Expectation Images
Kent Barker says JJ Waller’s latest collection ably demonstrates his fascination, respect and affection for our town.
Henri Cartier-Bresson is considered by many to be the photographer’s photographer. His candid, usually uncropped images, capturing what he himself described as ‘the decisive moment’. Possibly rather unfairly, I treat him as a benchmark against which to judge others’ pictures. So when I first saw JJ Waller’s latest book of photographs of St Leonards and Hastings, I was thrilled.
JJ Waller
The two artists’ backgrounds, though, couldn’t be more different. Cartier-Bresson came from a bourgeois manufacturing family who gave him a Box Brownie as a youngster, and financial support for his artistic endeavours. JJ Waller says he never owned a Box Brownie and began his career as a street entertainer; comedy performer, and organiser of large scale, often theatrical, events.
Nonetheless, there’s more than a whiff of Henri in some of JJ’s street portraits. The middle-aged man apparently deep in conversation with an Isetta bubble car; the topless tattooed dude shaking hands with an elderly lady – the spitting image of our late Queen. One should not, perhaps, be too surprised. Cartier-Bresson was a founder member of the renowned photo agency Magnum. Waller ‘toured the world as assistant to photographer Paul Lowe, at the time also with the Magnum agency’.
CREDIT: JJ Waller
But here, the comparisons rather grind to a halt. Waller willingly crops his pictures and is prepared to use digital editing if only “for things I would have done in the darkroom, a bit of shading, a bit of burning in. I’m not a purist,” he tells me. But most importantly, while Cartier-Bresson was the master of candid photography, invariably unnoticed, though almost always using a fairly close-up 50mm lens, Waller often speaks to his subjects before he shoots them. “I’m interested in people as people, not just as an image,” he says, “so I often talk to them before or after I‘ve taken the shot.”
Waller’s work seems to specialise in the unexpected. The bald man with an ice cream cornet apparently emerging from the top of his pate, the scary pirates onboard boating-lake white swan pedalos, the covid-masked man in a Santa elf costume among shoppers. Usually it’s the people that make his pictures. The thin man in the blue lederhosen entering the Bazaar in Kings Road; the ‘Peaky Blinders’ boys in Levi’s and braces; the woman on her mobility scooter outside The Biker’s Shop; the pipe smokers taking coffee outside the George Street tobacconist.
CREDIT: JJ Waller
Waller is equally adept at scenes without humanoids. There’s a wonderful Turneresque sunset behind the pier, unexpected rooftops and admirable arch-itectural portraits of terraced houses (one pockmarked by satellite dishes). There are also ‘still lives’: a mysterious paper plate of finger food on an otherwise empty pub table.
The real value of Waller’s collection is that it is a snapshot in time. His earlier 2007 collection of St Leonards photos sold out. “I didn’t want to reprint the book,” he says, “I wanted to update it.” So these are images of the town mainly from the past decade. An eclectic record of events; Green Man, Pride, Mayday bikers, naked bike riders, pirates and mermaids. A potpourri of day-trippers with their fish and chips, ice creams and fat bellies. Every shot is presented in landscape. None has a caption. Some bravely focus on people’s backs. All are somehow uplifting. And all this from an AFB (Across From Brighton). “With my stash of return train tickets as thick as several stacks of playing cards, my association with St Leonards continues with equal amounts of fascination, respect and affection”, Waller says in the introduction. “My visits are always full of expectation.”
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