The Bikes That Stayed

The bicycles have leaned on the same wall for years, the owner of the cafe told me, and nobody remembers who rode them there. Chipped paint, tangled locks and the first light on the street turn an ordinary corner into a small portrait of the neighbourhood.

I had no route that morning, only a roll of colour film and a coffee going cold. The light came along the wall at an angle that made the rust look freshly painted, which it was not. Two frames, then a delivery van parked in front and the picture was gone.

Walking without a plan

A plan is useful for a commission and useless for a morning like this one. You leave the house with the camera, you take the street you usually skip, and you let the light decide where to stop. Most of the time it decides on nothing. Once in a while it decides on six bicycles.

The wall has a story of its own. It was a bakery until the eighties, then a print shop, then nothing for a decade; the sign was painted over three times and every layer shows through the last. The bikes arrived one by one, the way things arrive on a street where nobody is in charge.

Nothing happens in this photograph, and that is the point. The street is not performing. It is simply still there.

What I kept

From the roll I kept four frames: the wall in the first light, the wall with a woman passing (her shadow crosses the second bicycle), the shopfront around the corner, and the cat that has claimed the bench opposite, photographed by lying on the pavement, which drew a comment from the baker.

I keep going back to these. A grand landscape tells you what to feel; a street corner leaves you to work it out. The bicycles are still there as I write this. So is the cat.