I completely understand what you mean. It's there--inside me--and the people who lived it with me are (mostly) still here with me, perhaps a bit grey, but still here in numbers; yet the world that they live in has been transformed, and no matter what they might carry around inside their heads nowadays, that transformation has in turn changed them, the way they live, work and think.
Stepping back after thirty minutes of browsing this Isle of Dogs book made me seriously question how I can experience such aching nostalgia for an environment that I'd be hard pressed to describe better than 'a bit crap'.
Both my mother's and father's families grew up in London and moved out to start their own families, but what I saw of Essex and the estuary overspill as a child was largely shaped in the image of the capital, though more spacious. Looking at these black and white photographs takes me back to my earliest memories (of the early 80s), when things were still rather crumbly, smoke-scarred and winter of discontentish, but, for all the imminence of destruction on display, the place depicted here is
alive: for every oddly beautiful industrio-cyclopian ruin, there are a dozens shots that teem with life in spite of the omnipresent decay. There are a few posed pictures, but even when figures are absent, the signage, commerce and general detritus points to a community, albeit a poor one, getting on with life and eking out a good amount of enjoyment in the process. Although I haven't featured any in the preview beneath, there are also a lot of construction shots and new developments included ('from when the big money moved in'), but they are hellishly sterile by comparison. More 'modern', better amenities, and better laid out, no doubt, yet utterly without merit as homes and the building blocks of neighbourhoods.
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