Ghost Milk: Calling Time on the Grand Project (12 page)

I kept the record of the police raids with me for weeks, turning over the prints, placing them against each other, editing a film of my own from Maddock’s raw material. He was on to something, without question: a troubled witness coping with the responsibility of shaping a true report. The person you never see, the one with the camera, is omnipresent; in the way that, however alien the set, every portrait becomes a self-portrait.

Nothing is quite what it seems in Maddock’s Hackney, a terrain trapped in that mysterious interval, after street lights go out and before the sky begins to acquire colour in the gap between tower blocks. Any attempt to register cultural difference has to be undertaken in direct competition with the evidence-gathering machinery of the state.

While Robin was accompanying the group from Stoke Newington on their raids into what they understood as hostile territory, Hackney councillors decided that the best tactic for combating litter abuse was to establish a snoop squad, undercover agents stalking the borough with camcorders. ‘In one incident,’ the
Evening Standard
reported, ‘two enforcement officers burst into a café in Mare Street, searching for a woman who had dropped a cigarette butt on the ground outside.’ The raids, recorded by Maddock, are a more dangerous version of the same strategy. There is no distance now between art projects blessed by Olympic legacy funding and the fetish for current technologies espoused by the state. You can listen, with one ear, to successful applicants babbling about art-for-all digital cameras fixed on bus shelters and, with the other, to post-Orwellian paranoids (like me) whimpering about surveillance systems: the footage is identical. In the age of the spinner, content means nothing; the apparatus of explanation, the word-weaving, tells us what we are looking at and how we should react.

Walking the streets, I frequently witness preparations for the sort of incidents Maddock documents with such an innocent eye. Slow procedural hours, in the aftermath of the smashed door, inspire a catalogue of small revelations. The drugs themselves, at the centre of all this fuss, are ‘glamorous in their absence’. There seems to be an agreement between cops and postcode gangs to avoid collision. Screaming sirens work like a courtesy call, allowing offenders to melt into the shadows before they become tedious paperwork.

The underlying theme of Maddock’s practice is a tribute to place: as it is, not how it should be. Featureless blocks, sedated by blue television-light, in an oasis of bare branches and unloved grass. Hooded spectres are nightmare emanations of the buildings themselves. The police, with their padded vests and short-sleeved white shirts, spread out to advance on that dark place, a city within the city. A Welfare State favela. The poetry of estrangement is nicely managed: the photographer’s attitude is alert, but never forensic. He brings a measure of humane record to a brutal process. Once inside, surrealism is on the cusp of farce; pornographic magazines and accidental soap operas act like a parallel text, a commentary. Here is the bent head of an old man, as unknowable as Samuel Beckett, sitting on the toilet alongside the life-size transfer of a grinning skeleton. Here is an officer with a disposable yellow camera, which he grips, so fastidiously, with purple rubber gloves. Maddock’s archive is a mass of random documentation waiting for a curator.

I asked Maddock if he would record his account of riding with the Entry Squad convoy. How did the world look from inside the van? He made it sound ordinary, a job like any other. Domestic space is violated and the evidence, as the photographer amasses it, is of tedium: smeared colours, ghosts in petrol stations, ripped bingo cards, rumpled sheets, yawning kids, bandaged guns. He calibrates suspended time, using fright-sheet headlines as his chorus.

Maddock distrusts the sensationalist tone, the rictus of moral outrage. He has the gift of being surprised, working outside a script that is already written. Of finding solace in gazing from the balcony at deserted streets and mute canals.

When I went out in the van with the Stoke Newington police it was supposed to be a one-off. I didn’t know what I was doing. It felt like just another piece of the Hackney jigsaw. I wanted to move out into a part of Hackney that I hadn’t photographed. I was shooting on a large-format film, black and white. The wrong film to capture things you see by being more journalistic. As soon as I looked at the pictures I’d missed, because of using the wrong camera, I realized I would have to start again, using a more documentary style. But in a way that wasn’t about iconic newspaper images.

I had to report, early in the morning, to the Stoke Newington police station. Too early for me, about half-five or six. Sometimes it’s quite nice to be out in the city at that time. Sometimes they’d give the characters they were going to raid a bit of a lie-in, until half-nine. Of course they’re still in bed.

The briefings are really interesting, you find out about what people have done. The raid feels like a personal choice on the part of the police, a vendetta. We need to show them we are going to do something about it. The push comes from information received. Somebody on the estate complains about loads and loads of people visiting a certain flat. Loads and loads of people at night.

I don’t know how the police summon up the enthusiasm to go through all that junk. The more you are on the edge of society, the more stuff people hoard and collect. Many mornings it was like raiding a car-boot sale.

I love to be there when the doors are smashed in, catching the rush, the commotion. If I was at the front, right behind the first man in, I probably shouldn’t have been. Most of the time the specials would be shouting. There was a whole lot of screaming going on. The normal police would follow in later, to deal with the mess. Usually, the person they are looking for isn’t there.

Then we’d go back to the police station and the word would come back that the drugs were in the garden shed, but nobody had actually let them know, until it was too late.

The squad thought I was the grim reaper. Every time I went out was the touch of death. Then they started to get quite a good hit rate. They didn’t really mind me coming along. It was amazing. They have a real confidence that what they’re doing is the right thing.

You could probably map a policeman’s mind in its physical form. They say that people’s brains actually change shape according to what jobs they do. The police mind is: ‘This is the law, therefore it is right.’ They don’t have a lot of faith in the legal process. They see a lot of the people they arrest walking, the same night. Straight back to business.

