Spotted at the 453 bus stop at Deptford Bridge:
There are no benches or other seating at this bus stop lol.
I was standing there waiting for the 453 (as you do). The queue (well, no queue, more of a milling crowd) grew and I stared at the chair and thought about the shot. I had the Super Ikonta in my bag but as the crowd swelled (we were waiting for a while) I felt increasingly self-conscious about not only about pulling out a 55 year old folding camera, but metering the scene too. There is fuck all else to do when waiting for the 453 bus except stare at something that isn’t the traffic on Deptford Broadway and I knew I would become the centre of attention.
But if I didn’t photograph it I’d miss an abandoned chair, and abandoned chairs in strange contexts are close to my heart so I thought fuck it, I’ll just be kicking myself if I don’t do this. So I did. And predictably people stared at me as if I was absolutely mad. After all, WTF take a photo of a dumped and broken plastic chair in a piss-filled burnt-out corner of a bus stop? It is kind of hard to explain.
I’m not especially self-conscious when taking photos on the street, but normally I am not the focus of attention of a bored and irritated bus queue. I would have welcomed some dialogue in fact (and somebody sitting on the chair would have been the icing on the cake), but it was just sliding glances or obvious bewilderment and possibly an assumption that I was from Goldsmiths College of Art down the road. Not sure which is worse. Art students heh… I’m a bit old for that.
Then the bus turned up. I felt I had achieved something and I’m glad I got the image.
A couple of days later I found this high-chair abandoned on Blissett St in Greenwich
Slightly less public this time.
by skinnyvoice
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Torn between the mundane drudge of the pile of washing up and the complexities of human fragility after watching BBC2′s Grow Your Own about refugees working on an allotment I needed something at once terribly mundane and also terribly touching to make me feel whole again. I thought to log on to your site, and the picture of the chair has done it. Thank-you. Please may I use it as my laptop background?
Glad you liked it! Do use it for your wallpaper. I also have to do the washing up now…