Sparks: Adventures in Street Photography

Adventures in Street Photography

Stephen Leslie

• Publisher: Unbound
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781783524891
• eBook ISBN: 9781783524907
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Photography

'To put it simply, this book is fun. It's also funny, deep, at times disturbing, at other times profoundly hopeful. But every image gets remade in ways that hold a bit of genius' Lens Culture 'Funny, tragic and often bizarre, Stephen Leslie's photos in his book Sparks are an unique ode to street photography' Guardian A family isbrought close to ruin by a pet python; an Icelandic advertising agency has aproblem with a campaign involving a dead seagull; a chiropodist desperatelywants to stop examining people's feet and dreams of becoming a pirate...Stephen Lesliehas always tried to capture images that hint at wider, hidden narratives –suggestive moments rather than decisive ones – and Sparks is a book that imagines the weird and wonderful storiesbehind his original street photographs.It is alove-letter to photography, pairing eighty beautiful colour images – shot onfilm – with these stories, as well as the author's recollections of twentyyears spent looking through the lens.

What can I tell you about this photograph? I took

it in Corsica in 2002, 25 April. Wendy and I had

gone on a long walk and got completely lost.

As we tried to guess our way back to the path

we chanced across this abandoned car. The light

was just perfect so I took a quick photograph and

we carried on, wondering about what might have

happened and how it ended up as lost as we

were, miles from any road.

A few minutes later we bumped into

a young girl and a much older man, almost

bent double and walking with a stick. In our

atrocious French we tried to ask for directions

but fortunately the girl also spoke English. She

explained that this was her grandfather and they

were out collecting mushrooms and kindly told us

how to get back on our way. As we were thanking

them I remembered the car and asked if she knew

how it had got there? She smiled and repeated

the question in Corsican to her grandfather. He

started to laugh, then cough, and eventually told

us this story that she translated:

‘When I was about twenty-five I was in

love with a beautiful woman from the next village

but her father didn’t approve of me as there

was bad blood between our two families. We

decided to elope and so I took my father’s car.

We met in the middle of the night and started to

drive towards our new life. But her father came

after us in his car with two of his brothers and a

shotgun. I drove off the road to escape and we

went right through the woods where you got lost.

The car that’s still there now is all that’s left of her

father’s car, which got stuck during the chase. We

got away and were married in France in 1954

but we could only return twenty years later after

her father had died. No one around here wants

to move the car, as it’s considered bad luck, but

for me it represents good luck because if the car

didn’t crash then we might never have escaped.

So we leave it there as a way of remembering the

past and never forgetting.’

We listened to him speak, said our

goodbyes and wandered off, astonished by this

story and happy that we’d got lost in the first

place.

Except that none of this is true, it’s all

a lie.

Sure, it’s a picture of a crashed car in

Corsica that I took while lost on holiday, but there

was no mushroom-picking girl or bent-double

grandfather, no eloping or midnight chases. I

made all that up.

Every photograph invites speculation

and imagining. I’ve always taken photos not just

because the subject has interested me visually

but because I’m fascinated by what else might

be going on, intrigued by the latent, potential

stories that could be uncovered. Ninety per cent

of the photographs I take are quick candid shots

and I seldom stop to speak or interact with the

subjects. I rarely know the true context. So this

book is an attempt to expand out from some

of these initial sparks and imagine possible

narratives arising from the pictures. Each one

of the photographs in this book has sparked an

idea, or several ideas in my head, and led me to

invent my own potential contexts. They are in no

way intended to be factual, accurate or truthful.

They are simply reactions.

However they’re not all lies.

The only consistent factor in every one

of these photographs, which have been taken

over many years and in different ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Sparks