Kamikaze, Rotorua

Relax, said the night man,
We are programmed to receive.
You can check out any time you like,
But you can never leave.

The Eagles: Hotel California

I am not sure what it is about circuses and sideshows, but they fascinate me. I think they always have. I would like to think it has something to do with a childhood fascination, from being taken to a circus as a child and steering in awe at the clowns and circus animals. But that would be untrue. I have a vague memory, as a child, of being led around the outside of a circus, but never actually getting to see the performance. So there is nothing in my past that Stephen King could use as a hook for one of his astounding horror novels. Yet, at times, whenever I spend an hour or so in a sideshow, I get this uneasy feeling that in some surrogate way, I’m participating in a Stephen King script. So, being a photographer of sorts, I use the camera to help me navigate a path through this sense of the surreal and bizarre.

We all probably been to a fair, by ourselves, or with younger children. We may even have been those younger children. If you are a New Zealander, then it is almost certain that at some point in your life you were led around the amazingly surreal but somewhat tawdry collection of sideshows which can be found in different Kiwi towns at different times of the year. It never really occurred to me how small a group of people they might be, how homogenous their existence might be until a couple of years ago, when I was asked to photograph Guy Fawkes night at new Brighton Beach. Make sure, my client said, that you get plenty of photographs of the sideshows and stalls by the beach. She was paying the bill, so I was happy to oblige. Not that, in fact, there was any major issue for me. The surreal, the difference, the potentially bizarre, brings out the documentary photographer in me. I may well have been spending the weeks prior to the event out on a hillside somewhere, sharing the vastness and wonder of the natural world, looking to interpret eternity in the moments before me, but show me a circus, a fair, a celebration or public event(I particularly like  rock concerts!) , and I am in, boots and all. There are many reasons for this, but here is a potential explanation which will do just fine for today.

I really like being around people. I really like watching their interactions and the way they live their lives amongst each other. Yes, the way I am speaking suggests that at times I feel quite apart from that, that I am playing the role of observer rather than participant. I make no apologies. To document life, sometimes you had to stand apart from it. The documentary photographer proceeds through the world of illusion, acutely aware of the illusion and strangeness of what he beholds, part of it yet separate from it. Such is the geas of the documentary photographer. He is acutely aware that what he beholds is not just a string of ordinary events, but rather metaphors, portraits of life, symbolic happenings which hold the cue to a more profound and potentially powerful awareness. In the rhythm of what is apparently ordinary life, the documentary photographer perceives an endless succession of jewels, of moments where the real and the surreal meet at nexes of realisation. The true documentary photographer, it seems to me, is a gypsy in search of the perfect village, a traveller looking for a place to rest. A documentary photographer is fascinated by the morality play unravelling before him, and often is as fascinated by the spaces between events as the events themselves.

When Henri Cartier-Bresson referred to the decisive moment, he immediately created enormous misunderstanding amongst generations of documentary photographer wannabes. To really understand what he meant, it is necessary to go to the source and read what he actually said. Lesser mortals naturally assume that he was talking about split-seconds, about dissecting time into such transparent slices that the truth could be discovered there. Such thinking is quite two-dimensional, and really shows no understanding of what he really meant.

For Cartier-Bresson, the decisive moment was about synchronisation, about the simultaneous overlay of a series of supposedly disparate events which, when photographed in the single moment, showed themselves to be a series of vectors of intention all arriving at a single point in Time and Space. So, entranced by the possibilities, he devoted his life to seeking out these places where many things arrived at the same time. Look at one of his photographs and all you see is a relatively simple event. The small boy strides proudly home with a bottle of wine under his arm. It is a universal story, but to see it as such is to miss an awareness of the visual richness of the moment which Cartier-Bresson has captured. To get a glimpse of what he has truly observed, you need to drag your eyes away from the foreground, or from the obvious centre of interest. The truth and has photographs lies not in the foreground or the place where the obvious is taking place. It lies in the small things: in the shadowy figures moving in the background; in the structure or run of a road winding house on the edge of the picture; it lies in the small details littering the fringes of the photograph. You cannot begin to understand the genius of his photography until you begin to engage with the small things.

Welcome to the world of the documentary photographer. Welcome to the world of the documentary photographer, not the photojournalist. The photojournalist looks to tell a story in five seconds; the documentary photographer works with a much longer sense of time.

For the last week or so, I have been in Rotorua. It is a town which continues to fascinate me, to ask me to look deeper beneath the surface of what is apparently a tourist town which draws its living from feeding, watering and gently moving on passing tourists. Towns like this appear to be surface, to have little more to offer than the quotidian and customary. To see towns like Rotorua in this light is really to take them for granted, to be drawn into an illusion of your own making. There is always much, much more.

