This picture is part of a series of 85 black and white
photographs of London. Entitled “Unreal City”, this photographic series was
inspired by T.S. Eliot’s famous poem “The Waste Land”. In Eliot’s poem London
is the “Unreal City” in which most of the characters in the poem have their
entrances and exits. The photographs reflect many of the themes of the poem: a
strong sense of alienation; people’s inability to connect meaningfully; the
cruel demands of the city; the failure of religion to provide comfort in this
broken world; and the apparently unbridgeable divide between rich and poor. The
dark humour which is evident in several of the pictures emphasizes the
“unreality” of life in the capital, but also holds out a few rays of hope that
all may not be lost.
Highgate Cemetery. In looking for ways to mitigate the more dreadful
aspects of London life, one often looks to the arts for distraction and
amusement. However, because of the high cost of living, and the fact that the
laws of supply and demand frequently do not work in their favour, artists
(musicians, poets, actors, painters, sculptors, et al.) are often poorly paid,
and live from one gig or paycheck to the next. In her book Big Capital: Who is London For?, Anna Minton describes how the
artists and journalists living in Notting Hill were pushed out by City bankers
in the 1990s, who were then displaced in turn by the ultra-wealthy,
internationally mobile tax exile elite.
In this picture one can make out a ghostly figure between
the gravestones top left.