for David Hynes
I think the photographer is one of the first completely modern people…
he’s always living off his nerves in a big-time world. David Bailey, c. 1965
‘Mr Churchill is dead!’ announces the photo ed,
flicking through contact prints of Blenheim and
marble Admiralty Arch. (The armed
flotilla in the Mersey won’t go away.
A Navy is a fine thing but who controls it
is the issue.) Boys from Harrow and Sandhurst
encircle Eros, the pedestrianised paving,
where colourful visitors now shout ‘Howdy!’
under hoardings for Max Factor, Gordon’s and
The Beatles’ new film Help.
The nation’s hope
is extinguished by an eternal flame, out of which
the Lunar Photographic Mission blasts off,
rocket tearing the sky. This is monitored idly
by holiday makers in the dimly lit lounge
of Butlin’s, dusty red seats curving their spines
as they unfold enormous newspapers across
their arthritic knees. What a grave new world is
assumed as plastic flowers chorus
the late afternoon ‘wakey-wakey’!
Mucus caravans overlook a cold pea soup sea.
They rock on dead wheels as refugees from modern life
(with its Habitat gadgets and polythene wrapping)
shiver under grey sky. Get out your Instamatic
to record the tree-lined path to nothingness.
Approach the realisation that travelling
didn’t count and the destination won’t either.
Go home!
A jagged toothed skyline looms over the concrete
freeway and its broad paving. Covered shop fronts
tend to its route. In this suburban playground
‘modern people’ stand by their Hillmans
awaiting instruction through entertainment.
The smiling hero of the cigarette ad photoshoot,
his seven squealing beauties squeezed into his open top,
skids out of our smoke haze to park
under the new pencil-slim lamp post,
transporting the benefactions of celebrity
to this newest of new towns.
No one can hide from your magic camera.
It peels trees from concrete boulevards.
It sucks out the dolly birds’ brains and limbs
that you Pop-Art collage to the puce walls.
The Kinks thrash each other with their guitars.
Snap!
Robert Sheppard
Image: ‘The Field of Forgotten Dreams’ by David Hynes, © D. Hynes
.