paris

As a birthday treat last year I squeezed myself into the wonderful old city of Prague, where both agoraphobics and claustraphobics are somehow catered for in equal measure. I spent four days there, (midweek, avoiding the weekend invasion of visiting, vomiting Brits.) Helen Mirren was spotted on Charles Bridge – it's a structure, not a person – and I took hot chocolate in the cafe where the Velvet Revolution was planned.

There must be ten million pounds worth of photographic gear in use at any given time in that city, with most of the clicking taking place around the Old Town and castle. It's a good job camera shutters are quiet these days, or it would sound like mass tinnitus.

And you almost have to resign yourself to the fact that whatever picture you take has been taken god knows how many times before. But it's still better than buying the postcard.

Evidence of the Czech fascination with puppetry is everywhere, and quite disconcerting some of the images are too. Here is my two penn'orth, taken on the long slog up to Prague Castle. And next time I go, I'll probably try some of the absinthe ice cream, it might help to flatten out that hill.

Puppet shop, Prague

Phil
www.thesilverimage.co.uk