A girl sits at a bar in Wally's Jazz Bar, Boston MA.
I don't
want this journal to play out as a simple tour diary – cataloguing
the minutiae of each day, but I fear that if I don't write it down
then I will completely lose huge chunks of what we have done due to
my crappy memory. Just in the simple act of trying to bullet point
the past few day's activities, I completely forgot about Thursday.
Photography
has been utterly relentless. I have been putting myself under an
awful amount of stress, this trip is a hugely loaded one. I know that
I really need to deliver on this as it's the opportunity i've been
dreaming of. We've yet to really relax, using every available minute
to either photograph, video or write in my journal. I've also been
tearing my brain apart with constant evaluation of whether I am
tackling this in the best way that I possibly can. It's been pretty
tough, but i'm fairly confident that i'm ticking the right boxes.
Due to
this stress, myself and Bekky decided that we should have our first
alcoholic beverage in the continent; this still wasn't an opportunity
to set my camera down though. We found ourselves at Kenmore Square in
the midst of Red Sox fans (Boston baseball team) – pushing agains
the flow, our attention was directed to a cheap looking
bar/restaurant on the side of the road. The beer was cold and so was
the food, but it was still enjoyable. Following this we went with the
flow, sitting down at the bar of The Cask & Flaggon, a sports bar
heavily biased to Red Sox fans. I've rarely been as confused as I was
in here. I always thought that I 'got' baseball, I knew that you hit
the ball and ran around the bases. Turns out I 'get' rounders, the
scoring system made no sense to me. Also with that, no one had
explained to us about the American system of tipping at bars, so we
spent a good fifteen minutes trying to figure out what to sign and
how much to tip. We settled on 10% and hoped that would be enough.
Thursday
came and with it was the desire to explore downtown. The suburbia of
yesterday had been great but we needed the hum of the city. 'Boston
is an incredibly clean city' I thought as we stepped off the 57 bus;
there was literally no litter anywhere, not even a cigarette dimp in
sight. It's buildings glinted in the sun, stretching up into the
clouds – I craned my neck to see the top of them. I had never
really seen so many tall buldings in such a dense area. This sparked
excitement about how tall the buildings in NYC would be. Hunger
eventually took us to The Barking Crab, a waterside seafood
restaurant under a huge gazebo. We both ordered a platter of fried
fish each – containing the most beautifully fresh tasting scallops,
haddock and shrimp.
So far on
our trip, we had walked to most of our destinations, figuring that
we're most likely to see America as it is if we leave well trodden
routes. Only, on this occasion this may not have been the best idea.
Our next destination was a flat my Gran used to live in, the one Joey
burst into, singing 'I am the Duke of Earl'. However, as romantic as
this little story is, the area is far from it. Getting there, we had
entered Boston's 'edgelands', going through empty industrial estate
after empty industrial estate and also stepping out of our comfort
zone. Nothing untoward happened to us at any point, but it wasn't
what we had prepared for – both of us looking incredibly english,
cameras hanging around our necks. We arrived at the front door, I
took the photos I needed and we bailed on an Uber back to downtown.
In hindsight, we were overly paranoid but if heading to somewhere
different it's always better to blend in than stick out. I though it
bizarre to imagine my Gran in such an area though, it's always
strange to think of your family as being a young, care free person at
one time. I struggle to picture her living anywhere outside of
Cheshire.
After last
night's experience of Red Sox fans, we decided we would try and catch
a game to see if we could understand the sport any further. This plan
was temporarily scuppered when we found out that it was $37 dollars
for a ticket in the bleachers, but was later saved when we stumbled
into The Bleacher Bar. One of it's walls was a floor to ceiling
meshed window that looked straight out onto the field. You don't get
that in premier league football. All of our ticket money was instead
spent on beer & rum, a very nice trade off indeed. We made
friends with an American who shared my name as well as my views on
western politics; men in pubs solving the worlds problems once again.
With
Friday came a small hangover and Boston's Freedom Trail – a
pre-destined route around Boston's landmarks. I figured this would be
a good way of navigating the city for some street photography whilst
also seeing some culturally significant spots. The trail took us to
vast parts of Boston that we previously hadn't seen, crossing over
cobbled streets, through farmers markets and eventually to the Bunker
Hill monument that concluded the route.
Before our
trip, I decided to book myself and Bekky in for a tattoo by an artist
I like at Boston Tattoo Convention. This was Bekky's first tattoo, so
she was pretty nervous. Both of them are themed on commemorating our
trip: mine a cartoon landscape of the kind of land we will find in
western America and Bekky's a simple mountain horizon.
The night
then took us to Wally's jazz bar, a small dive not far from Newbury
Street. Climbing up onto the bar stools, we opened a tab and
swivelled around to watch the musicians. The band was made up of four
young artists, a trumpet, a saxophone, a double bass, a guitarist and
a drummer all played along to the beat – taking turns to indulge
themselves in a solo. The double bass took us down, swaying between
slow notes and deep beats before the trumpet player rose us up
through the ceiling; singing a song through his instrument. I had
checked out the clubs' website previously and loved their ethos, they
run a programme of educating kids about music, hoping to get them to
pick up instruments instead of guns.
Part of my mission in America is to visit as many Jazz bars as I can. I had only ever visited one previously when I was in the UK so I was anxious to get into the scene, to allow myself to be consumed by the music and understand what is so romantic about jazz. After all, jazz had played such a huge part of my fabrication of Joey, I wanted to discover what it was all about. I tried photographing the musicians in here, but I wasn't really sure how to deal with this in order to show anything about the scene more than 'here is the musician playing, here is a live music shot'. Some of the shots are okay but I found that turning the camera on the customers was more fruitful in portraying the environment. As I progress, I will carry on shooting both but I feel that the significant images will be the people watching on, lost in the music.
Part of my mission in America is to visit as many Jazz bars as I can. I had only ever visited one previously when I was in the UK so I was anxious to get into the scene, to allow myself to be consumed by the music and understand what is so romantic about jazz. After all, jazz had played such a huge part of my fabrication of Joey, I wanted to discover what it was all about. I tried photographing the musicians in here, but I wasn't really sure how to deal with this in order to show anything about the scene more than 'here is the musician playing, here is a live music shot'. Some of the shots are okay but I found that turning the camera on the customers was more fruitful in portraying the environment. As I progress, I will carry on shooting both but I feel that the significant images will be the people watching on, lost in the music.
Anyway,
that brings us to today. We kicked it all off with a visit to some
local thrift stores – one, a pop up shop in a church and the other,
an impeccably organised, colour co-ordinated-superstore of a thrift
shop. Bargains were had: discount tshirts, brand new shirts and a
scruffy, stuffed dog that we've named Frank.
We spent
the day hitting up a few of my Gran's favourite spots in Boston –
the Public Gardens, Boston Common and Beacon Hill. Here, we
encountered the swan boats she had described to me, they float so
delicately through the water. We mingled within a cosplay convention
and watched a newly married couple have their photographs taken. We
walked narrow streets, holding hands the same way that Joey &
Grace would have done all those years ago.
The night
ended with a trip over to The Beehive, the other jazz bar I had my
eye on. Earlier in the day I had been granted permission to
photograph the evening's show. The Beehive is a bit more upmarket
than Wally's, and as such my photographs from it are a little more
stale. If I had let myself be carried away with photographing it's
patrons i'm sure I would have been thrown out as my permission was to
shoot the band. However, due to better lighting I managed to steal a
few frames of the guitarist that seemed to express my idea of the
jazz scene. As of yet i'm unsure how this will be incorporated into
the rest of my work, but I believe it's important that I find a way.