Down and Out in and Rome

Ian Walker

In many cities built on a river, the two banks back in our hotel room, I considered it more have an unequal and somewhat uneasy carefully. There are two elements at play here relationship. The bulk of the power lies on – a photograph and a text – and what had one side while the other – La Rive gauche, the struck me was the disjuncture between the South Bank – represents alternative and even two. The three word text in the speech bubble resistant values. One of the most obvious – ‘Hard Rock Cafone’ – I took to be an examples of this is in Rome, where to cross advert for a café, probably somewhere near over the Tiber into Trastevere is to suddenly by in Trastevere, since there was no address. feel that one is almost in a small self- But the photograph above I knew more about contained village, defining itself in opposition and it was that knowledge that had made me to the Imperial City on the other bank. detach the poster and carry it off. In September 1994, we spent a couple of It is, as I’m sure most readers will have weeks in Rome and went across to Trastevere recognised, a photograph by Don McCullin several times. It was there, up a narrow of a tramp in the East End of London. But I backstreet, that I saw a roughly made poster doubt that many who saw it in Rome would stuck on the wall. There were many flyers of have known that; perhaps even the person this sort around the city streets, but this one who had put together the poster wasn’t aware hit me with a palpable blow. I looked around of its source. Its siting on a Roman backstreet to see if anyone was watching, carefully had thoroughly ripped it from its original removed it from the wall, folded it up and put context, but it is revealing to go back and it in my bag. uncover something of its intended meaning. I acted on impulse, but unfolding the paper The photograph had been made some

Anonymous poster Don McCullin, ‘Tormented, homeless found in Rome, 1994 Irishman, , London, 1969’

10 twenty-five years before I rediscovered it in published in the magazine Man About Town, Rome. As McCullin wrote in a text published had included a photograph of a down- also in 1994: ‘For six weeks in the winter and-out staggering towards the camera on of 1969 I appeared at dawn on the streets a wasteland in front of a rather peculiar of in London’s East End.’ His modernist belltower (The tower belonged subjects were the vagrants who clustered to St Boniface’s German Roman Catholic there. ‘Stealing pictures of these people with church, rebuilt the year before. It is still there a long lens was not my style. I wanted to on Mulberry Street, just south of Whitechapel be close to them, to feel their plight, and to Road, now surrounded by newer buildings). convey the emotion of contact with them. I This photograph would also appear five years wanted their trust and to become their voice.’ later in Michelangelo Antonioni’s film Blow By that point, McCullin had established a Up in a fictional book dummy of London formidable reputation as a war photographer photos put together by the fashionable young with his work in Cyprus, Vietnam, the Congo photographer, Thomas, largely based on and Biafra. But, for him, the East End was David Bailey and played by David Hemmings. also a war zone: ‘there are wars that cities Talking with his agent over lunch, Thomas have… and I put just as much energy into says he is bored with London and wants to showing the misery of what I call social wars’. be free; his agent points to the vagrant in the McCullin’s journey to the East End in photo and asks, ‘Free like him?’. 1969 was a return to one of the places he The photographs McCullin shot in 1969 had started out as a young photographer. would first be published in 1973 under the In 1961, his picture story ‘East of Aldgate’, title ‘Crisis on Skid Row’ in the Sunday Times

Don McCullin, Spread from ‘East of Aldgate’, picture story in Man About Town, 1961. Frame from Blow Up (1974)

