THE IMAGE HAS CRACKED

The photographs of Chris Dorley Brown invite us to think about time. He shoots an urban scene and then goes back many years later to record the same slice of metropolitan scenery once again. The framing of the first shot is a matter of aesthetic choice, the second the result of chance since it has been self-consciously created with no regard to how changes in the built environment may have a detrimental effect upon its composition. In the selection of images gathered together here, Chris takes the London Borough of Hackney as his subject. To me this particular series of images look like evidence from the scene of a horrendous and almost incomprehensible crime. Utopia has been murdered. By blaming an ideal for the deficiencies of the real, utopia was transformed into a scapegoat and then ritually sacrificed. Properly understood, utopia should have been no more than a marker we would self-consciously over shoot, but it was deliberately confused with a fixed destination, and then cast out from the (anti-)social (dis)order of the capitalist present. Those who abandoned utopia and acquiesced to its murder, let themselves down. Their future has been replaced by an eternal present which, on examination, turns out to be a mythological simulation a faked past. While accepting the past is a construction, it is nonetheless rooted in material realities that must and will yet well up to remake the world we occupy today.

Time is what we live in and through. For most of us it's a one-way street to the future. But what happens when the future has been cancelled or if we try to move backwards in time? Was the past better than the present? Will the future be an improvement on where we are now? The answer probably depends on who you are and what you're thinking about. A couple of years ago I was sitting in a Soho pub with two friends and we were talking about how much both London and the world had changed since we were teenagers in the nineteen-seventies. One of my mates said he was trying to find some contemporary music he liked as much as the dub reggae he adored when he was growing up but nothing he heard now seemed even half as good. There were and are contemporary musicians making sounds we liked, but on the whole the pop world appeared stale compared to when we were young. Partly this was a matter of perspective. We'd heard a lot more music having hit our forties than was the case when we'd left school aged sixteen, so nothing was going to make the same impression again. But it still seemed surprising that we so resolutely preferred old records to contemporary releases. We also felt that books and films were worse than they had been a decade or three ago, although the decline was less marked than in music. Moving on to drugs, they were more of a mixed bag. We'd missed out on the golden age of LSD in the sixties, when really pure tabs of acid were readily available, and the blotters around today are no better or worse than those we consumed as teenagers. Likewise the skunk kids get stoned on today is stronger than anything people were smoking back in the seventies, but whether this is a good or bad thing remains a matter of opinion. Now there seem to be a lot more drugs readily available to experiment with, but we still preferred it when amphetamines came in tablet form and were known as blues. Finally we tried to think of something that was unequivocally better than what we'd grown up with. It did'’t take long to agree the food we ate both at home and in restaurants was infinitely superior to the grub we'd ingested back in the sixties and seventies. There is more variety and today what we chow on tends to be fresher, less likely to be over-cooked and is almost invariably better spiced. Obviously, these observations do not necessarily apply to those who choose to live on ready meals and fast food.

We don't live in a black and white world, and the present is neither unambiguously inferior nor superior to the past. Partly the way we see these things is a matter of perspective. What I like about Chris Dorley-Brown's photographs is that they conjure up this whorl, this flux, the impossibility of fixing the past. His images of the same spots in the Borough of Hackney taken roughly fifteen years apart confuse me. When I first flicked through them I thought that on the whole I preferred the earlier pictures. However, as I looked and looked again at these pictures ambiguities began creeping in. Certainly, in terms of the architecture, the decoration added to tower blocks, and the mushrooming of post-modern terraces, made the present look ugly. All my life I’ve been in love with the modern world and the architectural era I like best is that of the fifties and sixties. I like the sweep of the blocks produced during this period, their clean lines, the sense of vision attached to them. I like concrete as a material. This is not to say that brick built terraces are not a product of modernity. Given that terraced houses are serial and infinitely reproducible, they clearly belong to modernity but this is not the modernity I favour. Squat, brown and depressing, is the way I view terraced housing. Hackney is full of terraces, remnants of both a Victorian past and an already eclipsed post-modern pseudo-present. But Hackney is also filled chock-a-block with concrete structures erected during the post-war period, and which the local council began demolishing in the late nineteen-eighties.

