Robin Maddock - God Forgotten Face

Trolley, London, 2011. First edition. Hardback.

Condition: Like new, in publishers shrink wrap.

ISBN: 978-1-907112-34-8

Robin Maddock’s Statement:

With this project I wanted to make a quite open work about England today, so I moved to Plymouth where my father’s family is from. The place always scared me a bit when visiting from Singapore as a child when I grew up.  Maybe I sensed the ongoing trauma it has after being bombed flat during the war.  So in a way it was this fear of the wild west which attracted me. Plymouth embodied our confidence in the Elizabethan age, so I felt it to be a good place to think about our confidence and direction now in the era of declining of western power.

Though surrounded by amazing natural beauty in its landscapes, like many provincial English cities, Plymouth is virtually an art-free town. I think of all those fountains built into it in the 50s and the fact that they are all turned off. To the Romans, fountains were seen as the sources of inspiration.  That’s the kind of question I wanted to think about when picturing us now in the UK, particularly as part of this great history of Plymouth, what do we believe in now?

Isolation shaped this project in two ways. Firstly, I started out by thinking about the way being so far from removed from the centre of media power and image creation affects a place and its people. Later, more tellingly, I found that as a Londoner of 15 years, I was now a clear outsider here myself.  I had my own creeping personal isolation to deal with.

In my two years there, what felt most clear to me was people’s stoicism against the hardness of the imposed post-war planning. (I’m sure Owen Hatherley who did a great essay for God Forgotten Face would disagree, being a Modernist puritan!). Relying on a few pints, Plymouth Argyle and some West Country humour to get by, ‘Janners’ triumph by loving their town.  In spite of the age-old brutality typical of naval towns, relatively poor since the retreat of the navy, there is an admirable dark humour and generosity here.  This was certainly a discovery that changed the work at both the shooting stage and in the editing/sequencing of the work with Gigi at Trolley Books.

In God Forgotten Face I tried to make an honest account of a time as well as a place, as Plymouth’s now more part of my story, too. Yet of course I hope people might still recognise themselves, in their town, in 2011.