11 Magazine. But after that, there were a whole one of the gateways through the Roman range of sites from which the photograph city walls; now it is a complex interlocking might have been sourced by the maker of the road system largely given over to a swirling Rome poster and photocopied to produce its circulation of traffic. From there, Whitechapel harsh contrast, even more marked than it is in spreads to the east, a rather amorphous, McCullin’s own prints. decentred area, with the tube station Possibly the poster maker found the ‘Whitechapel’ actually sited half a mile east picture in a magazine or newspaper, perhaps of Whitechapel High Street (The station that in London or Rome. But its most probable serves Whitechapel High Street is Aldgate route to this end would have been through East). one of McCullin’s books. The earliest Spitalfields is a smaller area to the north- volume that featured his British pictures was west between and the edge of Homecoming in 1979, in which this picture the City of London. Almost face to face of the Irishman was simply titled ‘East End, at the heart of Spitalfields stand the two London’. In Hearts of Darkness (1980), the dominant institutions of the area: Nicholas picture appeared as one of four photographs Hawksmoor’s magnificent Christ Church, from the East End (all dated 1973, in fact the completed in 1714, and the former Fruit point of their first publication). The caption and Vegetable Market, the present buildings there is more expansive: ‘Portrait of Irish dating from the late nineteenth century. down-and-out, lonely and hungry but not Spitalfields’ trajectory from affluence to without dignity’. In 1987, the large anthology degradation and back again has been of McCullin’s work entitled Perspectives particularly dramatic and is worth recounting included eight pictures of London tramps, in some detail, since it has been the site of with no captions or dates. many of the most powerful representations of Those were the major books of McCullin’s the ‘East End’, including much of McCullin’s work to feature this photograph before photography. According to his own 1994, but they have of course continued to account, it was next to the Market that he this day. One was published in 2001, with a photographed the homeless Irishman. more specific title for the image: ‘Tormented, Spitalfields’ history has been that of homeless Irishman, Spitalfields, London, immigration, starting with Huguenot refugees 1969’. More recently, the large retrospective from France in the eighteenth century, the volume of McCullin’s work published in 2012 richest of whom built rows of large, elegant in Milan by Skira featured the photograph terraced houses. Through the nineteenth on its cover; inside, the title was given as century, though, the area became more ‘Homeless Irishman, Aldgate, East End, crowded and the lives of the local population London, UK, 1973’. Not only has the date more degraded. The Huguenot houses were of the image shifted yet again, but so has the sub-let over and over, many of them occupied place of its making. by a new wave of Jewish immigrants. Those For around McCullin’s photographs of who couldn’t work lived on the streets. In down-and-outs, and occasionally glimpsed in 1902, the American author Jack London them, lies the place where they were made. ‘went native’ in the East End to write his Sometimes he calls it Whitechapel, sometimes searing indictment of living conditions there; Spitalfields and sometimes Aldgate. It is he visited the garden next to Christ Church indeed true that these areas merge into each to find it occupied by a crowd of derelicts: other and even a local would be hard put to ‘a welter of rags and filth, of all manner of say where one passes from one to another, loathsome skin diseases, open sores, bruises, but nevertheless, each name conjures up grossness, indecency, leering monstrosities something different. Aldgate was originally and bestial faces’ (A balancing measure of

Don McCullin, Spread from ‘Crisis on Skid Row’, picture story in Sunday Times Magazine, 1973.

