London based photographer Richard Ansett recently spent a week in my hometown, undertaking a self-initiated residency. His typical areas of interest are, broadly speaking, portraiture and documentary, so hearing that he was coming up for a few days of street photography was a bit perplexing.
Lincoln has a relatively small population with few areas of high footfall. I did the maths, and all things considered, I figured the chances of him getting even one exceptional street image seemed extremely low. As in nil.
Turns out when he showed up he had more than just a camera and flash, he brought some ideas.
Day one, and we washed up in front of a Costcutter, situated just around the corner from the Usher gallery where his Man Up men's mental health project was being exhibited. My part in this undertaking was to hold aloft a stand with a high powered flash-head. It was a studio-type unit which discharged with a thud felt through the stand. My instructions were to keep it up high, aim it wherever he was pointing the camera and not get too close to either him or the subject so the exposure would be kept within usable parameters. After that comprehensive tutorial some boys exited the shop and BOOM (pause for review on the LCD), BOOM (review), BOOM (review), and turns out we’d started.
Upon careful inspection of those first images he proffered the camera’s LCD screen with some satisfaction, I had not predicted a good day but there it was, something. After the kids moved away there was zilch happening so our next stop was the pedestrianised High Street a short walk away.
As you might imagine, when someone is walking around carrying around a lamp held high in the air, BOOMING out huge waves of light, we were fairly conspicuous. As for any possible hostile reaction, it never happened. Our faces were not punched in, there were no words of abuse - none audible at any rate. A police car did a slow pass eventually, just as Richard was asked by a mum to take a photo of her son, David, who had cerebral palsy, and while he did so and with everyone smiling, the cops left us to it. If anything we were routinely being waylaid by people wanting to chat or have their picture taken. Perhaps with our combined age of 112, (the larger part of that belonging to me) we were seen as not much of a threat to public order.
We traipsed up and down the High Street, amid the flow of people doing their lives. Precisely what Richard was seeking out was not altogether clear to me so my aim with the lamp was not always well aligned with where the camera needed it to be. There were consequently a fair few wasted BOOMS of light as I tracked one incoming person with seeming potential while he was choosing to take a picture of another. The Ansett verdict on such mishaps was conveyed in an occasional less than life-affirming glance in my direction as he scrutinised the resulting dim failure. To balance that he did also offer the occasional ‘are you okay holding that?’ More satisfying were those signs of encouragement now and then when things were going better. Him mumbling to himself, ‘Interesting’, quietly reassured me that this wasn’t going to be a completely futile effort. As far as I was concerned, as long as there was the possibility he might come up with something, I’d be happy to hold that flash all day long.
That first afternoon was the first sunny day we'd had around here for a while, and turned out to be the start of a mini heatwave. It had caught most people as well as us by surprise and unexpectedly was a bit of a gift. No-one was wearing sunglasses. That realisation came on day two when suddenly most people were. The downside of this was that shades took away the slight grimacing that people did with the sun in their eyes, which was adding to any natural expressions of tension or anguish that he was picking up on. At some point I had started to grasp unease was of underlying interest in this endeavour.
At a more studied level was an absorption in the complexities of belonging and apartness, particularly as existed within families. Those delicate, inaccessible spaces between people whose lives were closely entwined. These were the details being sought for. Consequently, this foray into street photography, intended as an experiment, proved to make aesthetic and emotional sense within his existing body of personal work.
On his website he openly frames his work within that of a damaged psyche, an abandoned child, where, 'So powerful is my need to shape the universe in my own image that I can still conjure up the energy to manipulate time and space and the very molecules in front of the camera to document my life experience. My instinct in the moment can be at the expense of my subjects who become allegorical beings rather than sympathetic figures – I am ashamed to say I am human in this regard. I am an object lesson in the infection of autobiography onto any objective view'.
Altogether we put in a few afternoons over three days looking over that tiny world of Lincoln’s High Street pedestrianised zone, and we had become quite familiar to regular passersby. We had made much use of the sunlight and those hours when there was activity, and only when the weather eventually conspired to say enough was enough and the crowds thinned we eventually fizzled to a stop and were done.
Several hundred images, rich with specificity. Pictures of ordinary people just passing by, or hanging out, taken over a few hot summer days in 2024, here in an East Midlands town, my town, Lincoln. Local people, set against a commonplace background which will look familiar to people who live in Britain. Everything pretty much what you see in any town in this country. To that familiarity there is a particular quality of it being configured through a particular eye. One intently curious about families and groups of friends, of the mysterious ties that bind, particularly ties of blood, the strength of that gravitational pull between parent and child, existing between that curious separateness and wordless needing. Public pictures filled with suggestions of position and belonging. I don’t doubt for a second that if invited he would have gone to spend time with many of these families to take this fleeting engagement to a more involved level of connection.
For me, his best photograph is of three girls. These young kids seemed to be together but it was not altogether clear as there was no sense of interaction between them, no word, glance or gesture. There was an isolatedness of each so evident that beyond their proximity to each other I wondered if perhaps they didn’t actually know each other at all. Despite the strong afternoon sun they forever exist in this picture in a pool of flash-made moonlight, stuck in a tiresome English High Street Gethsemane that speaks of the absence of the one that matters most to each, the parent.
I think Ansett had shown up that week with a very specific kind of picture in mind that he believed he could make. Anticipating both his kind of subject, and previsualised in the way it would be bathed in that signature Ansett light. I’m pretty sure he managed to get much of what he came for and some other things besides. Sometimes, when working with those flowing molecules in front of the camera, people were simultaneously themselves in full, but also had become the allegorical beings he came to find.
All images: Richard Ansett