Strange and Familiar

Strange and Familiar: Britain as revealed by international photographers is the title of an exhibition of photographs curated by Martin Parr and currently showing in Manchester. It covers the period from the 1930s to the present day and is a fascinating view of aspects of our life as perceived by foreigners. For the most part the contributors steer clear of the picturesque landscape – one exception being Paul Strand’s dreamy images of the Outer Hebrides – and home in on the nitty-gritty of everyday people, places and people-in-places, many of which will be familiar to older generations. (So familiar, in fact, that I could swear the girl on Earl’s Court tube station, snapped by Gian Butturini in 1969, is my girlfriend of the time.)

When I wrote last week some less-than-euphoric impressions of Australia I received this comment from Anonymous: “Don’t suppose you’ll be getting a job with the Australian Tourist Office then?” which came to mind when I was scanning the photos at the exhibition, very few of which flattered their subject. I did not mean to suggest that my Australian experience wasn’t beautiful in many respects: I saw plenty of perfectly-formed beaches – I even ventured on to a few – but those beaches were all part of my expectation. Like the foreign photographers who shunned Buckingham Palace or Windsor Castle, I took them for granted and fixed my attention on a few of the ordinary telling details of the foreign environment. In Bondi, for example, after a mandatory look at the beach we retreated a couple of streets to find refreshment and were fascinated to see not only the off-duty surfing crowd but also a procession of Jewish families making their way to (or from) synagogue, which goes to show that, for all its international reputation, the beach is, after all, simply the boundary of an otherwise normal big-city suburb.

Details kept intruding into my fixed, romantic image of Australia with its outback, wine valleys, mountains, exotic flora, fauna and ever-present ocean. One of these was the fly-screen, that omni-present domestic deterrent to the intrusion of winged insects. I began to notice that there was no way to cope with the opening of the sliding variety if – as was invariably the case – your hands were full of sundowners, snacks or, in some cases, three-course meals which you were attempting to transport out onto the balcony, terrace or patio etc. Surely, I thought, someone must be selling a foot-operated, spring-loaded mechanism to do this job? Or how about a photo-electric cell attached to a motor? They are quite common in public toilets. I still fantasise about moving to Australia, patenting a mechanism which everybody would buy and making my (belated) fortune. But if I lived there I suppose that, like everyone else, I would just get used to juggling the trays and using my elbows.

In a way Australia struck me as being strange and familiar: the old colonial ways persist, to some extent, alongside ‘foreign’ tropes. How a photographer might portray this could be an interesting proposition. A photograph can be a powerful form of communication and, with the application of thoughtful technique, an educational experience. Henri Cartier Bresson’s photos of the coronation of George VI, for example, show not the procession but the reaction of the crowd, thereby telling us something about the King’s subjects. In contrast, the amusing collection of Boring Postcards collected by Martin Parr and displayed in another room demonstrates just how dully factual – even pointless – a photograph can be. In this same spirit, a prose description of Australia’s beautiful beaches would be all very well but we already know that they exist and that they are beautiful. They are the familiar: give us the strange.