a&l
TheNational
Sunday, March 18, 2012 www.thenational.ae
City of
dreams
and rivers
SF Said talks to Kate Quill about using
a forgotten technology to photograph
London’s forgotten waterways
Remember the Polaroid? You could
be forgiven for thinking of the clunky 1970s camera that spat out “instant” prints as a format that, in our
brave new digital world, was as obsolete as the windup gramophone.
But SF Said, a Beirut-born writer
and photographer, proves the medium is not only alive, but thriving.
He’s about to have his first exhibition of Polaroids, all of them London landscapes, in the high-spending environs of Maggs antiquarian
booksellers, in London’s Mayfair.
His love of Polaroid is not about a
1970s aesthetic. “It’s got nothing to
do with nostalgia,” he says. He gestures towards a picture in the show:
“The 1970s did not look like that.
To me, that looks like a dream or a
memory. There is something in the
colours and textures of Polaroid that
I don’t think any other type of camera comes close to. It’s pure magic.”
Said’s pictures do seem touched
Expired
Polaroid film
produces
striking
effects in
SF Said’s
photographic
exploration
of London.
Photos
courtesy the
artist / Maggs
Gallery
by magic. They’re unconventional,
with notable “flaws” in the exposure, but possess an unsettling
sense of mystery that will stop you
in your tracks.
“When I first saw them they blew
me away,” says Carl Williams, the
curator of the exhibition at Maggs.
“SF has captured a side of London,
a particular psychology of the city,
which is all to do with things you
know but can’t quite remember.
They have a sense of the uncanny,
what Freud called unheimlich. It’s
very hard to deal in this feeling, but
SF really gets it.”
The pictures were taken for a book,
London’s Lost Rivers, by Tom Bolton, published last year. Even native
Londoners are often unaware that
London is underscored by several
waterways, such as the Fleet, the
­Tyburn and the Westbourne.
Polaroids, continued on 3 →
Sunday, March 18, 2012 www.thenational.ae
The National arts&life
f ast
03
we
Our eyes on all the bargains to be had online at www.theoutnet.com. An enormous clearance sale
is underway until March 19 with designer pieces such as Balmain studded leather jackets and Zac
Posen tweed wide-leg trousers up for grabs. Accessories such as Alexander Wang textured leather tote bags are also available, with some top labels discounted by up to 85 per cent
‘The camera and the film play as big
a part as you do, and sometimes
they know better than you’
→ Polaroids, continued from 1
Said and Bolton trudged around
with an aquatic map of the city to
research the book — a map that a
19th-century Londoner would have
been familiar with but that has long
since fallen out of use. Rather like
the Polaroid.
The exhibition also includes the
photographic work of Jon Savage,
the foremost historian of punk
counter-culture in the 1970s, who
wrote the acclaimed England’s
Dreaming. Together, their pictures
are a poetic, deeply felt response to
forgotten London: edgelands, derelict sites, empty riverbanks, alleyways and tunnels.
“I find it wonderful that London
is a kind of palimpsest, that it contains all these layers of history and
experience,” says Said. “The lost
rivers project was a perfect way into
that. I am fascinated by the idea that
landscapes might have memories
or dreams.”
Polaroid, more than any other format, is perfectly suited to capturing
this. It seems to scrabble away at the
surface of things, trying to locate
the intangible and invisible. Said
uses a second-hand SX-70, a classic model first made in 1972, and
scours dusty old pharmacies and
eBay to buy expired film. New film
is available again, thanks to the Impossible Project in New York, which
saved Polaroid’s last factory at the
11th hour in 2010, but the quality,
says Said, is not quite there yet.
Said loves expired film, particularly in a range thrillingly titled Time
Zero. Far from ruining an image,
its ageing, unstable chemicals contribute to the dreamlike quality of
his pictures. Leaking colours; blurring; unexposed corners; flame-like
flashes of light across the surface;
smoky shades of mauve and turquoise: Said uses them all to artistic
effect. River Walbrook looks apocalyptic. Flames lick the landscape as
night workers sweep snow from the
streets. River Fleet, meanwhile, has
a ghostly, Victorian, intensely melancholic quality. “With Polaroid,
the camera and the film play as big a
part as you do, and sometimes they
know better than you,” says Said.
Said is passionate about photography and “the viability of the analogue form”, but he isn’t a professional. The camera is something he
picks up as “an escape from words,
writing and editing”. After a spell in
academia at Cambridge University,
he enjoyed a successful career as
an arts journalist for The Daily Telegraph, before leaving to devote his
time to children’s books. His first
two, Varjak Paw and The Outlaw
Varjak Paw, about an urban Mesopotamian cat with magical powers,
won several awards and favourable
reviews in the British and American
press. The story has since been optioned by the Jim Henson Company, of Muppets fame. Said has just
completed his third book, Phoenix,
a “sci-fi space epic for all ages”,
which will be out next year.
Said was born in Beirut in 1967,
and lived in Jordan until he was two.
When his parents parted, he moved
to London with his mother. His
ethnic background is a mixture of
Iraqi, Egyptian, Turkish and Circassian, but London is where he feels
“completely at home”. Even so, the
Middle East has played an important part in his life. Said even became a speech writer for the Crown
The author and photographer SF Said with his ancient Polaroid camera. Courtesy Mark Pilkington
‘
I love the Burj Al
Arab. I could stare
at it for hours
Rear Cover (left) and Flaming Path, Polaroid pictures taken by SF Said for the book London’s Lost Rivers and on exhibition at the Maggs Gallery in London. Photos
courtesy the artist / Maggs Gallery
Prince of Jordan at a time when, he
wistfully recalls, “peace in the Middle East looked like a real possibility”.
His grandparents ended up living
between Abu Dhabi and Dubai, and
Said still visits the Gulf frequently.
He is fascinated by its “oldness and
newness”, its “transient, miragelike” nature.
He is working on a Polaroid
project of the area and says that in
Dubai, “you sometimes feel as if
you are looking at a parallel world.
I love the Burj Al Arab. I could stare
at it for hours. A skyscraper in the
shape of a sail on a dhow. What an
amazing idea. And a great subject
for Polaroid.”
• From the Westbourne to
* the to do list: 18:3:12
I Put It There, You
Name It
Ramin and Rokni Haerizadeh
and Hesam Rahmanian
depart from formalised
gallery structures by
transposing their home
environment to the gallery
space. Exhibition runs daily
until May 3, 10am-7pm
(Fridays closed), Gallery
Isabelle van den Eynde,
Dubai, 04 323 5052, www.
ivde.net.
Abaya
Through various
media, six Emirati
women artists
comment on the
significance of the
Abaya. Opens 7-9pm
and continues daily
10am-10pm until
April 20, (Fridays
3-10pm), The Ara
Gallery, Dubai, 04
454 2784, www.
thearagallery.ae.
Nothing Beats the
Blunderbuss
Showcase Gallery celebrates
the opening of its new
gallery space in Alserkal
Avenue, Al Quoz, with
an exhibition of charcoal
drawings and mixed-media
pieces by Amartey Golding.
Opens 7pm, then runs
daily until April 18, 10am6pm, Showcase Gallery,
Dubai, 04 348 8797, www.
showcasedubai.com.
the Wandle: the Photographs
of SF Said and Jon Savage, is
at Maggs Bros, 50 Berkeley
Square, London, from March 22
to April 19
# [email protected]