Although Medway Eyes has only been around for a few months, the photographers who make up the core team have been pounding the streets for years finding pictures in unlikely places and learning to love these towns. The Look At Medway Exhibition last October was an attempt to show you Medway the way we see it; vibrant and creative, gloriously decayed in places, pulsing with life in others.
But there is a stench in these towns. The council wants to stamp out the stench; make Medway clean and sterile; a nice blank canvas on which to paint neat little lined parking bays for the 2012 Olympic car park that Medway is set to become. The council thinks it can eradicate the stench by building ugly, unaffordable, uninsurable boxes along the river for rich people to live in, while the locals are denied the views they used to take for granted. There will be a white elephant or two; perhaps another theatre to eventually be abandoned and a new parade of shops to set against the backdrop of declining sales that already blights the dying Pentagon, the tumbleweed Dockside outlet and what was once a proper high street.
This is where the Desolation Row project sprang to life; in the high street, as I wandered along among the blinkered and the blind, camera in hand, legs on auto, brain in gear, heart on fire. I was saddened by the dreary abandoned shop fronts, and angry that nobody cared. In fact, nobody around me had even noticed. I felt like an alien, like I'd woken up in a world gone wrong, some kind of parallel universe that looked the same, but felt different. I felt different. I felt awake. No wonder the council found it so easy to force through their regeneration plans when so many of the people allegedly consulted were sleep-walking in Poundland.
So Medway Eyes decided to create a multi-media archive to document the changes in Medway. And we asked lots of creatives to come along for the ride. And some of them did...
Sunday 15th March saw an
assortment of creative locals - musicians, photographers, film makers,
writers, artists and designers traipsing around the forgotten stretch
of the Chatham/Rochester Hight Street. The plan for the shoot was to make
it up as we went along. The only certainty was that we would end up in
the pub.
Our only
disappointment was that the Bob Dylan which had been stencilled onto
the side of the Jade Garden
had been painted over. A real shame as it was the only thing breaking
up the ghastly shade of Dull that the rest of the building was painted
in. Anyway, thanks to our vigilant photographers, we'd heard of a second Bob Dylan painted
on Bath Hard Lane. We found Bob
to be wonderfully photogenic and a real hit with the ladies.
We did the second Desolation Row shoot two weeks later. We filmed a couple of interviews and a bit of singing by the
river. Unfortunately, there was one thing missing; Bob Dylan. The second one had been painted
over too. He'd been stencilled onto a filled in railway arch on a
scrubby bit of wasteland, so who would paint over it and why? Given
that other graffiti had been left behind, including an indecipherable,
artistically-devoid tag about six feet high, I could come to only one conclusion. And it seems I was right. Medway Eyes photographer, Garry Jenkins, was in the papes again for the second time this week. The caption beneath his photo read "This Dylan image has since been painted over by council workers". (You can view the newspaper article here). You see, the council can't have the general public seeing validity in vandalism. How will it manipulate us into believing that Medway needs regeneration if the crappy tags have to compete with artistic graffiti? So they painted over Bob and left the rubbish behind in the name of making Medway a "cleaner and safer place".
Oh, I almost forgot. The stench. Like the man who spends all day looking for his keys only to find he had them all along, the council will find the stench in its pocket, buried beneath the money earmarked for the renovation of the theatre its currently demolishing.
Sweet Fanny on behalf of Medway Eyes
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A huge thank you to Groovy Uncle, Rio Fraser, Andy Fraser, Didi Bergman, The Great Zarganza, Lupen Crook, Stuart Turner, Moira Mehaffey, Kay Meinertzhagen, Andy Harding, Jay Allen, Abby Ziering-Dalmedo, Ben Jones, Johnny Barker, Darryl Hartley, Rich Clark, The Flowing, Thomas Palmar, Kirsteen Bristow, Paul Baker, Gary Robertson, Redlock, Anna Oates, Rew Oates, Alex Turner, Garry Jenkins, Phil Dillon, Lisa Dillon, Bob Dylan.