11

Vision

BY 2004 I HAD A PART-TIME JOB working in a pro photographic lab off the Kingsland Road. My regular commute took me from west to east along the Marylebone Road towards Old Street. Depending on the weather I’d sometimes get the tube, sometimes the bus, and sometimes cycle.

Marylebone Road was originally designed as the northern side of London’s first bypass, though the tarmac soon flowed over it, moving onwards and absorbing the road into the city’s great blank mass. From Edgware Road in the west along its Euston Road continuation to Pentonville in the east, there are along its length five hospitals, one national library, a fire station, four major rail termini, seven tube stops, the Methodists, the Quakers, a school for the study of astrology, several churches, many doctors, one overpass, three underpasses, a lot of plane trees, several of the best musicians in Britain, a booth for measuring the city’s daily pollution levels, a courthouse, an apple tree, a waxworks museum, a famous consulting detective, an underground river, several razor-thin slices of human brain and a necklace made of teeth. There are a few pubs, hotels and shops at either end of the road, but – perhaps because the road is also a three-lane highway – it’s not a place to linger. But its sheer abundance, its utter essence-of-London-ness, make it a good spot to pick out the city’s soundtrack.

In BSL the sign for London is the same as the sign for noisy, though by the round-the-clock standards of other great international cities – Mumbai, Buenos Aires, New York – London has always had a muffled quality. Thus the Marylebone Road is about as loud as this place gets. Because of all the hospitals and fire stations along its length there is almost always the sound of a siren rushing westward or eastward, and each of those sirens has a song. At the western end prison vans scurry down Lisson Grove heading for the back of Westminster Magistrates’ Court, giving no more than a quick woop-woop before vanishing behind high walls. Military police bang through the traffic on their way to a tea break while fire trucks cry havoc across the city and fire engines bawl northward.

And then there are the ambulances flashing their way to good news or bad, up from St Mary’s or down from UCH. Pre-deafness I’d be cycling back from work along the bus lane and suddenly there would be a sound loud enough to spring me six feet into the air. Sirens don’t just have to rise above the ambient noise of a city, they have to reach the ears of a driver in the sealed cabin of a far-off car. Because drivers can’t hear outside sounds well, the volume of those sirens has been increasing until they’re now often set at around 110 to 120 dBs. Cyclists and pedestrians aren’t in sealed cabs and can obviously hear fine, so the noise of the ambulance sometimes creates behind it a bow wave of figures leaning away or covering their ears.

Other sounds, some of them seasonal. The shush of rain under tyres over the roar of leaf-blowers. The ticking of hot car metal as it expands under the sun. The unsynchronised click of stilettos. A beggar outside Lloyds bank, propping himself up against the wall: ‘Yous! Gies yer change, ya fuck!’ The gusty sigh of a bus’s air brakes against the shaking of cabs at the lights. The collective rush of trucks passing. Stop. Start. Stop again. Fragments as people pass: ‘Most of salami is, like, donkey. Or sometimes horse.’ Pigeons, their wings beating against the leaves of the trees as helium balloons sag between the branches. Two armed Met policemen, all stab vests and jackboots, discussing bargains on the QVC shopping channel. The shudder of the Metropolitan Line beneath my feet. Tourists queuing outside Madame Tussauds, calling back their children. Workmen putting up scaffolding; the flat notes of boards and poles being set in place, the chink of the couplers thrown down on the pavement. The rattle of fighting magpies. ‘Yeah, well, he talks about it so much, it’s obvious he’s a virgin.’ Musicians wrangling coffin-sized double basses over the road, yanking at their trolleys before the lights change. A Lamborghini gunning in frustration. Somewhere behind, the diesely snort of the trains at each station. And far beyond that, the sound of London breathing.

Sitting on the top deck of the 205, I would listen to the schoolkids, their voices raised to grandstand.

‘I was like, Un. Fuckin. Believable. I mean.’

‘Yeah, an really I done my mum a Hollywood the other day.’

‘Likefuckinwellsickyeah?’

‘Not like I mean what that’s wrong, but I’m saying by now you should be pissing orange.’

‘I mean, whodefuck?’

‘He was like, yalright? I was like, yalright?’

‘Are. You. Fuckinshittinme?! Omigod, Shan, youfuckinnevah!!’

