What stroke me first when I saw Guimarães’ Bluetown project was primarily the intriguing mix and fusion of art and documentary photography. Shot on a 5x4 camera these tableaux bring you close to the oceanic adventure that Guimarães had to encounter and to sew together. The photographer having used the available light of the places he visited, does not forge the atmosphere, but rather maintains the reality of the location. Moreover, in his project he has included both close-up and wide-angle scenes, depending on the necessity, importance and point of view he wants to provide to his viewers. With Bluetown he has achieved two things; one is to approach the mundane and vernacular in an artistic way and the other is to deconstruct or if you prefer to reconstruct an image of London, exposing and documenting a social reality of the city. What follows is an attempt to understand how the photographer has brought home the bacon (raw and not fried…).
Firstly, it is not that simple to say what or where exactly Bluetown is, because it is something abstract and solid at the same time. According to Guimarães’ website, ‘Bluetown is, a kind of ‘second order’ city, an imaginary place made of fragments of a previously existing reality’. And here is where I find both the beauty and oxymoron of this project. Guimarães’ imaginary place is actually London itself or to put it better it is a fragment of the already existing London playing on the boundaries of reality and fiction. It is a London as we have not seen it before, it is a London beyond what we are already been used to see as portrayed and showcased by the media or in tourist guides and magazines; it is a London found and constructed by Guimarães and the images that compose his project are dominated by an undisputable reality. To put it bluntly it is London behind the curtain.
Moreover, as it is stated in his website, ‘to find Bluetown Guimarães superimposed an outline of Queen Elizabeth’s face on the map of London…’ In addition to this, in the introductory text of the Bluetown newspaper, Tomasz Curvo states that ‘The choice of Queen Elizabeth’s face is a symbolism for “Englishsness”, a necessary condition to approach the geography of Bluetown’. At this point, I will dare to say that the Humanities have been preoccupied with the cultural aspect of ‘Englishness’, living aside the class dimension ever since the fall of the Berlin Wall and class has deliberately been neglected from academic literature ever since. Fortunately, Guimarães indirectly and perhaps even subconsciously touches the class issue and the irony stands exactly here; although he has used the face of Queen Elizabeth to map London, a symbol of power, colonialism, monarchy, aristocracy and empire, the locations he visited and took pictures of, portray London’s class and social conditions, what the average Londoner experiences, beyond the spectacle that London wants to portray. Spectacle means the world to London and to paraphrase Guy Debord ‘The spectacle is the alpha and omega of London’. Guimarães has achieved to strip it off; He has removed the illusion of London by challenging reality and the grand narrative around London we have been accustomed to.
But one could ask, what is London anyhow? Is it the Wembley Stadium that will host this year’s Champions League Final between Barcelona and Manchester United? Is it Big Ben, Trafalgar Square or the Houses of Parliament? Is it one of the leading cultural capitals of the world? Is it a vivid city and one of the most important financial metropolises of the world (although the last one is nothing more than a bubble based on the service sector of the economy)? Yes, London surely encompasses all the aforementioned, but at the same time entails another reality, usually covered and not documented and only encountered by those who live there, like the photographer did. Although it may be a city that offers what we want to call ‘opportunities’, at the same time it is a fast-food city dominated by neon lights, surveillance, homelessness, poverty, unemployment, poor housing standards, beauty salons and corner shops. This motive repeats itself no matter in which part of the city you live in; in hip Brick Lane, extravagant Notting Hill, the deprived area of Hackney or indifferent Willesden Green, not to mention parts of the city further away than zone 6. Guimarães, not only managed to discover this London, but also to document it in a unique way and give a fresh approach without any clichés or repeating visual discourses.
The project has been also self-published by the photographer in a newspaper format of high quality (http://www.pedroguimaraes.net/main/index.php?/publications/bluetown-newspaper/). On its back cover there is a stamp that encourages and suggests the reader to ‘ Dream Seriously: when you are over 30 you should start taking your dreams seriously’, leaving a question for further thoughts and reflections. The question that remains is whether such a contradictory city like London can allow that…
