I spent most of today photographing with my son. We began on Brick Lane and found ourselves drawn back towards Charing Cross as we searched for a 1 hour photography lab (eventually, Jessops on Charing Cross Road came to our rescue). As we got closer to the shopping district I was struck by the amazing colours of the shop windows and advertising hoardings, especially in the late afternoon winter light, and Walter Benjamin’s notion of the Parisian arcades as Phantasmagoria:

“The crowd is the veil through which the familiar city beckons to the flâneur as phantasmagoria-now a landscape, now a room.”

Walter Benjamin

This passage from Paul Auster’s novel ‘City of Glass’ (from the ‘New York Trilogy’) also seems appropriate:

He felt as though he were leaving himself behind, and by giving himself up to the movement of the streets, by reducing himself to a seeing eye, he was able to escape the obligation to think…. The world was outside of him, around him, before him, and the speed with which it kept changing made it impossible for him to dwell on any one thing for very long. Motion was of the essence.

Paul Auster

I hope you are all making progress on your personal projects as we get closer to the end of the holidays and the coursework deadline (the week of 16th January).