As I walked around Bath on Wednesday the hit “Ghost Town” from two-tone band The Specials “replayed in my head:
“Do you remember the good old days before the ghost town?”
“We danced and sang, and the music played in de boomtown”
In fairness that track from ‘The Specials’ was referencing something different: Urban Britain in decline, huge unemployment issues. Hold it… same thing by the looks. I arrived in Bath at Noon, lunchtime. A time that I know is busy. Tourists, office and retail workers on their lunch break, shoppers et al. The streets teeming with thousands of people, a perfect storm for Street Photographers. Here’s the Abbey area that at times you struggle to walk through as you fight your way through the masses.
Just the one lady then who had come into town to feed the pigeons, dressed rather fetchingly as the opening shot of this shot blog post shows. She too was amazed by the sheer scale of our current situation.
I reckon that I saw no more than 25 people, which is great if you’re one of those Street Photographers who likes to take shots of solitary people in an urban environment. They’ll be living the dream the way things are currently.
I like to see lots of people. That’s the challenge to frame a scene without overlapping characters which by the way I failed at during the only opportunity I had. Perhaps we will call it “Street Scenes” in future. Meanwhile ‘the word on the Street’ from the people is that there isn’t any.
You can see that I ended up looking for colour matches from the last couple of images. Otherwise it was a case of simply trying to find people.
I’ve since found out that most of the population of England were at the beach that day. Flouting Social Distancing rules like there was no tomorrow and if they carry on with that there might not be a tomorrow for some. We went to see my sister the next day at Budleigh Salterton, no overcrowding there or social distancing problems. In Bath, a small queue formed outside one of the few shops that was open for essentials. A guy moving furniture into a new flat. A couple exercising near the Abbey. Two people in the park near Pultney Bridge.
They say every picture tells a story and I decided that for a change not too many words are necessary for this post. It doesn’t take a financial genius to figure out that if there’s a usually vibrant city as quiet as I show here, the working population is sitting on the beach sunbathing and the children haven’t been to school for months then we’re storing up a lot of socio-economic problems for the future. A future where we’ll be paying huge amounts both financially and emotionally, not just us either, our children and grandchildren will be settling that bill.
I walked back to my motorbike, over that bridge. I spoke before about how we’ll be unable to see and interpret those human emotions when our faces are covered. Here’s a couple of the ‘Invisible Man”, not quite a ghost in this Ghost Town, but he may as well have been.
I’ve just read through this post and it seems a bit negative. It wasn’t my intention to be, I usually try to keep things light and airy. I was hoping for some more life down there in Bath and it was disappointing. What I will say is that I enjoyed ever second of that hour in Bath. I’ll be going in again and fingers crossed we’ll see more activity next time, an uptick in our circumstances. If anything it makes Street Photography even more of a challenge. I’ll leave you with a shot I took a couple of days before as I walked through Corsham, a small town near to us. There’s never much going on there at the best of times, during this crisis even less, however there’s always something interesting or unusual to see on the Street wherever you happen to be and that’s the fascination. Nothing captured here is in any way exceptional, but as I’ve said so many times before it’s the process that’s important to me.
As always my sincere thanks go to anyone taking the time to read this blog.
All images can be opened by clicking on the thumbnails and are taken using a Leica M with Summicron 28mm Lens fitted.
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