An early (and unknowing) contact with New Journalism - attempting to portray Paris by putting 'myself' into the report. Wanted to make this an extended piece, but I ended up working to quite a strict word limit because of the paper's small travel section. Published with a collection of photographs I took whilst there, but I haven't figured out how to limit the size or watermark them on here. I hate copyright thieves.
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Two days after one of my Erasmus friends told me something like “Oui Alex, you should come and take pictures this summer, Pah-ree is tres beautiful”, and I’m on a flight. I’m in full on photographer mode, heading to the home of street photography, to streets trodden by the cutting edge of photojournalism – Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Doisneau, Martine Franck. 20 rolls of film rattle optimistically in the side pocket of my overpacked rucksack. 18 would remain disappointed and be returned to my film fridge at the end of the trip. I had been naïve in thinking my photographers eye would last a week without being sucked into the atmosphere of the city of lights.
This wasn’t to be a week of photography at all, but rather a week of high culture, low culture and everything in between. Parties every night, galleries every day. Coffee until 5pm, and wine until 6am. And conversations throughout all this – sat in the cafes around the Louvre, in dark corners in underground bars, and in the gardens of the Sacre Coeur after jumping the fence at 3 in the morning.
I stayed at the Peace and Love hostel in the Stalingrad area of town, and 2 hours after arriving, rather than my initial plan of heading toward the Bastille to take some pictures, I’m drunk and singing on a table with an Irish guy who would leave the next day with a hangover to remember. “You know, taff!” He shouts at me, “Paris is the city of, of, love and stuff. Waaaaaay!”
An incredible fusion of culture and the party lifestyle is a feature of many of the great European capitals – London, Berlin, among others. However, there is something special about it in Paris. It suits backpackers perfectly, with a great range of hostels (my recommendation is to find one with a bar, great for meeting people). Being a solo backpacker, I had the advantage of having no plans in particular, and so could go where I like, when I liked, and do what I liked. Brief encounters with people who I’d never see again added colour to a city which lends itself perfectly to a trip that ends up being somewhere between scenes from Before Sunrise and Lost in Translation.
Sitting in the hostel bar for 20 minutes each day, I’d end up in a random conversation with a mixture of locals and fellow travellers, before sauntering over to the Louvre, Pere le Chaise, or the Arc de Triomphe. It’s easy to see why Parisisan cafes and parks became the backdrop for innumerable conversations between Sartre and his fellow philosophers, and which form the background of the photographs I admired so much while at home. The atmosphere is all consuming, as the gentle music of cafes and the large windows invite you to look out onto the street, give up on that copy of Nausea, and just watch the world go by.
Ultimately, Paris is a city that has to be felt, rather than seen. Ok, so it has some of the greatest art galleries in the world, some of the most iconic landmarks, and the grave of Jim Morrison. It’s impossible to avoid the clichés of the romantic city, they’re in the air along the Seine, and in the breezes that batter the top of the Eiffel tower. But after spending a night under the Eiffel tower, I kissed a girl I’d never see again goodbye on the train platform, and had no problem with that. It’s a feeling to be embraced and let go, with the acceptance that it will sit comfortably in your memory for a long time to follow.
A short photo-essay on the oldest record shop in the world - handily located in Cardiff. I love this place, and tried to capture it in all it's analogue glory, while still maintaining a gloss of journalistic objectivity. Again, photos will follow when I've worked them out.
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Cardiff isn’t a city that hides its landmarks away. As you come in to the city by train, it’s easy to see the Millennium Stadium, its contemporary design standing as a motif for the modern city of the future – a mass of identical chain-fashion stores, easy-access entertainment and overpriced city centre nightclubs. However, hidden opposite the massive building site of a new, ‘exciting’, shopping experience on the Hayes, lies a true gem of Cardiff culture – Spillers Records, the oldest record shop in the world.
