The first time I knowingly saw a photograph by Bruce Davidson was on the cover of Beth Nugent’s 1993 short story collection ‘City of Boys’. One of those spectacularly fine images from his ‘Brooklyn Gang’ project, it was the reason I picked the book off the shelf. And whilst Nugent’s stories were terrific pieces of prose, it was certainly Davidson’s photograph that had the more lasting effect on me.

 

If pushed to make a choice, with the proverbial gun to my head, I would likely opt for ‘Brooklyn Gang’ as my very favourite collection of photographs of all time. The 1998 re-print by Twin Palms is perhaps my most treasured book, and not just because of its rarity and selling price. Davidson’s photographs in that project are sensitive portrayals of hard lives lived bitter-sweetly; photographs of teenage years in the years of the birth of teenagers; photographs that could be Springsteen songs in black and white grain; hymns for the cigarettes, the coffee and the alcohol; hymns for the beautiful and the damned. If I had been born seven years earlier they would have kicked off this series on a high it would never have surpassed.

 

Davidson’s ‘Nature of Los Angeles 2008 – 2013’ work might be very different thematically to ‘Brooklyn Gangs’ but the quality of the photographs is no less wonderful. Looking at the city from an unusual perspective (a shot of the Hollywood sign from behind could be the key hinge image that captures the intent), ‘Nature of Los Angeles’ documents the interface between nature and the city. This is no half baked critique of environmental issues however, for Davidson’s photographs implicitly acknowledge the give and take that this city creates in the juxtaposition between apparent opposites. Here Davidson illuminates the illusory quality of the city, hinting at the interventionist nature of the, ahem, ‘nature’. These palms are not native; this cultivated land is as constructed as the concrete highways. Nothing is as simple as you might initially think.

 

My favourite image from the collection is a shot of one tree and two elevated highways. Each is separate, yet each is connected in the composition, crossing each other in illusory three dimensional space. It is a photograph of powerful form, relying on strong contrast; a contrast that allows delicate leaves to assert themselves mysteriously against the white. Look closely and those leaves could almost be photograms and in truth perhaps that kind of nod to Man Ray surrealism would be perfectly apt. It is literally a photograph of two halves, each distinctive in its self-contained way and yet each depending on the other to create something more coherent and more powerful than if they were alone. Perhaps there is something in that idea that we could learn from…

If pushed to make a choice, with the proverbial gun to my head, I would likely opt for the records of Chris T-T as being the one body of work I would choose to document the past decade or so of my life. From ‘9 Red Songs’ and a gig supporting Brakes in Brighton in October 2005 through to this year’s ‘9 Green Songs’ and a summer gig in a tiny pub in Somerset, Chris’s songs and performances have been the ones that have offered me most warmth and succour as my age has drifted from 40 to 50. Of all these songs however it is certainly ‘A Box To Hide In’ from his 2008 full-band ‘Capital’ set that continues to resonate the most.

 

If Bruce Davidson’s photographs of Los Angeles capture a sense of alternately conflicting yet mutually dependent elements, then ‘A Box To Hide In’ perhaps acknowledges a similar theme in song. Ostensibly a song about a distinctive kind of 21st Century loss it is in some ways a kindred song to Springsteen’s ‘Missing’. Chris’s approach may have a hint of Springsteen’s sentimentality (the thick woollen socks in verse one) but it is at heart a song that more openly acknowledges the anger which inhabits if not the loss itself then certainly the mediated form it can be turned to. ‘A Box To Hide In’ says that the context of personal pain inflicted by terror attacks is such that loss is co-opted by Government and media corporations and used as a means of control and restraint. As a song it knows this and yet is simultaneously aware that to comment as such is to be seen to be complicit in the very acts that lead to the loss. Action and reaction are inseparable and inevitable; fight and flight as appealing and yet as equally, ultimately, futile as each other. ‘A Box To Hide In’ is a song that cloaks the appeal of desolate isolation in the soaring, soulful voice of passionate resistance; is a song that wants all and nothing at all in the same breath. That it manages to achieve this is testament to Chris T-T’s gift both as a songwriter and as a sensitive observer of human nature. Long may he continue to be so.