I spent 7 years living in Camberwell. 10 Brunswick Vilas was the address and many people thought it was some fine location and very up market but it was in Camberwell. Certainly the house had some grandeur as it was a four storey victorian terrace house with a lovely garden. But Camberwell is in South London in the borough of Southwark, off the Walworth Road where some of the action
in Dicken´s Great Expectations takes place.
It was then and there, in 1996 and just after I had finished my year at Goldsmith when I was wondering the streets looking for a subject, a theme for a new project to work on. I thought of doing something on the diversity and multicultural live the presided over the area. The mix variety of different communities that had landed in this part of the world and to which I then belonged. Black Caribeans, Nigerians, Ghanans, Indians and Pakistani, Chipriots and Turkish, Greeks and Italians, Spanish, and of course English from all paths of life. The upper middle classes that lived up in The Grove and towards Dulwich Park, people like myself that occupied the terrace houses or those that inhabited the numerous council flats that dotted the whole area.
Camberwell was a rare mix of many things and a complete different scenario depending on the time of the day. Mornings were always somewhat dense and heavy as many on the out patients from the famous phyciatrist hospital Moseley were let out wondering the streets. On rainy days the whole place was a grim and depressing landscape, a perfect Dickensian background for many things to happen. Sunny summer days were vibrant and colorful, almost mediterranean.
One day I was on my way to Burgess Park and I found a old victorian building, a home to a boxing club which surprisingly had on one of its wall and engraved rather large image of a butterfly.
The tile work read " The Camberwell Beauty". It got my attention and arose my curiosity to find out what that was doing there and where did it come from.
It turned out that this was a common name within the local popular culture. A very well known butterfly that was found for the first time in the area as It came from abroad. I just love the idea of a butterfly that immigrated to England most probably on a boat that carried goods and people that later settled in the Islands.
It was a perfect allegory for what I was working on and was trying to do.
The resulting project is a body of work in which I began to explore a visual language that would somehow define my next documentary works. Often armed with a Hasselblad but most of the time with my Rolleiflex. I set out to photograph the neighborhood and its people with the intention to depict the simple ordinariness of their everyday life with particular attention on how one as a immigrant, tend to reproduce habits from one´s own culture in an attempt not to forget the place where we all came from.
This photograph of the two men was one of the first I took of the series.
Both cypriot as well as friends were one a turkish cypriot and a greek cypriot the other. Both were exiled by the war between their communities and they had meet in London were they became very close friends. On summer days the would seat on the pavement, facing the olive and feta cheese shop that Soteris, a toothless cross eyed dusty looking greek cypriot and his charming hugely overweight much younger wife, owned and run together.
Every afternoon they would come to the shop to meet for a chat, they would take the chairs out and as if they were in Larnaka, Nicosia or Limasol, and they would sip turkish coffee while chatting with other members of their exiled community that came to the gathering. One could not resist imagining that behind them was the Mediterranean sea when if fact was the A2, the Camberwell Church Street what run behind their backs .
It didn´t matter. It was summer, it was sunny and that little strip of pavement in Camberwell was where they would feel more at home.
They are now both dead, but the shop remains there.
Last time I was in England I went back to Camberwell to see my old friend James who lives there with Charlotte and their son Rubin. On my way to see the Waddell´s I visited the shop as it has become a kind of right of passage for me. Of course the lady owner as she saw me came out from behind the counter to salute and hug me and without hesitation, put together a little bag with assorted olives, sesame bread, taramosalata dip and a chunk of feta cheese for my breakfast. Needless to say that she looked offended when I tried to pay.
We had a little chat and I asked her about the two men when she confirmed that they had both passed away. As I remembered that I had given her a small hand made and signed print of the photograph, I asked her if she still had it.
She proudly smiled and said "of course", pointing towards the doorway. There it was the print.
Dusty, stained, wrinkled and frameless, pinned like a trophy to the upper corner of the door.
