Notting Hill Carnival 2011
It’s pretty poor form to have lived in the capital for 12 years without ever having stepped foot on West London tarmac during one of the most celebrated street festivals in the world. In my defense, for most of those years I was watching white men play indie music at either Reading or Leeds Festivals over the same weekend. As excuses go, it’s not entirely cast iron, is it. Finally though, thankfully, a photo commission motivated me along to the Notting Hill Carnival, for which I will be forever grateful.
I didn’t see much of the main procession as my brief was to capture the faces of the carnival, but what I did see blew my mind, which hadn’t been calibrated for such an audacious, cartwheeling frenzy of tightly drilled colour and movement. Amazing. The bottle-necked maze of soundsystems prised into local streets was not short on thrills either and it is here I spent most of my day. As present as police were (and their number was noticeable, not to mention highly publicised, following the recent riots) they were no more than observers really. I didn’t see or sense negativity in any form all day. The place just sort of massed out of an omnipresent and hedonistic chaos with the most delicate thread of cohesion running through it all, pulling it into shape. It certainly moved to its own beat. It was a joy to move around at the heart of it all.
You can see some of the results of my day below…
| October 7, 2011 @ 1:48 pm
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