12 black humour might be found in the local Don McCullin has not been the only magnetic to documentarians? It is no longer nickname given to this garden: ‘Itchy Park’). photographer to work in the area and they possible to evoke the camouflaging impulses I myself first came to Spitalfields in the have come with a variety of motives. In to “help” drunks and down-and-outers or 1970s to visit an artist friend who had John Banville’s novel The Sea, which won “expose” their dangerous existence’. Further a studio on Buxton Street. I’m sure my him the Booker Prize in 2005, the narrator on, she describes the Bowery as ‘the site of memory has darkened with the years, but I Max Morden recalls his first meeting with victim photography in which the victims… do remember walking from Liverpool Street his wife Anna in London in the mid-1960s: are now victims of the camera – that is, of the Station past the rotting piles of vegetables on ‘At the time she was trying to become a photographer’. the waste ground behind the Market (The photographer, taking moody early-morning This is a difficult argument to discuss in discarded food was one of the things that studies, all soot and raw silver, of some of relation to McCullin’s work, not least because attracted vagrants to the area). Hawksmoor’s the bleaker corners of the city. She wanted there is no doubting his deep sincerity in Christ Church was grey with soot and to work, to do something, to be someone. making his photographs; he was it seems as apparently so precarious that the Church of The East End called to her, Brick Lane, deeply scarred by the inequalities within his England had proposed demolition. To get Spitalfields, such places.’ own society as he was by the war zones that anything worth having at Many of the real life photographers he visited as a photojournalist. Looking again on a Sunday, you had to be there at 6 am; working in the East End were visitors like at McCullin’s photographs of down-and-outs, even then it mainly contained the detritus of Anna, though it has been local residents like there are indeed those pictures which depict urban culture. Paul Trevor and Phil Maxwell who have made their subjects as helpless victims, cowed, However, this was also a period of change the fullest, long term record of the changes sometimes insensible. Others have an edge of and sometimes violent turmoil. Bangladeshi to the area. Perhaps the most haunting voyeurism, as we are invited to gaze at second immigrants had been moving into the area images were taken in the 1980s by Markéta hand at a way of living that most of us would to replace the departing Jews, taking over Luskacˇová who made the inhabitants of never approach directly. But the picture of the sweat shops and opening the first ‘curry Brick Lane appear like relatives of the the homeless Irishman seems different to houses’. The National Front prowled the pilgrims she had previously photographed in these. It’s a much quieter picture, a simpler area and, on May 4 1978, a young clothing Czechoslovakia. When Luskacˇová’s pictures picture; the man stares at the photographer worker named Altab Ali was attacked by were exhibited in 1991, Mark Holborn (and us) as the photographer and we gaze at a group of white youths, chased down remarked that, whereas McCullin had worked him. There is a directness and even – for a Brick Lane and killed on the other side of ‘as if he were photographing a battlefield’, brief moment – an equality here which makes Whitechapel Road, next to the park that now Luskacˇová ‘came to photograph the area it of a different order from most of the other bears his name. for its vitality. She is consciously avoiding a pictures. Perhaps one might even imagine All this now seems a world away. The catalogue of victims.’ oneself in his place – or at least make the surviving Huguenot houses have been lovingly Such a comment was not made innocently effort to imagine that place. restored and are worth an awful lot of money. and it reflected a debate which had been I had known about these arguments for The ‘Soup Kitchen for the Jewish Poor’ on raging within documentary photography several years before I came across the poster Brune Street has been transformed into a over the previous decade. The most acute on the wall in Rome and I had debated them block of upmarket apartments. The Fruit and and barbed comments were made in an without ever arriving at a resolution, rather Vegetable Market moved away to the suburbs American context by the artist and writer a sense that they had to be acknowledged. in 1992 and the Victorian building now hosts Martha Rosler in her essay ‘In, around, When I took the poster away from there, I a myriad of stalls on Sunday, selling trendy and afterthoughts (on documentary thought it might prove a useful tool in that gear, craft work of varying quality, a range photography)’, first published in 1981. Her debate, a focus for the argument. For, on of world cuisines. Many of today’s visitors argument is particularly apposite here since top of the question of McCullin’s alleged are young tourists, for whom a trawl round her focus was on the Bowery in New York ‘victimisation’ of the homeless Irishman, we the market and a curry on Brick Lane comes City, a place also inhabited by ‘bums’ and could now add the violation of McCullin’s recommended as a quintessential London down-and-outs. Rosler began: ‘The Bowery, own rights at the hands of the anonymous Experience. Of course, there are still the in New York, is an archetypal skid row. It has poster sticker of Rome. homeless, but they are younger and hooded been much photographed, in works that veer One might even think of McCullin as also against the weather, likely to be encountered between outraged moral sensitivity and sheer a sort of victim, his photograph stolen from begging outside the Tesco Metro. slumming spectacle. Why is the Bowery so him in this smash-and-grab raid. He had

