I shoot them
Ian C Smith
My father finishes his tabloid newspaper that smells alluringly of tobacco. I read the comics and sports pages. Dick Turpin, the namesake of the highwayman I have also read about, in rhyme, beat Albert Finch for a British boxing title, ‘a bruising affair’ won ‘unanimously’ on points. While I pad my vocabulary, albeit floridly, the action shot I copy in pencil leads to a long hazardous journey from this post-war London childhood.
Sports annuals’ colours, words, dazzle me: Celtic’s green and white hoops, Wolves’ majestic black and old gold, and, yet to graduate from newsprint descriptions like ‘doyens of the hempen square’, team names; Crystal Palace, Tottenham Hotspur, Leyton Orient. Queen of the South should caption an ancient English warrior driving a chariot, hair streaming behind her, not a struggling Scottish football team. Pictorially, I prefer players caught unguarded, effort, strain, revealed in these pics better than boring tiered team poses.
Some early photo-journalistic success stems from sport’s backrooms: training tracks, horses sweating and snorting through dawn mist, jockeys’ raucous swearing, their drab muffled gear contrasting with the ritualistic splendour of race days, colours rippling before a field of acid green, that great roar; gymnasiums, dressing-rooms, where I listen to ‘off the record’ tales, catching insouciant expressions of gladiatorial newsworthies often from banal backgrounds like mine. Minor awards won early encourage me, but cause begrudgement close to home.
In a rub-down room of a New York gym, air crackling with speedballs and skipped rope, I photograph Emile, a black boxer from a poor American island territory who speaks, tears welling, of burdensome regret. Under pressure, privately gay, he suffered relentless taunts of exposure from a champion he trapped against the corner post with a calculated act of fury when they fought, using his own body, a rain of murderous punches, to hold him up instead of allowing him, already unconscious, to drop. The champ died in hospital.
I arrive in places once dreamt about, inspired by Donne the pirate sailing to Cadiz, Tahiti, Newfoundland, Aden, blockaded East Berlin, their memories now dreamlike again, where I manage to communicate with locals, where I frame the human face lit by the heart, squirreling film, notes, in my backpack years after fleeing the havoc of family chaos, exiting school’s madhouse early to initially grind out factory fodder’s hamster-on-a-wheel existence. Greedy, only truly switched on by the gravity of my camera’s probing responsibility, I fail in personal relationships. Utterly.
The image world outlasts us. All photography is testament to the pathos of relentless time. Facial recognition, good memory, serve me. I spot people on the street or in a bar, once in a lift, faces from past news. We all want our achievements noted, so this aids my artful voyeurism when I approach them. These compositions of human endeavour and frailty, a ghost of me behind each, feature electronically on a city building’s wall, and in a busy railway station concourse that I never get to see.
As subjects confess tricky problems; drugs, love’s speed humps, money, crucial wrong turns, I don’t have to invent my empathy. From a green room I watch a decades estranged family reunited on a TV programme I doggedly researched. Still self-obsessed, the joy of this memory warms me, my lamp’s glass smoke-mantled now. Like that long ago Turpin stoush, life has sometimes been a bruising affair but it is what I do.
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Ian C Smith’s work has been published in BBC Radio 4 Sounds, The Dalhousie Review, Ginosko Literary Journal, Griffith Review, San Pedro River Review, Southword, The Stony Thursday Book, and Two Thirds North. His seventh book is wonder sadness madness joy, Ginninderra (Port Adelaide). He writes in the Gippsland Lakes area of Victoria, and on Flinders Island.