The first night here, I looked down out of the fifth floor window of my hotel, from a room where I was trapped by air conditioning and an inability to open any windows. Even in an urban environment, I need to open windows, to feel a connection to the atmosphere. I hate hotels with windows which do not open. For me they are one step removed from having a small room with bars. To look out and watched the clouds floating cast on the other side of plate glass is like being barred from participating. I needed to get out. And there, five floors down, across the over-engineered boulevard, was all the excuse I needed. A circus, a sideshow.

What drew me was Kamikaze. It was a memory, a moment revisited several times. I knew Kamikaze. We looked at each other several times before; on the beach, as we waited for the fireworks to take off and do their thing; at Southern Amp, lurking at the south end of the stadium, ready to amuse the disaffected and broad; at the Royal show, tawdry and bedraggled by daylight, doing its best to put a little excitement and recognition of mortality into the lives of the people who want/need a vice.

I had only ever seen one Kamikaze, or so I believed. Was it the same sideshow? If, when I approached, would I meet the same people to whom I had chatted on those other occasions? Was Kamikaze a marker for my own journey, a road mark of more significance to me than anybody else? I couldn’t stay away. So, true to fashion, I waited for sunset, for the crossover, a time when the illusion of reality is absorbed into the deep blueness of the night. I waited for the time when nothing was as it appears to be. Sometimes, the Truth lies not in the moments, but in the spaces between.

I loaded up my gear and wandered across the road. As usual, using the coyote method, where I circle around my subject, photographing it until I find a way in, I explored the possibilities, from afar and from closer, all the while enjoying the crossover, following the transition of the light from the warmth of sunset through the deep purples of transition into the deep flatness of night. I enjoyed watching the artificial lights, the neons, the sodium vapour, the mercury, the endless variety of modified tungsten picking itself off the floor, resisting the fading daylight and standing out proud against the darkness.

I watched the people who came and went, and watched their interactions; with each other, with the stallholders, with a sideshows, and watched their duelling with their own desire for another reality. So many spaces, so many moments between. All I wanted was between two and five photographs which would suggest better in some way I had spotted one of these doorways, one of the spaces between, one of these potential journeys from and to it. So I prowled, camera at the ready, exploring, prodding, looking.

I wandered amongst the stallholders, who were happy to talk to me. Sometimes a very big camera can be a passport; at other times it can be a millstone. Tonight they were happy to talk, to share their lives, to offer me a potential perspective on human existence with which I was not familiar. One whom I met was a relic from my days as a teacher. We played the usual dance where we attempted to identify how we knew each other and then shared the joy of recognition. New Zealand;  two degrees of separation. Others talked about the mutual life they shared, of nine to ten months of the year on the road together, of how they were family, of how they lived and loved and fought together. I began to see that there was only really one sideshow travelling the country, that they were all family, leading a gypsy existence beyond the understanding of most of the people wandering the sideshow. They too were observers, curious and interested watchers.

I continued to wander, to prowl, to observe, to use my camera as a key to finding one of those moments where truth suddenly rears up on its hind legs above the grasslands and makes its presence felt. I was looking for one of those moments where all the vectors of intention arrived at a single point in space and time.

And then I found one.

It was a small enough event. And, much to my amazement, it involved my old friend Kamikaze. To explain: Kamikaze is one of those scary sideshows which involves strapping yourself into a cage somewhat like the sort of frame in which you grill fish on a barbecue, then, trusting to the professionalism of the relatively uninterested and terminally bored sideshow staff, being thrown around the sky while your breakfast attempts to leave you, along with your money and good sense. But, as I have observed, there are plenty of people willing to classify this as fun.

Watching all the thrill seekers screaming (sometimes a little obviously, it seemed to me) I got bored. After all, there are only so many ways you can photograph a machine thrashing its way round the sky. There are only so many ways you can photograph an event which is so obvious in its intention and execution. So I began to look around the periphery.

And it happened. On the platform Kamikaze’s minders were having a chat while their imprisoned charges were being thrown around the sky. To the left of the frame several young women, clearly disinterested, were discussing their (potential) social lives and relationships. Their backs were turned and they were clearly uninterested. Then, into the middle of the frame came a small boy, crashing enthusiastically, running up the alloy gangplank as if he were keen to sign on, to pressgang himself into another illusion. As he danced up the steps, the carefully placed light shining on the side of the control booth illuminated the words Kamikaze and tickets. Run up here; buy your tickets to your own demise.  Your Life is running away on you. Climb on board and participate, becuase it is going by anyway.His lack of understanding and innocence were positively breathtaking. The disengagement of the others in the photograph seemed to speak volumes.

Juxtaposition. Space between.

Once again Kamikaze had offered me a new interpretation.

For years and years