Across the alley

Who watches the watchers?

My office (two words in, I'm already qualifying them - the room with four walls, a floor, ceiling, and a window that I share with six other people and our computers, that's what I'm calling my office) overlooks an alley in Soho. From my desk I can't see into the street, but I can see directly into a flat across the alley. There are red flowers in pots precariously balanced on three window sills.

Every day, like clockwork, the elderly couple who live there come to their window and look out. Once in the morning, still in their night clothes. Once after they've cleaned up and dressed. Then several times throughout the day, for no more than twenty or thirty seconds at a time they appear at the window, always peering down into the street, spying on the goings on. They've become a part of my daily routine to the extent that I miss them when they occasionally don't show.

Soho is so packed with media companies, theatres, sex shops, pubs and bars, it's hard to imagine actually living here, although you know that people must do. You don't see elderly people in the street, so I can only imagine they've lived there a very long time. If London had a Little Italy, this would also have been it. I imagine them to be an old Italian couple, now left to watch the world go by beneath them.

The photographer in me couldn't let their regular visual presence go by without cataloguing it in some way. How very Rear Window Jimmy Stewart of me, I know. Over a few days, I took a number of photos.









I thought about doing a whole regular series, one photo a day, rain or shine. Something like that. Then as I was editing the photos down I left out ones that weren't particularly flattering, or caught them in an unguarded moment (picking their noses, etc). Then I decided to leave out any photos that identified their specific location [ahh she's at the window as I'm writing this. Gone again]. As much as I feel the frisson of being a voyeur, there's something profounding discomforting about it too, as though I am breaking some unspoken trust between subject and viewer. Knowing that people are behaving in a way that makes it clear they are unaware that anyone is or could even be watching them, makes me at least want to make my presence known. Then of course it would ruin the nature of my relationship to them and to the moments I've captured. Like physics on the scale of the smallest particles, quantum physics, you can't perform an experiment without your presence as observer irrevocably changing the result of the experiment.

There's a place for candid photos of unwitting strangers, either as journalism, documentary, or historical record for sometime down the line. I still take them because of all those things. Yet I'm also increasingly discomfited to take pictures of people without their consent, let alone publish them, and of course profiting from them (unless there's some journalistic value to it) is out of the question.

The latch to the film gate recently broke, and I've had to tape it up to keep it closed. Light has started to leak in and spoil the photographs. The last few frames of my photos of the elderly couple were washed out from light spillage, like a veil being drawn between me and them. I took it as a sign.