The Belly of the Beast

As a few of my photo-chums know, I’ve just spent what for me is a buttock-clenching amount of money on a new compact digital camera.

One of the main reasons why I picked it up is that it packs the widest-angle lens currently available on a compact. Wide-angle compacts are thin on the ground because a) for technical reasons they are expensive to make, and b) most people are much more interested in telephoto lenses. I think that’s at least partly because long lenses appeal to the voyeuristic side of human nature.

However, most interesting pictures, certainly the most interesting photo-journalistic images, are usually taken with wide-angle lenses. That’s because to use a wide-angle lens effectively you have to get close to and become involved with your subject and even when you do there is still a lot of space that can be filled with context. Good wide-angle pictures tell a story.

So, for example, when I got up early this morning and went for a stroll around Vauxhall to take some test pictures with my new wide-angle camera I was able to include a discarded copy of Hard On magazine in the foreground and the Royal Vauxhall Tavern (very popular with readers of Hard On magazine) in the background...

Subject and Context

But there’s a lot more to Vauxhall than pavement filth and eye-wateringly aggressive gay drinking establishments. There’s the fabulously expensive new solar powered bus station…




and the area is also littered with the latest manifestations of the Metropolitan Police’s ongoing campaign to deal with people’s perception of crime as well as crime itself. Because, as Commissioner Ian Blair so frequently reminds us, people’s fear of crime is rising even though crime itself is falling…

Leave it on show

Expect it to go

Chaucer would have been proud

Of course, Vauxhall’s most notable landmark is not the solar-powered bus station or the Royal Vauxhall Tavern or warmly reassuring posters about street crime it’s…

Old Spooky

and what’s really cool is how you can stand in what presumably is the MI6 building’s alfresco party barbecue area/ mock pagan temple and line up Millbank Tower (ex Labour Party HQ), Thames House (Meye5 central) and the Houses of Parliament

Millbank Tower, Thames House, HoP

When it comes to being in the Belly of the Beast Vauxhall sure takes some beating.

Sadly, the old Millbank Prison that once stood on the North Bank of the Thames opposite the MI6 building’s location was demolished years ago. It would have fitted in with the current physical and psychological landscape perfectly…

The Panopticon is a type of prison building designed by English philosopher Jeremy Bentham in the late eighteenth century. The concept of the design is to allow an observer to observe (-opticon) all (pan-) prisoners without the prisoners being able to tell if they are being observed or not, thus conveying a "sentiment of an invisible omniscience." In his own words, Bentham described the Panopticon as "a new mode of obtaining power of mind over mind, in a quantity hitherto without example

I was particularly gratified this morning to notice that a fellow Pyramid connoisseur and MI6 Building fan had clearly left his mark on Vauxhall Bridge…




and that building does fascinate me. All buildings are an encoded statement of one kind or another. Unless, that is, they are perfectly rectangular and totally utilitarian which even then is a statement of sorts (‘I’m cheap’, ‘I don’t give a fuck’).

And one thing’s for sure, the MI6 building is saying something. As well as being festooned with all sorts of peculiar little architectural features there is the small matter of the view from above...




Now I’ve said it before but to me it is reminiscent of the owl motif (aka ‘Moloch’) that crops up hidden in dollar bills, the Washington street plan and as the large concrete pagan idol, voiced over by Walter Cronkite, at Bohemian Grove in front of which past and current Presidents and Prime Ministers make mock child sacrifices (weird but true)...




On the other hand, someone has pointed out to me that it also looks like a Transformer Terrabot...



So, I have to concede that the Owl connection is hardly cast-iron

There's another possible connection/ synchronism that did tickle me though, I saw a clip from a restored print of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis a few months ago and the ‘Heart Machine’, the power plant running Metropolis is represented as the flaming idol Moloch, a furnace stoked on human flesh…



and guess what I was reminded of the moment I saw it...

Join MI6 today - it's a hoot...

Well, it was just a thought

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