Many of Dorley-Brown's Hackney photographs date from the eighties, and inevitably they carry the connotations this particular decade will spark off in assorted viewers. For someone like me, born in the early sixties, the eighties were once the epitome of naffness. But for someone born twenty years after me, musically and in terms of fashion, the eighties are probably a dictionary definition of what it is to be super phat and groovy. The truth lies somewhere in between these two positions. Reality is messy and Dorley-Brown's images reflect this state of affairs. Politically the eighties were far more complex than so much of the empty rhetoric and cheap sloganeering we are constantly bombarded with would have it. This was the era in which Reaganism and Thatcherism triumphed, but at the same time there was still widespread resistance to these twin brands of conservative extremism. In the UK, the miners were defeated, as were the print workers, However it wasn't until after the election of Tony Blair and New Labour in the nineties that the demolition job Thatcher had started on the post-war social consensus was seen through to its (il)logical conclusion. Looking at Dorley-Brown’s pictures, what really offends me is the replacement of tower blocks with low rise post-modern brick terraces. Concrete’s problem was that it was first widely introduced as a building material to London during World War II. In the fifties and sixties concrete was the cheapest and most flexible material available to architects and builders. Unfortunately for many Londoners it carried connotations of cheapness and austerity. As a consequence concrete never really found acceptance among broad swathes of people in the British capital.

Of course poor construction work will produce poor results regardless of the materials used. Some tower blocks were badly made and at times to unsuitable off-the-shelf designs. It is patently stupid to erect a building intended for an arid desert climate in a wet and rainy city like ours but that didn't prevent a certain number of blocks of this stripe being built in London. However, with suitable design and construction methods, concrete buildings are far more attractive and practical than brick carbuncles. That said, a failure to maintain concrete buildings has probably been even more of problem than poor construction. The attraction of a city is precisely its urban vibe, a dense population, and obviously the wanton destruction of perfectly good tower blocks takes away from rather than contributes to this. With exception of Tower Hamlets, all other east London boroughs including Hackney saw a reduction in population during the nineteen-eighties. Meanwhile the county of Essex which lies to the east of London recorded a 10% growth in population, due at least in part to the many incomers from places like Hackney and Newham. This process of suburbanisation, in which the destruction and ridiculous redecoration of tower blocks played a key ideological (and less significant material) role, simultaneously contributed to the largely false impression that Hackney was being gentrified during the eighties. Those leaving Hackney came mainly from the working class, so while the number of economically active middle-class residents did not increase significantly they became more visible as they came to constitute a greater proportion of those still present within a declining population. Britain remains a rich country but it did not become more middle class during the eighties or indeed subsequently. The bulk of us are still exploited by the few.

While the powers that be would rather we forgot historical change is a constant and a given, Dorley-Brown's photographs provide an inoculation against the temptations to surrender to an eternal-present in the form of the 'now'. Rather than wallowing in the pseudo-eternal, his monstrous twin images allow the past to contaminate and contribute to the reshaping of the present. This is not a contemporary version of pastoralism, it is a form of deonditioning, a way of avoiding the chatter of neo-critical production about the end of history and looking instead towards the ways in which collectively we might direct the movement of our ever changing world. This work mirrors the historical situation we find ourselves in, while simultaneously making starkly visible the ways in which we might move beyond this 'post-post-modern condition'. Dorley-Brown's images are a timely reminder that wo/man is a historical animal; that we make own history, albeit in conditions which are inherited and predetermined. We can leave the destiny of objects to the masochists who populate the popsicle academy. Chris Dorley-Brown's photographs provide an eloquent demonstration of why we should once more surge forward as human subjects. We need to undo the retrograde process of the privatisation initiated by Thatcher and subsequently seen through by Major and Blair, and instead rediscover a sense of community and all the interrelated and truly human aspects of living in a populous city like London.

Stewart Home, 2006.

More on time

The Age of Anti-Ageing Stewart Home & Chris Dorley Brown collaboration

Becoming (M)other Stewart Home & Chris Dorley Brown collaboration

Art/Anti-Art