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Do unusual things. In beautiful surroundings.

The things I love about London and the English: watching them, stoically, doing beautiful things in unusual surroundings. Or unusual things in beautiful surroundings. Whatever the weather does or the Jonses think.

Take the ultra English photographer Tony Ray-Jones. When he returned from New York to Britain in 1965, he toured seaside towns, villages, cities and festivals, documenting the English tribe, doing uniquely English things, a way of life he felt was fast disappearing.  

Having a cup of tea, anywhere, ritually, features strongly, as does being unusually dressed in everyday surroundings:

Tony Ray-Jones, A Day Off, ca 1967

Fast forward 50 years and there is Ellie Uyttenbroek. She photographs us too, being part of a tribe, not a disappearing one, but a worldwide one, and one we didn't even know we were part of.  Until we see ourselves here:

Ellie Uyttenbrock, Exactitudes, since 1998

Ellie's people are modern archetypes, her selection of identical strangers reveals a desire to belong expressing itself in rigid typologies. 

But there are acts of rebellion within conformity too. In 1974, Dale Irby, a PE teacher from Texas, discovered he had worn the same outfit in his yearbook photo two years in a row. His wife Cathy dared him to do it for a third year, and 40 years later he was still wearing the same thing. 

What started as a joke and a bet soon grew into a small artistic practice with a double pun. An ironic gesture disguised as compliance: a wild sea of snapshots of a singularly identical face and expression quietly revealing a touch of melancholy and what the Germans call 'the tooth of time'.  They also somehow, weirdly, remind me of this.

Also Charles Fréger who photographs us expressing ourselves tribally in neat, if totally surprising, categories too: not the instantly recognisable teacher, baker and candlestick maker August Sander shot some hundred years earlier, but heroes, legionnaires and short school hakas. 

Charles Ferger, 2010

In 2012 Freger travelled through Europe to photograph the still practiced pagan rituals of Europe. Dressing up, tribally, to mark changing of seasons, rites of passage, and other life changing events, was done uniformally and universally, with lots of the groups doing something similar without knowing one another.

All Above: Charles Freger, Wilder Mann, 2012

So. This season, be a pioneer and create a crowd, by doing your own thing. 

Be a character for Tony and David, not August and Ellie, and do it for Charles. 

Wear an unusual thing in a beautiful surrounding. 

Be a dirndlqueen.  

In London.