2007
With Alter James Smith has produced a body of work that is much more than a straightforward record of some housing schemes in Corby on the eve of their demolition.
Smith’s photographs refer to community photography. But they also betray a familiarity with Neue Sachlichkeit, (new matter-of-factness, the German reaction to expressionism in the 1920s), and with Mass Observation and the depression era photojournalism of Humphrey Spender. But whilst Smith takes on the methods of his peers, he seems to want to explain rather than to observe. Maybe Smith’s powers of persuasion won him the commission to record Corby in the winter of 2006/7 because he certainly wouldn’t be the choice if objective recording of physical appearances were what Alter was supposed to be about.
There is an urban myth in Corby which Smith recounted to me one wet winter morning that John Stedman, the architect whose office designed the notorious St. Anne’s estate in Nottingham, as well as Lincoln Way and Danesholme in Corby, took his own life after having bequeathed a legacy of sub-standard housing.
Form follows function, was a modernist architect’s unquestioned belief. But in reality, form and function often have very little to do with one another, and these places demonstrate the fallacy of the notion that there is a causal relationship between buildings and their content, or their use or their meaning. Its easy to see that an objectivist belief in the power of architecture to change society for the better, the sort of belief that modernist architects held, could lead to despair at its failure to deliver. Lincoln Way might be successful as formal architecture. As Smith shows, even now it is photogenic in its own way. And it still looks good in a way that appeals to architects. But it presents seemingly insurmountable difficulties as a place for people to live. I don’t know whether Stedman (who died in 1990) did in fact kill himself, but it certainly isn’t the case that his work is without architectural quality.
Photography has its own objectivist myths, and that’s why Smith’s interest in the questions that photographs ask is informative. Smith is not a native of Corby but rather an inquisitive visitor, a wanderer who co-ordinates his visits with inclement weather. There is a particular existential poetry in the sight of buildings that are scarcely forty years old reduced to the decaying hulks that we see here, and the fog that comes from the North Sea can be revealing, particularly if one is existentially preoccupied. Existential questions abound in the work which constitutes Alter: about forgotten futures; about the here and now of the passage of time; about the lugubrious complexity of the anonymous and personal. As Robert Smithson described it, the obsolete is merely the future in reverse.
There’s a long history of poetic rumination on the meaning and significance of decay along these lines, from Thomas Gray’s Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard (1751) to John Ruskin’s The Stones of Venice (1851-3). For Ruskin, time’s arrow was a rallying sign, a call to architects to do great things. ‘See, this our fathers did for us’ he wrote. In the twenty first century with humanity’s existence teetering on a knife edge, we seem paradoxically impatient for tomorrow, and care less about the past. Alter captures this zeitgeist,the spirit of our age, glimpsed beneath a grey January sky in the fraction of a second that it takes for the shutter of a camera to close. And we are left with questions to ask about the future of our urban environment, and about the forms that our communities (in Corby and elsewhere) will take in the twenty first century.