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Introduction Archetypes Monumental Eternal Cafe Performance Furthermore About | |
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Essays |
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DAVID SECOMBE David Secombe might not thank me for saying that, when we first met, I found in him a quality of old-fashioned Englishness. He seemed to be in rebellion against the ingratiating tone of modern discourse, and you can see this in his photography, which has the virtues formerly associated with Englishness: drollery, detachment, melancholia. He photographs a snow-covered Jaguar, and it looks like a tomb. A table and chairs set out in a garden for jolly al fresco eating are becoming enshrouded in a particularly menacing fog. Owing to some long forgotten advertising strategy, a hoarding on a shabby end of terrace shows a profile of Sherlock Holmes, and this corresponds – you eventually notice – to a word written in unsteady, hysterically ascending letters on a gate below: ‘DANGER’. David Secombe has an eye for what I would call the anachronistic void. His places have been left behind in the ferocious, futile onward march towards the ‘cool’ modernity of Tony Blair. His people tend to be older. They look – on balance – as if they are probably not on broadband. I have seldom met anyone who’s more fun over a bottle of wine than David Secombe, so I am surprised to find myself concluding that the subject of his photographs is death. I can already see him bristling at the hyperbole, but I would go further and say that such is the all-pervading mortality on show here that we are prevented from feeling superior towards the subjects depicted. Because we are next. © Andrew Martin, 2006. Andrew Martin was born in York in 1962. As a journalist he has contributed to a wide variety of newspapers and magazines, and written columns for The Evening Standard, The New Statesman and The Independent on Sunday. His first novel, Bilton, was published in 1998, followed by The Bobby Dazzlers in 2001, and a series of thrillers set on the Edwardian railways: The Necropolis Railway (2002), The Blackpool Highflyer, (2004) and The Lost Luggage Porter (2006). All of his fiction is published by Faber and Faber. He has also edited Funny You Should Say That, a dictionary of humorous quotations published by Penguin. 
Andrew Martin, Peckham, 2004
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