Being both professionally and personally nosy, I could never get enough of it. In the evening, staring out of the window, I’d gobble up romances, cliffhangers, showdowns, conversations about what to cook for dinner that night, one-sided phone conversations, arguments. How old’s the lasagne? Well, let’s use that before it goes off. Replays of stand-offs with a landlord or parent–teacher assessments. The wiring – omigod you should see the wiring in that place. It’s a joke. A war on YouTube. Music leaking from someone’s headphones. Unresolvable health crises, battles with doctors or fights over medication. This new one, I don’t think she even read the bloody notes. I mean, now she got me on twenty mil of amitriptyline and if I’ve told them once I’ve told them a thousand times, it don’t work for me, that stuff. The politics of offices. D’you think we’re talking a total rebrand?

Sometimes the voice behind me would be flat and monotonal, drained of colour or inflection. Sometimes it was animated or coy. Sometimes, from the short sing-song – Hello, pet! Are you having your tea? – they were talking to a child. Sometimes it was intimate, face turned away to the window, phone pressed hard against their head. It didn’t matter. I didn’t care – I’d just inhale all of it, whole box-set dramas at a go. Chats in languages or dialects I couldn’t even recognise, each from a different region of the body. French came from farther back in the throat, the pitch of German was deep and steady, and Russian was deepest of all, dragged up like bass from the depths of the diaphragm. Listening to an older man talking Russian, I could practically see the sound waves rolling out of his throat. For all I knew, he was discussing crisp flavours, but if he was, then those flavours sounded as rich and terrible as Montagues and Capulets. The difference between Spanish and Italian was the difference between an Edinburgh accent and a Glaswegian one – one pushed forward, higher, right to the top near the nose, the other swinging off the tongue, instantly recognisable. It was a game; could I recognise the subject under discussion even if I couldn’t understand a word of what they were saying? Could I at least get the region if I couldn’t get the sense? And, if I could get both the topic and the language, then could I work out what was likely to happen next?

THAT WAS BEFORE. And then there was after. I could still cycle or get the bus from west to east, but though I was taking exactly the same route, it had changed completely.

Imagine London turned down. Cut out the traffic. Cut the trees and the pigeons. Cut the leaf-blower, the trains, the smoothing rain. Cut the air brakes, the scaffolders, the click of heels. Cut the beep of a reversing truck or the bang of its shuttered back. Cut the air-brake exhalation of the bus. Cut the kids outside Madame Tussauds or the chat of passers-by. Cut the angle-grinder’s rushed complaint and the rise of a motorbike’s frustration. Cut the tourists. Cut music. Cut conversation. Cut Korean, Scottish, Arabic, Spanish, English, American, French, Estonian. Cut the occasional shout over the traffic or the bark of a dog. Cut the shriek of a black cab’s brakes. Cut the whole lot. Cut everything except the sirens and the wails of unchanged babies. Silence it all.

Or rather, take it all down by about 80 per cent. Take out all of the juice and most of the pith. Remove half the sense and flatten the rest. Leave what remains as a disconnected sequence of hisses and sibilants. The edges of sound are still there but the sense in its centre has gone. I can still feel the vibration of the bus and the windows shaking slightly as it stands. I can see the drills and the grinders but the sound is stopped off. I can still hear the sirens but until they get very close I can’t separate them from the mutter of the engine. I can’t hear London breathing any more. Perhaps it’s dead.

None of this is unpleasant or uncomfortable and, because it’s happened over a long time, I’ve adapted to it. But it is strange. I know some sounds because I catch the end of them, like catching the last words of a well-known quote or phrase. I can hear the edge of a diesel’s idling motor not because I can really hear it, but because my brain knows the sound of it so well it completes the missing phrases. I know the station announcement is a station announcement because of the rhythm and the distance, not because of the words. But other sounds, disconnected from their source and from any surrounding links in the auditory chain, make less sense. They just appear as pitches or tones lost in their own space. Half a word in a sentence. A slice of ringtone. A shout. A sudden metallic bang. The tail end of a longer sound like the squeaky shriek of wet bike brakes or the thump and rattle of plane tree branches against the roof of the bus.

