Rituals of Passion

Much of my personal picture making over the last year can be loosely called street photography, although I don’t like the label. I am interested in the darker side of city life, such as the fight for recognition or to leave a mark, or the repression of “nature.”

As I have mentioned in my previous posts http://www.rogercoulam.com/blog/2011/01/escaping-the-digital-straight-jacket-part-one/ and http://www.rogercoulam.com/blog/2011/01/escaping-the-digital-straight-jacket-part-two/ I am not comfortable in such contrived and controlled surroundings, and crowds are not my natural place.

To explore this further, and after several exploratory trips, I have tentatively started a project looking at the rituals outside of football grounds in the cities of Sunderland and Newcastle upon Tyne (two places with a traditional sporting hatred of each other). Up to 50,000 people attend home matches, and the movement of this volume of people can at times seem like a human tide sweeping by, especially when one is going nowhere in particular, just observing and looking for pictures.

On an average street people often seem very alone, they have their individual lives, they have something different to achieve, but outside football stadiums there is a shared objective and some of that individuality is suspended. Everyone is going to the same place, for the same reasons, and each one of them shares the rituals, and is bound by the passion for their team. So under these conditions I have found it hard to make pictures that sum up how I feel as an outsider. As a result during my last two trips I have simply given in to the flow of people, rather than fighting it or looking for fleeting images that don’t show the experience.

My efforts so far can be found in the new gallery at http://www.rogercoulam.com/galleries/23/

Leaving St. James Park, March 2011, and entering The Stadium of Light, Feb. 2011