“I’m desperate”: how Gillian Wearing got Londoners to open up
If you set out to capture people’s most vulnerable private thoughts, you’d think London wouldn’t be a great place to start. The cold dead heart of the capital, famous for its exorbitant house prices and general towering misery, isn’t conducive to emotional honesty, which makes the frank statements Gillian Wearing encouraged in her photography series Signs That Say What You Want Them to Say and Not Signs That Say What Someone Else Wants You to Say all the more poignant. By asking people to write down their thoughts rather than admit them out loud, Wearing somehow coaxed out an honesty that is at times touching, tragic, or a mixture of the two.
For the 1992 project, Wearing, armed with her camera and the knowledge Londoners are chronically emotionally stifled, asked people passing by her to write down what was on their mind and hold it up for her to photograph. It’s striking that the white paper her subjects hold up makes to warm them to the idea of being on camera. The little shield between them and the camera somehow removes any sense of embarrassment about what they’d written.
Predictably, for a piece that grapples with suppressed inner thoughts, the signs her male subjects write remain some of the most profound. Wearing, who told The Guardian the idea was that if you approached any passerby in the street they would have something interesting to say, also said she “never picked people”. That said, she made the shrewd move of photographing a policeman and a city worker, both of whom wrote arguably the most tragic confessions on their cards.
In the thick of the recession, the sharp-dressed city man had only two words scribbled on his board: “I’m desperate”. What Wearing was doing in teasing that from him was taking the emotional temperate of the capital to devasting effect. After taking the photograph, the vulnerability of what he’d just done sunk in. “[He was] shocked by what he had written, which suggests it must have been true,” she later said. “Then he got a bit angry, handed back the piece of paper, and stormed off.”
Other poignant images include a black policeman who simply wrote: “Help”.
Far from a portrait of individual turmoil, Wearing distilled London at its most fractured. Elsewhere, people wondered: “Will Britain get through this recession?” while others confessed they preferred being away from it completely: “I like to be in the country” and “The last holiday abroad was nice but I can’t afford it.”
It’s fairly bleak but not without its windows of light. One man gleefully admits he’s been medically certified as “mildly insane”, and two women embrace, laughing as they hold up their joint sing. “Best friends for life!” they write. “Long live the two of us!” Wearing’s work is a stunning venture into the subconscious of the capital, which wields surprisingly sincere results.
After looking at the Signs series, you start to wonder what prompted these people to be so honest. Then you start thinking about what you’d write.
