Excelsior Days
Oxford photographs
Chapter 1 : The Excelsior Cafe & Birth astride the Grave
“They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it’s night once more”
Samuel Beckett: Waiting for Godot (1952)
From the early evening flooded with a weekday end of work monoxide mist to bone aching Sunday mornings. Homeward bound commuters sleep with faces pressed against the cold and dewy eyed alcoholics sip morning coffee cures and stare into sober sunlit struggling skies. The mad the lost the cold and the damaged seeking sanctuary within the fold of the ‘Excelsior café’
This faceless partisan force of humanity, troubled lives we ignore or take for granted, sowing ambitions that are often beyond them. It’s a black humour existence where death and life mingle and apathy perpetuates a life to often wasted in self-obsession. We are all really in the same line of fire living lives with the same aspirations and passions as each other, waiting for a dream that will not arrive, not until humans indeed grow wings and angels breed amongst mere mortals.
Existentialists hold that there are certain fundamental questions that every human being must come to terms with if they are to take their subjective existences seriously and with intrinsic value. Questions such as death, the meaning of human existence and the place of (or lack of) God in that existence are among them.
My work although conceptual in formula has a real basis and relevance to the lives we lead today and the fuel and courage we have in facing an uncertain future.
Excelsior Days is a very simple photographic project, from very small-defined areas; from places and areas I know and from people I understand with the same dilemmas and conditions I have also have had to face and struggle with in my own life. I see Portraits of people waiting for things to happen or for problems to just fade away.
Drinking strong coffee or weak milky tea in a timeless English café, they are killing time or seeking sanctuary from the despairs of life.
I have started this project by taking images from the same café every week. I have visited for the last two years the same familiar chairs and sat in the same spaces observing the same customers.
This project of simple portraits (surreptitious and direct) as purely a personal view of the human condition and the boiling turmoil inside us best kept in check.The glimmers of hope and courage leak out though sometimes beneath the surface of a simple photograph.This essay was produced as an array of environmental and close colour and black and white portraits, overheard quotes and street photos over the course of the years and random time I walked through the 1960’s swing door of the Excelsior Cafe. The story of life’s struggles is revealed through the damaged, troubled and surreptitious customers of the Excelsior Cafe, with just the very little notes from observed quotes and dates as contextual addition.
