Marcus Watkinson

‘There were very few children of my pre-school age then who were speaking Yiddish so I was an attraction’ he said. ‘When we went to the grocer he’d shove his hand in the barrel and shlept out a sour cucumber for me. If we went to the deli I’d have a stick of vursht. When we went to buy the live chicken before taking it to the slaughterhouse the owner would find a warm egg, the poke holes in so I could suck the egg. I was a child celeb in many ways spoilt rotten by most of the shopkeepers because I spoke to them in Yiddish’. Lichtenstein, R. (2019) ‘Vanished streets : 1970s photographs of the Jewish East End : from the Shloimy Alman Archive’

The project ‘Where’d Jew Go?’ had an organic movement between research and image making. Starting solely with an issue of the publication ‘Jewish Socialist’, the editorial position and writing opened threads of research into spirituality in a secular world, anti semitism, national front/nazi movements post holocaust, antisemitism, both from a global but more importantly a hyperlocal perspective. Accessing various other pieces of archival material, a stark observation came when seeing the documentation of a prevalent community. Jewish culture seen through butcher shops, bakers and social clubs. Seeing a need and lack of exploration into contempoary jewish communities, the project framed local connivence stores and high streets as corner stones of communities. Specialised products, tableware and opening times all reflect the cycle of cultural practices or a slow moving nomadic like community. 

An animated sequence was produced using analogue printing methods to publication consiting of frames capturing the products, people and places along the high street in Stamford Hill. In an accompanying publication the animation is sorted by price and weight, customers and spaces, alongside and poetic observations sought to capture a specific time and place. 

Undercurrents of belief and myth are woven throughout the history of people. Even today, beneath our ‘reasoned’ and secularised society we see cultish, conspiracy driven practices and religious dogma dividing communities. Themes of higher divine powers and their inherent opposing darkness have been actualised and propagated as images. Charismatic messages are conveyed by higher or individual interpretation to incite dogmatic belief, between the congregation and the pariah. A shared and inherited example of this is, the antisemitic trope of a Jew, constantly evolving as the narrators change but still recognisably present. 

This project was purely research based with experimentation into print, image manipulation and binding methods. Within visual and analytical research I pulled understanding into the role of visual communication, and the trope or 'LARP' of contemporary belief in society. More specifically the way we as people subconsciously fashion identities to enact and preform the archetypal roles of belief.