Thrift Store Etiquette EP
By rory cobbe
17 February 2008
I became interested in the idea of Secondhand shops over the past year. I have been working on a Television series about Architectural Salvage for RTE Cork and had also started to buy second hand camera gear and film online. People I'd meet seemed to revel in the quality of things and the bargains to be had 'out there'. It seemed funny that the people in question weren't short of a few bob and yet they loved finding and buying old stuff, someone else's rubbish became their treasure.
I thought back to the 80's when things were worse than grim in Cork, the factories closing, the recession, being a teenager with no money and no prospect of ever seeing any either. How we had to buy secondhand clothes to find anything affordable and different, I thought about the shops Red Square run by Victoria and her sister and The Style Council run by Edwin who is now a tailor. I thought about the over-coats and the paisley shirts we bought to be cool, I thought about the suits and the belts and braces we wore fresh off the rail and a dead mans back probably. I thought about McCarthys shop on the Coal Quay and Parkas and I thought about Doc Martin Boots and big hair. I could smell the hairspray. I thought about how it was funny today how we lived before.
Then i looked around and saw Emo's and goths and really bad hair. I started to hear the music of that time on the radio again. and my brain started to mash.
It wasn't nostalgia for a forgotten youth or better times that had me thinking like this, far from it. The eighties is not a time for rose tinted glasses for me. The best thing about the Eighties was that the nineties came straight after it. Maggie, Ronald Reagan, John Maynard Keynes,H-Blocks and Trident, SS20s and Greenham Common, unemployment, dark smoggy days and nights of boredom and apathy which felt like a decade in themselves. No no, feck that, I'm not having that. The Eighties hold no gems beyond that it happened to be the decade though which i had to negotiate my teenage years.
It was how people spend their money today that had me like this. It's the talk about the planet, the waste, the rubbish the way we live, the throw away culture, instant gratification global warming buzz word buzz word buzz word. The whole bloody mess. It's not my problem, let some one else sort it out.
It's about the 4x4's and Mini Coopers, expensive clothes, shirts with two collars made for 20c in china sold for €300,. It's about apartments in Bulgaria bought from a brochure, swimming pools and Arctic hot tubs, 600 GB ipods, apple macs and digital cameras, Plasma TV's you can see from the next parish, Judge Dread's Dog in a a diamond collar stuffed into a designer bag. It's the Prozac, viagra, cocaine, champagne, vintage wine for €17 a bottle. Stuff we need. Stuff I need. Stuff I need to need.
It made me think about what we do with the stuff we don't need. You can learn a lot from emersing yourself in the waste and rubbish that a society throws away, ask an archeologist, why do that when you can ask a tabloid photographer bent over in a 'celebrity bin'.
I found myself looking for second hand shops, they have changed too, now they are called Enable, Irish Cancer Society, Gorta, CASA, Barnardos and Oxfam and they are Charity Shops. I started to to frequent these shops for no particular reason other than i was curious. I wanted to see what they sold and who they sold to.
I met Stan of the band Stanley Super 800 one Saturday afternoon in November 2008, it was Cork Film Festival time, he was waiting on some one on the quay opposite the Cork Opera house. I stopped my bike and greeted him, I had a Holga with me and a Pentax Mx on loan from a friend a work. I started shooting straight away. He's a great subject. I think he's on my page somewhere on jpg from that meeting. I had brought out a record for him on a label i set up and I made a video for his single 'GateCrashing' so we had a past.
We talked as i was shooting about what was going on and this and that and it struck me that we should be doing something together again as we were both at a bit of loose end, me with a tv series to finish and him with an album out and a child on the way. So we started talking about the second hand shops, in that fifteen minutes on the banks of the River Lee Thrift Store Etiquette EP was born.
I spent the months of December and January going to shops meeting people and seeing what was there, reconnaissance of sorts. I got quizzical reaction. People didn't understand what it was I was doing. But as I went along people were most generous with their time and were very patient with me being around.
It didn't surprise me that people would be suspicious of a man with a camera, but most people were amenable to the idea once they got their heads around it. I remembered too a thing that one of my favourite photographers, Simon Norfolk, said to me when i got to interview him for a show i was working on. It was about how how people in the war zones he travels to respond to him with his wonderful wooden box camera and how it gets him into places Nikon brandishing journojox never get to see. How angry men with guns would single him out from the throng of war photographers to ask him about the camera and ask him to shot their family, gang or neighbourhoods. It stayed with me even though my particular war zone as the discount rail in a saturday morning with the natives on North Main Street Cork as opposed to main street Monrovia with the Irish Army on a UN mission in Liberia.
So I took my Yashica D TLR loaded with tri-x with me and would always let people in the shops see me with it before i approached them for shots. It brought them in, it helped them to drop their natural defensive reaction to 'a strange man with a camera'. 'Is that a black and white one?' they would ask. 'Tis' says I. 'Take me photo will you?' 'I will of course what's your name?'
Often they would pose, i'd snap a shot posed and then ask them to continue their business and look for the real shot then. When i whipped out my D200 for back up they were already part of the process and understood the need for safety shots and would gladly continue wit me clicking away digitally. I ended up using shots from both and as both are secondhand cameras it seemed fitting that I should.
In the meantime Stan spent his time finding secondhand music which he reworked into a soundtrack for the shop we decided to build to exhibit our work. We built the Thrift Store in The Triskel Arts Centre in Cork. It's there until March 29th. We built a website www.secondhandculture.com so people can visit and hear and see the work.
Spending time in the secondhand shops of Cork has left a big mark on me and I will continue to drop in to see if I can come across any more gems, people and things, and I would recommend it. You come away with more than just a product, you can come away with a piece of something special like I did.
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