The closest analogy would be to imagine putting on ear defenders and then listening to a radio on the other side of the room. You can’t hear much, but you can hear the difference between the fenced-in sentences of a news bulletin and the ramblings of chat. If it’s a music station, you can pick up the bass line but not the melody. If it’s sport, you know exactly where the goals are in a match report or a horse race rising to the finishing post. Instead of just receiving the sound, as you would do if you could hear fully, it’s now an entirely interactive experience; you’re given a certain level of information, you work out the rest from that. Is the news politics, foreign, or crime? Can you recognise individual presenters or find the shape of a whole song from one single strand? Can you, equipped without hearing but with all your experience and knowledge, colour in the spaces left by sound?

When it got to the stand at Euston the bus would loiter for a while beneath the concrete canopy. I’d sit with all the other passengers on the top deck looking out over the big 1960s forecourt while the drivers stood and chatted. Outside on the forecourt were the usual mixture of travellers, junkies, dog-walkers, tourists, skater kids and students. I’d look at all these different tribes and start to read. Those two, the couple who have been sitting near the top of the steps. They look like they’re in love, but it’s always him who moves towards her. She sits a little tipped away from him and she’s not touching him, she’s wrapped over her phone. The man there with his bag on the ground, talking to the older guy. What’s their relationship to each other? Is there some kind of deal going on? From the bag man’s big punctuating gestures it looks like he’s trying to persuade the other one of something. The retired couple standing slightly apart beside their unscuffed suitcases. Where are they going to? Have they argued? He moves stiffly, like he can’t turn his head, like there’s always something he doesn’t want to see just to one side. Two male paramedics having a coffee, one of them bending forward in the chair as if his back hurts. Have they just come off a shift? Do they like each other? Look at the queue for the 68. There’s nine people there. How come some of them really stand out, and some seem always to be part of the concrete? That smooth-haired businesswoman, walking across the forecourt towards the road with a tissue in her hand, never looking up, turning her head from the other passers-by.

A man comes out of the station, three young boys trailing behind him. His shoulders are festooned with kids’ rucksacks and he’s trying to manoeuvre a larger case with a broken wheel. Halfway along the forecourt one of the boys drags harder and harder on his hand until he lets go and sits down on the pavement. Then he lies down. The man tries to pull him up again but the boy isn’t having it. The man stops and one by one takes off all the bags he’s carrying. The other two boys have vanished out of sight. A lengthy period of arbitration takes place, intense diplomatic efforts focused on the effective conveyance of mutually beneficial long-term goals. A bus – the bus they’re all supposed to catch – arrives. The man points at the bus. The boy on the ground gazes up at the sky and his face turns red. It is March, and chilly, but it is only when demilitarisation talks reach a chicken clause (man gnawing imaginary drumstick) that the boy sits up. By the time the man has successfully concluded negotiations, gathered the other two and run towards the stand, the bus has moved off.

Over on Eversholt Street, a courtesy bus carrying tourists from one of the hotels has shunted into the back of a minicab. Both the cab and the van have stopped, blocking the road, and the courtesy-bus driver is walking over to the cab. Both he and the minicab driver are giving it their best, shouting and finger-stabbing. Their faces are bunched up and their movements are sharp and hard, their meaning clear. Behind them the driver of the bus is leaning out of his window and gesticulating at them to unblock the road. The minicab driver is accompanying all his insults with a peck of his forefinger and a jerk of his head. The courtesy-bus driver has his arms open wide and is sketching out through the air the absolute and spectacular enormity of the minicab’s stupidity.

I would watch all of this, willing the bus to get moving but entranced by the morning’s impromptu theatre. And the longer I watched it, the more something became evident. I was seeing all these people, their conversations, their non-conversations, their intentions and anxieties, and, four times out of five, I reckoned I could make a reasonable guess at what was going on. Who knows? Unless they got on the bus and sat right next to me I wasn’t going to be able to fill in the factual gaps. But if I looked through the silence – really looked, with the whole of my attention – then I could see the hubbub of interaction. I could see desire or stress or jealousy or frustration, I could see how many people there had already left before they’d gone. I could see the way homelessness rendered men invisible or the sheer, ceaseless 24-hour hard work the addicts put in to feeding their needs. I could see the gap between who people wanted to be, and where they really were. The odd thing was, I couldn’t hear a thing, but I was having no difficulty in understanding every word.

