Street Play & Tour De Fence

Martha Cooper is best known for her photographs capturing the very early days of the New York Hip Hop and Graffiti scene. As a staff photographer for a New York newspaper in the late ’70s she spent all day criss-crossing Manhattan to cover news stories. In quiet moments whilst waiting for assignments to come through she headed down to photograph everyday life in the squalid Lower East Side. Street Play is a collection of her previously unpublished photos of kids playing in the streets of New York – tiny, scruffy, kids making the dirty sidewalks, debris-strewn empty lots and abandoned buildings their playground: building dens, racing go-carts, cobbling together customised bikes from scavenged parts, and improvising fairground rides. It’s a fascinating and fun document of a New York that no longer exists, and two seemingly opposite, incompatible elements of big city and small kids interacting free of any adult supervision. Sesame Street it is not! A few of my favourite photos: a small boy and girl concentrating intently on the task of catching flies in pop bottles, making their own mini zoo of imprisoned insects; a group of young entrepreneurs setting up their own ‘bar’ on the pavement using empty beer bottles and playing at being drunk; a gang of pre-teen Latino lads defiantly posing, displaying their rifles made out of broken pieces of wood and bits of string. Meeting these street kids was Martha Cooper’s introduction to the emerging Hip Hop/Graffiti culture, and her work documenting that world are acknowledged classics, but for me Street Play is a much more interesting and enjoyable book. File next to Nils Norman’s An architecture of Play: A Survey of London’s Adventure Playgrounds.
Tour De Fence is a different approach to using the city as your playground. Heath Bunting and Kayle Brandon took a map of their home town, Bristol, and drew a large circle on it. Then, having remapped the city to suit themselves, set out to walk through Bristol following the circle as precisely as possible, going over underpasses, scaling walls and walking along fences where necessary. Tour De Fence is a book and set of too-nice-to-tear-out postcards documenting this action which successfully blends urban exploration and civil disobedience. The kids in Street Play don’t need any encouragement to make up their own games, but as adults we forget how to play purely for its own sake. Tour De Fence encourages us to start playing again by turning the city into a free playground and playing with no particular goal or aim in sight. Simultaneously, it engages with pertinent issues of increasing surveillance and control of public space, and the policing and control of state borders. I’m reviewing a printed publication here but should mention that Heath Bunting’s projects exist both online and on the streets of the real world; both spheres feeding into and informing each other.
I picked Tour De Fence up at Here in Bristol. Here is a small, collectively run shop with a gallery downstairs. They sell a great selection of carefully chosen, independently produced magazines, zines, comics, books, cards and badges from the UK and US, together with gig tickets, prints by Bristol artists, and handicrafts from local Craft Rebels. They’ve even managed to squeeze in a sofa to encourage comfy browsing and are just round the corner from the Cube Cinema Microplex, forming their very own cultural hub.

Street Play – £19.99; www.fromheretofame.com

Tour de Fence – £5.00; www.irational.org/fence

Reviewed by Mark Pawson for Variant Magazine