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hull 70s / 80s

A spider's web | photography/text: pablo luis gonzález

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2. 'Are you into white slavery?'

'Perhaps...', she did not believe me.

The girl's face was expectant, strands of hair waving softly to the midday breeze on Queens Gardens. Lunch was always pleasurable when taken on the sun caressed grass, just a stroll away from Blaydes House.

'No, but I cannot prove it. You'll have to trust me.'

She did. Twenty three years later, I still see her occasionally.

Images were shot not because I was in pursuit of a 'project', such as a photo-reportage on Hull. My interest laid elsewhere: hunting for the other, their humanity, their beauty, their ugliness also, their dignity; a smile here, a hole on the wall there, a couple of girls behaving like girls with the prettiness and lightness of spring on Hessle foreshore, the decrepit shop where the denture-less old lady was motherly engaging me in conversation between the bread, the milk and the kids sweets. I was developing advanced skill in lip-reading when figuring out what her intonations meant, her kind face is still floating somewhere on the back of my skull...

The colourful decorative tiles camping on a wall crying for company within a sea of dereliction, rats and rubbish: the sad remains of an old fish processor. Art Nouveau luxury for dead fish.

A Christmas tree was blushing in front of the lens. Outside, the snow was still falling, that silent white lawn hiding in embarrassment the concrete and asphalt scars. The proud owner, a lady who had invited me to photograph the tree when she glimpsed me loitering outside with a camera and a coat of haze, was busily feeding me with Christmas treats. Black slits on the snow marked the curiosity of the bike's tyres as I went chasing for snow flakes. My eyes were hungry, not for Christmas pudding, but purely for the desire to reach to the other, to get under their skin, that of those who are not like me and, yet, I can see and talk with because we dwell under the same sky.

For how long then, for how long?

Pablo Luis González | Hull, October 2003

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