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by Gary Alexander
The actor, Timothy Spall, talking about his experience of suffering with leukaemia, said he had a period of profundity when just looking at a tree was enough for him but he also realised that he couldn’t live like that for long. On an occasion when he found himself shouting at other drivers in a traffic jam he knew he was getting better. After being diagnosed with lymphoma at the end of last year I made an effort to get out of the house and walking every day. So I found myself spending more time in parks than I ever used to. Being a primarily urban photographer I’ve tended to treat green spaces as separate from the city but given how common they are, this seems particularly stupid in London. Over the past few months, finding that I actually stumble upon my kind of absurdity in parks just as often as I do on the streets has been a minor revelation. In a way, the fact that there’s supposed to be less compulsion applied to what we do with our leisure time heightens the level of irrationality. Last week, after dealing with a relatively benign door-to-door salesman I noticed a rising internal anger. Hopefully that means I’m getting better. So I’m going to keep visiting parks not just to spend time staring at trees vainly hoping for revelations but also to take pictures of the normal and bizarre things that happen there.
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Submitted on the theme of LEISURE, Summer 2010