SOME TIME IN 2004 there was an exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery of photographs by the painter Lucian Freud’s assistant and model David Dawson. Over the years the two had worked together Dawson had gradually amassed a whole series of photographs of Freud at work. The images were casual and affectionate, almost always taken using natural light, some in his studio but others at private views or in other parts of Freud’s house in London.

One image showed Freud’s friend and fellow artist David Hockney sitting beside the easel on which stood Freud’s portrait of him. He looks like he’s just thinking about cracking a joke. Beside him is an ashtray and behind is a pile of dust-sheets and a thick swarm of colour where Freud has dabbed at the wall to test the texture of his paint. Freud himself is just walking through the door, white shirt on, scarf knotted around his neck and paintbrushes in one hand. He’s looking into the camera, and the look he gives it drills straight through the lens.

A few images on there’s a picture of Freud standing in a stable beside a grey horse. One hand is on the horse’s halter, the other tucked behind its mouth. The horse and the man stand beside each other like friends, the stable dark behind them. Freud’s gaze is as straight as a sparrowhawk’s. I looked at the two pictures in the exhibition, and I thought, ‘That man is deaf.’

It was an odd thing to think. Though David Hockney does indeed have severe hearing loss, as far as I know, Freud never went deaf. But what seemed to be visible in the photograph was the degree to which Freud had sharpened one single sense to such a level that it became the point at which all his energy and most of his being was focused. Everything, to Freud, was there in his seeing. He didn’t need hearing to be a great painter because hearing couldn’t help him capture the soul of a sitter. All he wanted – all he needed – was a ravening appetite for light.

Hockney, who’s now been painting for almost as long as Freud had, has said as much. ‘I actually think the deafness makes you see clearer,’ he said in a 2003 interview. ‘If you can’t hear, you somehow see.’ It seemed to me that Freud’s sight so absolutely dominated his other senses that his hearing had receded.

Many years later, I realised that what I’d seen in those photographs was the same thing I saw in the faces of the deaf and which Andy Hearn had described. It was the difference between looking and seeing. Their eyes were switched on, their gaze alive, and there was an acuity in their observing which seemed striking partly because it was so rare. If every one of us has a light at the back of our eyes then it often seems as if most of us choose to live with that light dimmed down. Real seeing is a raptorish faculty, a sharp, hungry tool, strip-mining information from the visual world. Freud had it. The deaf have it. Children have it until they get taught to turn it off. We all have it, but that open seeing is also such an intimate gift that it seems too personal for daily use. Don’t stare. Why not? There’s so much to be curious about, such sensory pleasure to be had. Freud looked like the deaf because only the deaf choose to see.

Looking at those photographs, I realised something. I might be losing my hearing, but I still had everything I needed. Sight gives you the world, hearing gives you other people. Take away hearing and what have you got? You’ve got the world.

PRO PHOTOGRAPHIC LABS ARE – or were, at least – fantastic places, full of skill and gossip. I started work there just at the point of maximum disruption as film gave way to digital, though this company was set up for both: two separate spaces for colour and black-and-white film printing plus a further space within the same building for digital output.

Though the volume of film coming through was declining by the week, the lab’s four printers still had plenty of work and each remained the undisputed overlord of his or her own darkroom. One by one they’d pop like bubbles through the black revolving door, re-emerging a few moments later to lean against the huge colour printer, marking up negs and complaining that the milk was off. Dave had once been an architectural modeller and, when someone bought a small plastic model of Gollum, he only had to add a faint yellow tinge to the eyeballs and a few thickened veins to produce the spit of himself. John was Irish, a big softie who produced his prints like magic tricks from a state of chaos, and over in the corner was easy-tempered Mike, a Stones fan who ran the processing side of things.

Back at home I set up my own little black-and-white darkroom in the bathroom and taught myself the basics of monochrome printing. I’d get back from the lab, take the dog out and go straight in: Just a couple. Just the portraits. Just five minutes. Time became something measured out in elephants (oneelephant, twoelephant, threelephant …) or passed unmarked in three-hour gulps. I’d come reeling out at 2 a.m. with a headache like a sledgehammer and then be up at seven to pull the prints off the washing line and then get in to the lab to do the whole thing all over again. I was stoned on photographic chemistry, pickled in dev, dissolved in fix. What I wanted, again and again, was that Excalibur moment when an image – a road, a face, a flame – rose up from the water to meet me.

