INTRODUCTION

Eternal Café was the name of a barbecue shack that nestled beneath a railway bridge near my home in Brockley, south-east London. The cafeteria never flourished and closed down long ago but the shack is still there: a flimsy hut on a dismal street, permanently shut yet defiantly proclaiming itself everlasting, a monument to optimism in the face of hard reality.

This site contains a collection of my photographs of English life over the past quarter century. Perhaps half the photos were commissioned, rare assignments that coincided with my own interests and concerns: the pictures of Dr. Barry Brewster in Yorkshire or the series on Cornish trawler fishermen could have been taken fifty years ago, but they were shot on assignment in the early 1990s. Likewise, the Speciality Acts series was a commission that turned into something more personal: it was the first time I experimented with Muybridge-like sequences, and I noticed only afterwards that Larry Barnes’ straitjacket routine had strayed into Francis Bacon territory.

But most of the images here were acquired in much the same way that someone might collect seashells. I had no conscious interest in screaming heads, abandoned toys or roadkill – I just took pictures and gradually noticed the same kinds of things turning up over and over again. As for the pictures of London’s Deep South, I was like the hopeful proprietor of the Eternal Café: you set out your stall where you can, stay dedicated to your pitch and with any luck everything you need will come to you. Why travel to India when you have the Old Kent Road?

David Secombe, July 2006.