11.11.11

There's only one subject to blog today, of course, and here's an image of an old Remembrance Day Parade that I shot back in the late seventies. It's the Cenotaph in the front of Eccles library, with some of the guys from my old Army Cadet unit standing guard by the monument. But it's a poignant shot in other ways, too. The long, curving building that you can glimpse in the background was the old Co-op department store, called Centenary House. Long gone, of course, like the soldiers from almost 100 years ago, the space filled by a horrendous, modern bright yellow Aldi store, but captured nonetheless by the simple fact that I was able to shoot unhindered in the public domain.

See how important street photography is? How a shot with one purpose can, with the passing of time, have so much more value? So how come we've ended up in a world where you daren't even take a camera out in the street anymore? In fact, funnily enough, I blogged the other day about the last time I took out a camera in Eccles. I was warned to put it away by a guy that saw me shooting. What would the War Dead make of that? Killed for our freedom? Remember that!...