Kevin

Kevin is a tall elegant man who dresses well and cuts a dash. Here I have rendered him as a silhouette perhaps fittingly in front of a fashion shop window. (A mannequin is just visible in the right of frame.)
 
I have known him since I was a teenager and even then he was one of my subjects as I wielded my camera. I can remember how one drunken night led to me photographing him in a pinstripe suit (he dressed well even as a student) and menacing sunglasses, pointing a water pistol into the lens. His pose portrays a kind of slightly bewildered bottled up aggression as if Al Pacino had entered through the wrong door onto the set of a British sitcom, gun in hand and was confronted with a smirking Rodney Bewes. We lost touch after university, I had heard that he had got a high powered job in Australia and I imagined him enjoying the guaranteed sunshine and outdoor living. For my part I was working in Manchester where at the time pool parties were still a novelty and barbecues were crime scenes where much of the evidence had been destroyed. It was my lunch break and I was walking along Oxford Road. It was his height that first caught my eye and then his distinctive gait which suggested he was about to change direction at any moment. He was two or three metres in front of me but I still couldn't make mind up whether it was him or not. So I decided to follow him. It was if the street had suddenly emptied out and we were the only figures moving in the shadow of the Palace Hotel. Just us and the electric hush of the traffic. He crossed at a set of lights but still I was unable to catch sight of his face. He headed into a cinema which I knew had a cafe and I followed him up the stairs and stood behind him in the queue at the counter. He has a very distinctive basso profondo voice and the moment I heard him order a coffee I knew it was him. Our paths had crossed once more in a city neither of us had a previous connection with.
 
Before we wander out into the night and come upon the shop window we have dinner and discuss the stuff of life, or rather our lives. Kevin is often enraged by the world yet he continues to observe it with a kind of horrified fascination. We eat, we talk we are not enlightened by our conversation but are glad of the chance to exorcise our thoughts. The outside world remains no more than a shadow on the wall of Plato's cave or a silhouette cast by the light of a shop window.
 
Camera: Yashica T5

Film: Fujifilm Neopan