David O’Mara’s Spitalfields
I have published many pictures of renovations of old houses in Spitalfields over the years but David O’Mara‘s candid photography reveals the other side of these stories, recording the back-breaking labour and human toil that is expended upon these endeavours
“For the past ten years I have worked as a painter & decorator in London, both as a means of surviving and also funding my artistic practice – but the roles of artist & decorator are not always easily reconciled, time demands and budgets often lead to a conflict of interests.
My work is described as ‘restoration,’ though I began to question the truth of this description. From the beginning, you strip back the layers of previous occupants. Cupboards, doors and walls that were later additions are all removed. At every turn and removal you notice the evidence of previous lives, all to be erased and replaced with freshly painted blank surfaces – everything is pared back to the tabula rasa.
This has a resonance with my own experience: the daily repetition of tasks erodes memory, time is distilled into but a few recollections. I started photographing my working life as a way of recording the disappearing history of the houses and also to combat the erosion of memory through the repetition of work.” – David O’Mara
Photographs copyright © David O’Mara
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I’d be interested to see what would have happened in the absence of “restoration”? Perhaps what will happen to the bell foundry.
And I hope the work wasn’t undertaken for free under the instruction of a sweatshop landlord.
Very well described, this work through the layers of time. I can really understand how you first have to clear away all the rubbish and then eventually see the light at the end of the tunnel. And in the middle of it all, the historic banisters are taped up to protect them from these extreme measures!
Love & Peace
ACHIM
Thank you so much for this revealing group of photos. They are stunningly effective, and
bring us into a world that most of us are completely unaware of. We see the “outcome”, and are rarely on-site to witness the work. These photos bring a grinding reality to it all – the teetering steps that seem to plunge down into the abyss. — Totally harrowing. A lesser soul,
like me, would just turn around the leave.
When we bought a raw space in Lower Manhattan, we hired two contractors (partners) to do the rehab for us. Like most of the men doing that work, they were artists. And they sub-contracted to many other artists, doing specialized tasks. I still remember visiting the work site, seeing an already-tall young man with lion-like hair, atop his sheet-rock platforms; literally stomping around on metal stilts while he slathered compound (expertly!) onto the wall surface. Face, hands, hair, jumpsuit, motorcycle boots, all coated in a silt of white dust. He looked fearless, and dare I say wildly attractive. The space echoed with noise that day…….mostly work noises………. but also the epic static of a radio tuned to a rock station. The radio itself was a relic, worthy of a Rauschenberg combine. It had long since lost its outer case, and was just a hunk of noisy innards now splattered with joint compound and paint. Remarkable, gifted,
hard-working, great-looking men! Let’s hear it for the guys.
Thanking you & the photographer very much for these images that matter a lot, for the showing of the harsh labour & also reminding us how daily tasks can erode memory & erase forgotten lives.
I’m Spartacus.
I mean a painter and decorator.
Think ragged trousered philanthropist.
Give us a kiss then.
Thought provoking images and words – the sheer hard graft clearly evident.
The immediacy of your photos made me gasp. These are images suggesting not what is lost, but what has been found. Revealed, scraped, dug away until the pattern has been discerned. An archeology of recovery, as much as discovery. Thank you, Gentle Author, patient cataloger of so many rare and particular images of life. And thank you, David O’Mara, for sharing your almost palpable point of view. I believe I have dust and the smell of old about me as I gaze upon these views.