13 approached the man on the street, he had of the grunge bands then in vogue, with an made the picture with his film in his camera; added avant-gardish post-Zappa edge, a surely he deserved a well-earned credit and combination well-described by the Italian even a copyright fee for this (mis-)use of his term ‘rock demenziale’ (demented rock). image. Yet, of course, authorship was another I also discovered that the title of their shibboleth which was undermined in the album had nothing to do with a café (I’m critique of documentary in the late 1970s. sure some of you have been dying to tell me Most notoriously, Sherrie Levine had put this). ‘Cafone’, it turns out, has evolved from her own name under copies she had made of being an Italian term for a poor peasant into the photographs of the rural American poor slang for a hoodlum or shady character, and taken by Walker Evans in the 1930s. Not only the title puns of course on the name of the was this gesture claiming that a picture, once chain of American burger restaurants, created published, was ‘owned’ by whoever looked at in London in 1971 and now a homogenised, it and liked it enough to copy it; it also, more worldwide franchise (Since 1998, there has implicitly, questioned why it didn’t belong been one in Rome on the Via Veneto). So the to the person in the picture. After all, he or image of the homeless Irishman now carries she had made the picture just as much as the a quite different message. He himself is the photographer had. ‘cafone’; he’s lived hard, possibly on the So I would hold up the poster in a lecture edge of the law, and his direct stare offers and ask: whose photo is this? Whose should a challenge to the conventions of bourgeois it be? The photographer? The Irishman? The respectability. He is no longer victim but hero poster-designer? Was it not now mine, for (or anti-hero). after all, I was now in possession of it? Or Does this make the appropriation of the does it now belong to the viewer? Now you image more acceptable? Probably not, but it have seen it, is it not part of your own image- does complicate the message of the picture bank? And with those questions left hanging, through a process of romanticisation. And it I would finish the lecture, fold the poster up makes me think again about how McCullin’s and put it away till the next time. picture has previously been affected by the I was of course predominantly interested other texts that have accompanied it. Does it in the place of the photograph in this process matter if the photograph was taken in 1969 and the journey it had made from London or 1973, in Spitalfields or in Aldgate? I would to Rome. It wasn’t until recently, as I was have guessed that the man was homeless, but typing up these thoughts, that I began to not necessarily that he was tormented (Rather think more about the other element in the I have read his gaze as challenging in its very poster: that phrase ‘Hard Rock Cafone’. steadiness). And does his Irishness matter in As I said, I had assumed it was an advert how we understand the picture? Except that for a café; I was, I discovered, wrong. But I McCullin would only have known this when wouldn’t have known this if it were not for the man spoke, which starts to give him a the development of technology in the two voice, albeit one that is quickly lost in the decades since I found the poster. Sitting at my overwhelming silence of the photograph. computer some twenty years after the fact, I There is, however, now more to add. In discovered that Hard Rock Cafone was the January 2013, a feature length documentary, title of the third album by the Italian band simply titled McCullin and made by Jacqui Santarita Sakkascia, which had indeed been and David Morris, had a cinema release released in the autumn of 1994. I’ve looked and later in the year, was shown in BBC1’s them up on Wikipedia and found the whole Imagine strand. In it, McCullin speaks album available on YouTube. It’s playing as eloquently and at length about this picture. It I write this. They sound to my ear like one comes after he has remarked, ‘These people

Cover of Hard Rock Cafone, Santarita Sakkascia, 1994.

14 used to try to put the dead eye on you. They camera and subject (Presumably it was only dedicated to ‘Works on Paper’ (a rubric that try to stare you out. You must never flinch afterwards that McCullin spoke with him and has more to do with conservation than any away. You must stare them out.’ Then a little heard the Irish accent). The mention of the connections between the works themselves). later, over a photograph of a vagrant lying man’s blue eyes reminds us of what the black The picture of the tormented Irishman was on waste ground, he says, ‘I think one of and white photo – so powerful in other ways among them and it stood out as really quite the best portraits I ever did was this man in – cannot show. And most extraordinary, this unlike anything else on the walls around it, Spitalfields Market and he was actually lying leads into the comparison with the Roman as if it had come from another world, which by the embers of an all night fire that these sea god Neptune, which feels both far-fetched in fact it had. The days when photography of homeless men used to congregate around. He and quite apt (It might have been particularly this sort was not allowed through the doors sat up and looked at me full face and I just so in Rome, where figures of Neptune stand of the Tate seem a long way away now. held his stare and I just brought my Nikon guard over the Trevi Fountain and the Piazza It is also a long way from a backstreet camera up to my eye’ (here the image cuts Navona). This is, as it were, a picture brought in Rome. But that is the spectrum of sitings to a close up of the Irishman’s eyes, which back from the bottom of a metaphorical sea. which such an image can occupy, changing gradually pulls back through the rest of the It is chilling to go back to that other picture its meaning as it moves around. Yet, once voiceover) ‘and took this picture and he of the same man sprawled on the filthy one knows the story of the picture’s origin, never moved an eyelid. I was looking at the ground and recall the caption that McCullin one cannot help but constantly return to that bluest eyes you’ve ever seen. And his hair was gave it when he reproduced it opposite the confrontation in Spitalfields over forty years matted. I felt as if I was looking at one of portrait in his 1980 book Hearts of Darkness: ago. And if Spitalfields itself has changed those Neptune images of a man under the sea ‘Down-and-out sleeping in the rain and out of all recognition, then the ghosts of the with a trident. It was quite extraordinary.’ waiting for death (which came)’. homeless Irishman and his fellows still haunt McCullin’s comments are remarkable on In 2013, the galleries of Tate Britain were the place, revealed if one scratches away a a number of levels. They fill in our sense of rehung as a ‘walk through British Art’, with a little at its new, bright, shiny surface. how the picture was made and the tense, small group of Don McCullin’s photographs silent relationship between photographer, of down-and-outs being displayed in a room

Don McCullin, ‘‘Down-and-out sleeping in the rain and waiting for death (which came)’, 1969

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