In so many of my pictures, people are sitting there silent, or with a bit of banter, because they know the police are not going to find any drugs. And if they do, the people arrested will be out on bail in a few hours. When you see a kid caught throwing his gear into a hedge, the cops will tell you how rare this is. One boy broke down in tears straight away. He knew, it was the third time he’d been warned, that he’d been caught red-handed. He was going to do time. These kids don’t believe they are going to be caught.

Everybody’s got a TV. Everybody’s got a microwave. Everybody’s got a full fridge. It’s a strange kind of poverty. You’re on that line where it could go into poverty. You might not be able to do anything else, because you haven’t got any money. A lot of kids are in that position. What would I do?

There is a massive blurring now, white kids act like black kids. When I went out with the police, there were a lot of mixed-race kids. Single white mothers. The parents live in denial or they are big smokers themselves. They might be part of the same drug scene.

I probably went out on about ten raids. It was difficult to stop. You are always left with a smell in your nostrils and feeling a bit grotty. I was challenged by the people we were invading and by the police.

I’d try to get closer and closer before it kicked off. Before my presence affected the situation, I would back off. There is an awful sneakiness about making those pictures.

One policeman said, ‘You’re a voyeur, aren’t you?’

You find yourself playing a role, getting along with the police. I’m sitting in the van, it’s a bit quiet. And they’re all in their element, having a good time. If you do the raids, same area, same prostitutes, the action is always interesting. As interesting for them as for me. Even if they have to pick through a lot of dirty laundry.

They work together, they have a laugh together. They have the same sort of mentality about things. They have a very dry sense of humour. Sitting there, little by little, I got to feel how much of an outsider I had become.

The main sergeant who looked after me, and gave me the call most mornings, she was very much on the way up. She’s now gone to the Entry Team, the people who smash doors in. The guys in the helmets, the ones who go inside. She made the jump from community policing, head of that, to the Entry Squad. She was so trusting, so nice about it, I nearly went out cycling with her. I’m almost glad I didn’t. She was a married woman. But we got along. We’re both into running and cycling. And yet we come from different worlds.

I went to her leaving party, to see them all very drunk. That was about as close as I’d want to get. Actually it would have been good to photograph because they were dressed up as nurses and firemen. Can you imagine? It sounds pretty weird. They’re all very straight, but when they go out, alcohol is allowed, so it’s lively. It was nice to meet people from a different world and to feel their generosity. And to be allowed the space to work.

Most of the police would say, ‘Hackney! Where are we going for a drink?’ They think they’re in the Wild West. They see the worst of it. And, like all the taxi drivers, they have taken flight to Ilford. They are out there in Essex. Maybe there’s a racial profile. The head of the Stoke Newington police, when I was there, was a black guy. Great presence. He was really confident about the structure and very helpful. And yet I felt some of the black and Asian officers had taken a traditional white role. They are ambitious. Doors are open to them. They’re in a weird position when they’re standing with the youths and the banter is going on. ‘Why are you hanging around the streets?’ And the kids say, ‘This is where we live.’ They don’t want to go and sit with their mothers or their grans in the flat.

I lived out in Hackney Wick for a while, when people were having their flats bought out from under them. I saw a few warehouses being demolished. The allotments went. This wasn’t an area where anyone would choose to be. It’s a weird island. You’d get police horses trotting through in the daytime, but they are nowhere to be seen in the evening when the stuff is really going on.

The girl I lived with was a bit of a depressive, a designer. She used to rearrange the flat every day. A beautiful, big old fabric factory. She’d move all her stuff across the room, every week. She couldn’t get organized. She couldn’t work. One of those procrastinators. She had a relationship with the Kurdish guy from the local shop – who turned out to be a raging alcoholic and a nutter. He was breaking our door down in the evening. I got accused of sleeping with her. Always drama, always someone dying.

The blue fence was going up at this time. I saw a documentary on the allotments. It’s a terrible shame that they haven’t the imagination to say, ‘Let’s keep the allotments and let’s have the flyover going over them.’ Those gardens were so visually beautiful.

The problem is that we don’t have any style when we do these things. When you look at the stadium going up, you see those big girders. Compare that with the Bird’s Nest in Beijing. What an incredible piece of architecture. It’s half-baked. We have no sense of tradition about what we’re doing.

‘It isn’t money, exactly,’ Sancho suggested, ‘more like new debt.’

– Thomas Pynchon

Suddenly I was rich. At a time when banks were collapsing, bankers topping themselves or selling their apologias before doing some rehab in an open prison, loot was rolling in. The technology made it so easy; every morning, as the screen cleared its sticky-eyed scrot, a good-news assault provided my wake-up call. The Spanish were blush-makingly generous, emphasizing my turn of fortune in block capitals and promiscuous underlinings. The Lotería Primitiva in Madrid was not so primitive after all. They could hardly contain their pleasure in letting me be the first to know that my ticket number
015-11-464-860
had come home.
You have therefore been approved for a lump payment of NINE HUNDRED AND EIGHTY FIVE THOUSAND NINE HUNDRED AND FIFTY EUROS ONLY.

I loved that
ONLY.
And I loved the pleasure they took in my good luck.
CONGRATULATIONS!!!!!!
And the most astonishing aspect was that I didn’t even have to buy a ticket. I had never bought a Spanish lottery ticket or any other kind. Nothing, in my prejudiced view, was more depressing than witnessing the urban poor queuing to shell out for their shares in the Millennium Dome and all the other Nude Labour vanity projects. There are more scratchers addicted to loss in the minimarts of Dalston than the fleapit cinemas of 1960s Dublin, or the dockside brothels of a malarial sump.