David Runnacles – reality checkpoints

A surprise arrived with a thump on the doormat last Friday: the latest book by David Runnacles, reality checkpoints – cambridge photos 2021.

David is a man of few words and a brief text on the front cover flap sets the scene.

[This] is the last in the cycle of 8 books of documentary photos, shot in the same small area of central Cambridge over the past 8 years.  About 1000 pictures … All taken on Saturdays between 3pm and 7pm.  The aesthetic reason for that, is to examine a microcosm over one particular time period.  The real reason is laziness.

Laziness or not, reality checkpoints presents that small area in 82 crisp black and white images (beautifully reproduced by mimeo photos), which show that even on dull days David is a master of light, using texture, tone and chiaroscuro to bring his subject to life.  His subject is not the place, but the passing parade, the performative street life, the self-conscious and instinctive interactions between family, friends and strangers.  Here are the little moments of street poetry that only the camera (in skilled hands) can capture.  David brings order to the chaos of the busy flow, with an eye, to eccentric behaviour, to unguarded gestures, to sometimes strange sometimes telling juxtapositions and to the very diversity of humankind.

It is helpful and important that David is honest about the narrow geographical focus for this work: this is not a portrait of Cambridge, central or otherwise.  The people that he captures are largely youthful, energetic, fashionable, cosmopolitan and culturally and ethnically diverse.  The women are beautiful and the men are handsome.  The streets are prosperously busy – the empty shops and street sleepers are elsewhere.  Historic buildings are mere fragments.

The pictures offer few clues to outsiders as to where they were taken, so reality checkpoints is certainly not really about a place.  It’s about people and how they inhabit public spaces at the start of the third decade of the Twenty-first century.  And it’s a celebration of street photography with all its potential for ambiguity.

David concludes with two quotations:  ‘the relation between what we see and what we know is never settled’, Ways of Seeing, John Berger; and ‘know nothing’, Socrates.  He helps us to see and we must hope that this is not really his last book.