Compulsory Travel
Joe leans close, puts his mouth to my ear, and whispers ‘do you think he said to them, hold that pose gents there’s a few francs in it for you’. I smile at him and then look back at the photo, it’s overwhelming sense of spontaneity lessens and it becomes more possible. We stall there for a few minutes staring at a photo of two men in a street with their backs turned to us. They’re peering over a low stone wall looking down five metres or so to train tracks running below. The photo centres on the v shape of black they’re looking into and from which glinting silver rails emerge. I imagine that from where Joe and I stand, if we could walk into the picture, it would only take a few paces to take up their position and peer into the dark like them. It’s so compelling it’s not enough that I see what they’re looking at, I want to see it how they saw it.
‘Hmm’, says Joe, ‘I like that’.
‘I’m getting tired’, I say, ‘my legs ache’.
It’s a big exhibition and it feels like we’ve been walking for hours. More exhausting again is that it becomes an endless collection of magic moments that we’re looking at, everyone of them beautifully observed and captured, a lifetime of careful observation, edited down to 2 or 3 hundred greatest hits. We become blasé, after the photo of the men dressed in their funny rounded high hats and square coats craning over the wall nothing is quite as good. They watched over that wall as though looking down from heaven into the underworld.

Walking back from the exhibition Joe and I find ourselves on the main road watching buses go by, a bus pulls up and we stand there staring up at the folk on the top deck as they stare absentmindedly back at us.
‘God’ says Joe, ‘it’s like monkeys at the fucking zoo’.

What is it about this being up high looking down thing? Often when on driving trips I see people standing on motorway bridges who look just contented to be gazing at the flow of traffic going on below them. There is something dutiful in their pose as they stand midpoint on the bridge and take a shift at watching. There also seems to be a longing in it, which I feel at times, especially watching people in cars, on trains, on buses all going....... (home)? Standing still watching all that movement, all that strange ordering provokes a longing and feeling of displacement, but also a sense of self and of being alive in the world.


© Jeremy Akerman