It’s easy enough to learn black-and-white printing at home but colour printing is almost impossible anywhere except a lab. Instead, I did my best to pick up as much as I could of the old lore from the printers themselves, men (usually men) who had spent their lives mastering an art which was now expiring before their eyes. It wasn’t just that photographers and editors were all swapping to digital, it was that the big photographic manufacturers – Kodak, Fuji, Agfa – were reducing their stock of film and chemicals to the point where a whole delectable menu had become a shrivelled little snack.

Still, from my point of view, it was a privilege just to watch them. Part of the art of colour printing is in having two very highly developed senses: sight, and touch. Printers have to be very well trained at looking but they also have to be good at working just by feel because once the light-sensitive paper is out of its packet the darkroom has to be totally dark. Neg out of its sleeve into the enlarger, find the right paper box, pull the paper out of the thick plastic sleeve, locate it in the mount, adjust the dials, notch more magenta here, degree less cyan there, couple of exposures, out the door and into the machine – all of it done by fingertip.

As a visual education it couldn’t have been bettered. In amongst the boxes of corporate portraiture or catalogue fodder, the lab processed work by some of the best photographers of the day – Juergen Teller, Tim Walker, Sam Taylor-Wood, Josh Olins. The sheets passed through our hands tagged with names, dates and job descriptions, passing along the lightbox to the next stage in the process. There was a rhythm to it, a smooth, dust-free motion from uncurling the negs to slipping the last line into the sleeve. Once in a while we’d reach for the lupe, bending over a single frame to check for errors. Sometimes film came in bearing the telltale fog of airport security X-rays or the distortion of dated film stock. Some had clip-marks or rips or the single shaft of false sun where the lens had slipped and the light had got in. Sometimes the photographers themselves had a single defining trick – always taking on the diagonal, perhaps, or preferring underexposure.

And some – some you could just never stop looking at. Mostly, those were the ones taken by Juergen Teller. There he was, the man himself, line after line of naked Tellers standing there with nothing on but a bratwurst. There was Charlotte Rampling in the Hotel Crillon with Teller upside down on a grand piano beside her. There was a blank wall with a sapling growing out of the cracks. There was Kate Moss stuffed into a wheelbarrow or Victoria Beckham’s legs spilling out of a Marc Jacobs bag. There were a hundred flaming Vivienne Westwoods laid out like invitations. There was snow, melting, or a fragment of ragwort on a rainy pavement. Teller again, caught in filmic whiteout. His images were irresistible partly because everybody was naked and doing strange things with food, but also because they were great – funny, provocative, brilliant, perceptive, revolting. They told you about what both people and film could do when they were pushed.

And then over in the other corner someone would hold up Tim Walker’s looking-glass images of galleons and fairytale girls, correcting the depth of a shadow or pointing out nuances that I hadn’t even considered. All day, as I filed or cut or sleeved, I gazed at this rolling procession of images, good, bad, dull or brilliant. If I wanted more detail I could ask the printers how it was done or compare a dark print with a light one. Pulled halfway between Mike’s bar-by-bar critique of Goat’s Head Soup and the radio’s foretelling of calamities at the Catthorpe Interchange, I’d barely register the arrival of the photographers and their entourages. The printers would clamp each new print to the wall and the waiting crowds would circle. ‘Top right,’ someone would murmur. ‘Blown.’ A collective pause. A squint. The waiting eyes flicking between it and the print beside it. Too contrasty. Too flat. ‘Maj is off.’ Maybe try it with a keyline? Or gloss? Or 16x20? The printers would flip back behind the door, waiting there in the dark by the machines until the crowd wandered off.

Because of the background hum of the machines I’d have to work hard in the lab to hear. But it wasn’t sound I was concentrating on any more, it was vision. In there I could get hooked on looking, I could stare to my heart’s content, I could teach myself a whole new communication. Cycling north in the evenings, deaf to the traffic swirling around me, I’d think, I am happy. Somewhere in all those pictures of legs and handbags, I had found my way out.