Back in the Day

David Moore – The Lisa and John Slideshow (Makina Books, 2019)

There is nothing special about the poet’s capacity to feel. We all feel. The great poet simply expands our range of feeling. He makes us look at a tree or a river with a love normally reserved for friends and family.

But too much poetry can sour us to the everyday. It takes a special kind of sensitivity to come down from Mount Parnassus and go through mum’s old photos, paying the same attention to them that you once paid to the Nightingale.

The greatest art is mundane, but also transcends the mundane. I would place David Moore’s new book within this rare category of greatness.

The Lisa and John Slideshow began life in 1987. Back then, he was a photography student, traipsing around the council estates of his home town, Derby, in search of families to photograph. The first to let him in, the household of Lisa and John, became the subject of his final show.

He hung around and took photos. He captured everyday life in a household with one income and five kids. The photos are startlingly intimate. Taken on grainy film with a flashbulb, they look just like normal family photos, only heightened by the photographer’s eye for composition and interest.

They leap out at you with their squabbling intimacy, swelteringly close, filled with exuberant and unbridled personalities.

One photo, a group-shot with four adults and twelve kids, is positively Hogarthian. Every face tells a different story. Many things are happening, all at once, and it’s only in the slice of time captured in the image that this mess of separate intentions can be gathered together into a group.

The photo series was named Pictures from the Real World, and established Moore as a professional photographer.

In 2012, Moore returned to the photographs. He tracked down Lisa and John, now separated and living with two new partners, and asked them to reflect on what they saw in them. They looked at the photographs together, explaining and reminiscing, and then Moore asked them to go away and pick which, of all the hundreds of original images, they would choose to be included in a public slideshow.

The whole process was captured on tape; from the reactions of Lisa and John seeing their photos again, to the explanations behind their slideshow choices.

Moore cut-up, reordered and edited these transcripts into a script for two actors. The photography series was now a play, The Lisa and John Slideshow. The genuine responses of Moore’s subjects are captured there, on stage.

Love, loss, and the heartbreaking nature of time passing. The play has all of it. But most impressive is the overpowering sense of the saccharine. The too-sweet nostalgia. There is no sophisticated understatement here, or, at least, there isn’t intended to be any.

In fact, there is much left unspoken; merely alluded to, or implied. The fact that John says a woman in a photograph is Lisa’s sister, but Lisa refuses to recognise her. The close friend who plays with their children who neither can now recall. Kids sat in plastic buckets, taking baths there at night, out on the lawn.

“Probably can’t do that anymore,” John reflects. “Health and safety, you know”.

The final stage in the journey of this project has now arrived courtesy of Makina Books. Technically, the book is marketed as a play, but I fail to see what performance could add here. We are presented with the scripts, the directly spoken (if slightly re-ordered) words of Lisa and John, without the distance created by performance. We have raw words and image.

The photographs are beautifully recreated. On the page, Moore can pace our reading; giving us the words sometimes before their related image and sometimes after. The gaps leave room for reflection which the simultaneity of the live performance would have smoothed out. We have time to pause, a chance to guess at what’s coming, and time to reflect on an image before reading its subject’s associated reflections.

You get to know the real people here. You feel for them. They are perfectly balanced between the mundanity of their reality and the transcendence of myth. Moore has erected them within an artistic framework that permits us to see more of them than they perhaps knew they were showing. Then, through them, we see ourselves.

If you enjoy photography or theatre, this book acts as a fine playbook or objet d’art. I, however, would personally like to see this book embraced by literature readers. The combination of word and image, of reportage and curation, represents a groundbreaking achievement in the field of expanded literature. This is the bound book at the height of its relevancy. It is reality between covers.

Perhaps a masterpiece.

– Joe Darlington