Images to Live By

Sometimes you are in the right place at the right time, as they say – and for me, this happened one night back in October when I happened to see a guy putting up a sticker in a London Underground carriage. You may recall my delight at this right-place-right-time happening from the previous entry on this blog, ‘All in the moment’.

Sometimes you are in the right place at the right time, but without a camera. That night I had been at the theatre with a friend, and I hadn’t taken my camera with me. I sat on the train watching this guy calmly and smoothly attach the sticker to the wall and I was unable to photograph the result. Argh!

In the blog post, I wrote about imagining someone catching sight of the sticker on a busy train, and smiling because of it.

Well, not only did that indeed take place, but the person also happened to have a camera with them and take a photograph of the sticker.

And not only THAT, but this person also happens to read this blog, and she has sent me the photograph. Thanks so much, Nadia! And here it is:

You can see in the photograph that the sticker is just starting to fray and peel a tiny bit (though not as much as the ‘official’ sticker above it). And let’s just admire what a great piece of work it is: the font, the layout, the wording, the white border, the shape and size. I wish I knew who this guy was. When I saw him put it up, I didn’t speak to him, because I somehow didn’t want to interrupt his performance: I didn’t want to be ‘the academic’, saying ‘excuse me, do you mind if I ask you why you are doing this and how long you have been doing it?’. Sometimes you just want to be the audience – admiring, appreciating, and enjoying. The consequence of that is of course that I may never know who he is or how many stickers he has put up on the Underground or elsewhere around London (imagine it! maybe he makes these ‘almost official’ stickers for loads of different sites – what a fantastic idea). But not knowing is somehow OK – I love the idea of this anonymous person carrying out this small act which beautifully resists what Nadia describes as ‘hyper-individualised and negative Tube culture’.

Thanks again for the photo, Nadia. Sometimes it almost felt like I had imagined the sticker, and it is so good to see it again.