Established over 100 years ago, in 1894 by a certain Henry Spiller, Spillers remains largely untouched by the clinical, hospital-like atmospheres of larger chain stores such as HMV. Remaining independent throughout its history, the store, owned by the enthusiastic Nick Todd, hides the dream of any true music aficionado behind its simple red façade. Wallpapered in posters for gigs large and small, past and future, the racks hold row upon row of CDs, catering from a wide variety of music tastes, but leaning toward those who are as enthusiastic about music as Spillers employees – and that is, to put it bluntly, very. Enquiring about whether or not they had an album by instrumental rockers Mogwai, Nick’s daughter greeted me with genuine enthusiasm, apologising first about disturbed stock deliveries due to the band’s record label moving base, before telling me that if I was a fan I should check out a gig at Cardiff’s Clwb Ifor Bach that night for a band that had a similar sound. A similar depth of information was thrown the way of the wide and varied clientele, from a suited gentleman asking about Nina Simone recordings to a fluorescent-vested workman inquiring after Iron Maiden DVDs. In Spillers, everything from local scene gossip to the tectonic movements of worldwide rock superstars flows between enthusiasts with a keenness that leaves the homogenous consumer mass miles behind, preferably somewhere they can purchase their soulless aural novacaine from a pre-pubescent teenager in a Zavvi T-shirt. I don’t want to be greeted with (at worst) a grunt, or (at best) a semi-enthusiastic offer of a storecard. I want to ask for a recommendation, be handed a disc, and be told ‘you need this album in your life’.
Unfortunately, the shop hasn’t enjoyed plain sailing over the last few years. With the threat of rent increases, and unfortunate placement facing the new St. Davids 2 development, there have been multiple instances of this fantastic monument to music being permanently closed. However, support from both the local area (particularly students), and from the upper echelons of rock stardom have, so far, managed to keep Spillers in business. The Manic Street Preachers have registered their support, as well as Columbia Records, and closer to home, politicians in the Welsh Assembly have encouraged support from the wider community for the store. For the moment, rent increases have been held, and so Spillers remains in business. As the name of the highly successful facebook group states, ‘justice for music, innit.’
The wide scale regeneration efforts in Cardiff have been largely successful on a commercial level over the last few years, turning the city from one that was declining into a bustling multicultural city of the future. However, while walking around it’s easy to believe that in the process, it may have already started to lose its identity. To many people the city doesn’t show any level of uniqueness through its main shopping street, or the millionth Oceana. However, along with the fantastic undercover market, the beautiful gardens of the university, and the castle, there’s Spillers. There has always been Spillers. And hopefully there will always be Spillers, fighting the impersonality of the internet age with a charm and charisma that isn’t available in .mp3.
Again, an attempt at a magazine style story cut short by word limits and my wanting to show off my photos on the same page. No chance to even mildly give justice to the 2 and a half months I spent in the country, which I fell in love with.
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“Very nice place, very good,” says one of my pupils matter-of-factly, resorting to one of the innumerable catch-phrases that Indian people love so much. I was slightly wary, remembering that I had been told something similar about Jaane Tu Ya Jaane Na, a Bollywood blockbuster that had proved to be the most painful 3 hours of my life. Nonetheless, I rush over to the bus station with a friend, and get the next state bus out of town, onwards to one of the many spontaneous adventures of my time in India.
I claim it was spontaneous, but in many ways these odd weekend trips out of the city to random exciting locations were entirely predictable. Spend hours on a packed state bus with fascinated Indian people staring and mumbling in Gujarati or Hindi, stumble off to be assaulted by rickshaw drivers, and spend a couple of days getting hopelessly lost in one of the most overwhelming cultural experiences of my life.
