Sometimes the best recommendations to satisfy your cultural thirst come from right on your own local doorstep.
OH HAI Brixton Buzz.
And so with a spare half hour in Clap’ham, I swerved the brunching Wankerville hordes and headed to the local library to look at the work of Brixton street photographer Christopher iCha.
The X-Factor exhibition is low key, but lovely all the same, It features many recognisable Brixton faces. The enthusiasm for the subject matter comes across clearly.
A mixture of black & white and colour snaps are on display as you make your way down the spiralling - and bloody awful - structure of Clapham Library.
There’s no great fanfare telling you about the exhibition. The photos blend in with what is already quite a busy interior landscape.
Framed behind glass in a very bright building, they’re also impossible to snap yourself, with endless lens glare.
That’s no bad thing. It’s a little cheeky to take photos of photos, often leading to a poor secondhand reproduction.
It’s clear from the first frame on show that iCha has the complete trust of his subject matter. He’s not capturing Brixton scenes - he is PART of the Brixton street life.
If you can manage this then you’re halfway there to capturing some decent portrait photography.
It’s an incredibly positive, and very playful exhibition. It will serve as a wonderamful historical archive of the Brixton scene in ten, twenty years time.
Clapham Library itself is very odd. It was built on the back of a developer, wanting to flog on luxury apartments up above. The library looks and feels like an afterthought.
The spiralling nature of the building means that you make your way down to the basement on basically a giant helter skelter walking ramp. It has aged badly over the past fifteen years or so.
Never trust round buildings - and yep, I’ve worked in one.