Occasional Sights – Anna Best Archive

A London guidebook of missed opportunities and things that aren’t always there.

An attempt to operate as a curious tourist in your own backyard. It is an anti-guidebook in the sense of memorials and palaces. Its footnotes guide the reader around the bibliography, which has been walked as meanderingly as the streets.

I found the history of wandering and observing a rather male-dominated affair, mostly privileged and sometimes not, and there is that detached observational way of viewing public space as Other, that is also so closely linked with taking pictures – the photographic stance of capturing the world through the lens. How to expand on this practice? How to use the camera as a conversational starting point? To explore encounters, to involve and talk with people I met, sometimes to initiate impossible projects with strangers, to ask them to send me pictures. Over the period of a year, I took extra time when I went out, to initiate encounters. I used the guidebook as a strategy, saying I was looking for contributions for stories of things that they might have seen that aren’t always there, things that are transient or that happen only now and again e.g.. It might be a puddle that only appears when there is so much rain, a homemade raft under Blackfriars Bridge, or a dropped ice cream on the pavement. I spoke about traditional guidebooks, historic monuments, national events. I focussed on their personal experience, on the everyday and commonplace, and occasionally this was extraordinary. I gathered their anecdotes, images, drawings . I made a book , very much in collaboration with Neil Chapman as editor and Janice McLaren as producer. It’s like a guidebook that works alphabetically by area, but almost an anti-guidebook in that many other things wouldn’t be there if you went back to find them. I also didn’t want the book to be seen as simply the document of a project, but a tool to use to explore London, or anywhere in fact, in a different way. As well as the tool to enable the research in the first place. After it was published, 1000 copies soon sold out, we organised a series of walking tours, by some of the contributors, over the weekend of the book’s launch, in London. In so many ways this project was of its time, and a kind of analogue precursor to what became utterly ubiquitous a few years later…eg instagram, smartphone cameras etc.

Collaborative writing

Anna Best and Neil Chapman

Commissioner and producer

Janice McLaren, The Photographer’s Gallery

Writing and book design

Anna Best

Graphic design

Spin

Print

Editorale Bortolazzi-Stei Verona

Contributors

Adam Coffman
Aladin
Albertine Lucas
Ana Laura Lopez de la Torre
Andre Klauser
Andrea Crociani
Andrea Davidson
Andreas Lang
Annie
Ann-Marie LeQuesne
Barby Asante
Bev Chipp (Angeltoad)
Bridget Hugo
Chris Jones
Clair Montier
Cleo Broda
Colette Meacher
David Agar
David da Silva
David Jennings
Deborah Asante
Deborah O’Hara
Dimitri Launder
Ellie Reid
Ikoli
Irene Ward
Jacky Spears
Janice McLaren
John and Anne-Marie Larman
John Curtis
John Parry
John Wigley
Jonathan Goldberg
Jonathan Greenbank
Justine Graham
Karin Baez
Lenny Borg
Maria Moreira
Marianne Hartley
Martin Garside
Mauro Cocilio
Mr Cornwell
Myles Stawman
Nick Turpin
Patrick Smart
Peter Boag
Rachel McCowat-Taylor
Richard Bram
Richard Chipperfield
Roxy Walsh
Simon and Lars
Simon Faithfull
Sissu Tarka
Stefan Szczelkun
Steve Ball
Susan Eskdale
Sylvia de Swaan
Tessa Bradley
Tessa Gleeson
Tim Noakes
Vaidas Daugele

Credits

The Publishers and Anna Best would like to thank all of the contributors for conversations, photographs, writing and directions: Andrea Davidson for administrative work; B+B for including the work in ‘Talk Show’ at ‘Critical Mass’, Chicago 2002; Myles Stawman for website; Nic Hughes for design collaboration; Eileen Daly for final proof work; Andrea Crociani for press pass advice. Special thanks to Neil Chapman for conversations and questions; David Lillington for help with writing and corrections; Janice McLaren for organisation, proofing and support; Katie Murphy for personal assistance.