This particular trip, to a ruined Muslim city about 50 kilometres northeast of where I was staying at Baroda, was yet another masterclass in unwitting cultural immersion. After reaching the town late at night, we didn’t stand a chance finding the only hotel, but found ourselves accidentally staying overnight in an incredible Jain temple after following an enthusiastic stranger down too many dark alleys. The next day was spent getting lost on a mist-covered mountain as ruined places of worship slowly revealed themselves through the cloud. And in the evening we bumbled our way back to Baroda, a feeling of travelling catharsis ensuring that I would sleep soundly despite the heat that I never quite got used to.
I had ended up in India after taking up an AIESEC internship on a whim. During the weekdays, I spent my time working on a cultural education project called Project One World in a school at Baroda, and while my work at the school was less than I expected, it proved a useful platform for travelling around the subcontinent. I always knew that I could return to free accommodation and food for a minimum of work, meaning I could spend my afternoons, weekends and occasional weeks off to explore to my hearts content.
Developing familiarity with one city also had definite upsides – shopkeepers got to know me and my workmates, rickshaw drivers didn’t try to rip me off as much after I told them that I lived there a few times, and I always had someone to show me something new in the crazy world of extremes that is a modern Indian city. I ate meals in luxurious all-you-can-eat restaurants, and had coffee with Islamic cloth merchants in the old town’s market, just after bombings had rocked the nearby city of Ahmedabad. “This is not Islam”, they repeated after bomb scares had been called in other cities around India. I’d been told not to visit the largely Muslim section of town following the blasts, but went anyway, and rather than militant clerics had found a community that was scaring itself into a self-imposed segregation.
This immersion was one of the most valuable parts of my trip. After the relatively sheltered and chaperoned couple of weeks, I picked up a smattering of Hindi, Gujarati and Arabic, allowing me to venture out and have broken conversations with any number of locals, many of whom seemed absolutely fascinated by my blonde hair and blue eyes. It also helped me understand the absolutely religious nature of India – after almost getting hit by an oncoming elephant following a dodgy overtake in a rickshaw, my driver turned round and grinned at me. “Al hamdu lill’ah”, he shouted back, somehow avoiding the hordes of traffic ahead while looking back at me – “If God wills it”. Every week there seemed to be another Hindu festival, from letting off firecrackers on the beaches of Goa to parading down the streets with giant statues of the elephant God Ganesh. In fact, it is easier to get around in India by temporarily adopting whatever religion you choose, than to attempt to explain that you don’t hold any God at all.
A word of warning though. Things in India don’t happen on time. They happen in time. I spent a significant amount of time in India wondering how anything got done in a country where trains were quite regularly 2 or 3 hours late. This obviously doesn’t lend itself to the well planned and regimented traveller – and any attempt to plan things in advance and to-the-minute were duly decimated by a rickshaw driver who had no idea where the destination was (but remained jovial and willing regardless). However, this can be a rewarding experience in itself, as it is in pressured conditions where the essential resourcefulness of the Indian people comes out. One of the most impressive spectacles I saw was the flooding of an entire city that seemed to carry on regardless. Indian businessmen would lean over the handlebars of the prolific 125cc Honda, and hit the throttle in an attempt to plough through miniature lakes 2 or 3 feet deep. Meanwhile, barely clothed street children sailed down temporary rivers on home-made rafts, and corn sellers on the major roads suddenly switch their commodity of choice to umbrellas. Contrast this with the panic in the UK when we have a couple of inches of snow, and you’ll know what I mean.
Any visit to India is likely to bring out a little of this resourcefulness in yourself. In fact, it’ll demand it. On the upside, when things finally figure themselves out, it always seems completely worth the effort. The key word for travelling in India is ‘yes’. Invited for tea? You might just end up reassuring a spear-toting Sikh that the Large Hadron Collider probably isn’t going to destroy the world when it’s switched on. Watching the fishermen bring in the catch? Give them a hand, and you’ll have friends for life. This way, it’s possible to begin peeling back the layers of tourism that cover India, discovering a culture and way of life that is absolutely dazzling in it’s depth and sophistication, far more than a day at the Taj Mahal could hope to reveal.
