NOTE: Full gallery available on Demotix: here.
I had heard about this Lewes Bonfire Night since I came to London a few months ago. And even on the train as my friends and I (also photojournalists) were on our way, people were warning us and telling us “good luck” and “be careful.”
I think it was the fully boarded storefronts outside the train station that first made me think: “Okay, maybe there is something to the warnings…”
But as the sun set and all the crowds began to pour out of the station into the pubs, I started to realize what this really was.
This was a lot of people out to have fun.
One thing about photojournalism is that the photojournalist must be careful about his handling of the subject. It would be very easy to show a photo like this…
…and talk about how crazy it was and the viewer would think I was making images of a freaky cult in some sort of war zone.
It certainly was a bit intense at times just because of the shear amount of people and the fireworks in the street–I did come away with a little temporary hearing damage as if I had been at a very loud concert–but at no point did I feel my personal safety was threatened. There were way too many police, way too many children, way too many barricades, etc, for it to get out of hand.
There have been injuries and such in years past and those were mainly due to fireworks and the REALLY loud types that have some sort of cap in their base that fragments and would spray shrapnel. Those did make an appearance from time to time even now.
Talking to a police officer as we headed to the last trains back to London for the night, he said that the intensity has been chilling out in the past few years and it has become what it should be: a whole town coming out to celebrate history and have a good time. That didn’t stop a lot of people being treated for “fireworks related injuries” and a few drunk and disorderly arrests over general stupidity, but, as he said, it was unfortunate that those injuries occurred at all but the number has been coming down for a few years.
The images are no less striking, I think.
Is this reduction in violence a watering down of history? Here’s the Wikipedia article on it and one of the official websites. The risk of such things is that things become “Disney-fied” and it makes it a figment of its former self.
But, I guess that’s the debate anytime for things such as this. Make it too crazy and intense and you’ll lose your participation because people really don’t want to be hit in the face with shrapnel. Make it too loose and you’ll get Mardi Gras in New Orleans with it’s beads and booze and debauchery.
The Lewes Bonfire, though honestly this was my first experience with it, seems to hold to a stricter sense of tradition if evidenced simply by obvious scarcity of political correctness. Many times during the night I heard: “The people in the procession are doing it for themselves, not just to be a spectacle.”
I hope that’s true. Whatever the subject, doing grand things for one’s self is a lost art.
Be careful that you aren’t too quick to judge anything you see here. Be careful that you not impose your preconceived notions of what is going on in these images with their procession of burning crosses and false priests and various odd characters blown up or burned in effigy.
What is happening here is very complex and steeped in tradition older than the United States.
Hasty judgement of such things incurs a certain judgement on your own traditions. Half the holidays Americans celebrate are based on far less factual accuracy than the Lewes Bonfire Celebrations, not to mention the way in which they are celebrated.
The whole of human experienced is steeped in tradition. From the celebration of birth and birthdays to the pomp and circumstance of funerary rites, every society collects in a place and says: “This is important.” Sometimes these traditions go in contradiction to someone else’s tradition in another place. And because their “important” thing is in conflict with another person’s “important” thing, you’ll find people who rebel against those that revel.
Even when all the nations finally figure out how to work together and we are united as People of Earth (instead of black and white, Indonesian and Mexican and Russian) there will still be those traditions. And so they should be. Is it traditions that prevent peace?
But truly I hope that these traditions in which fireworks are thrown in narrow streets and crosses are burned will not conflict with the eating of turkey and trampling each other to buy a cheap big-screen television so much so that there is no dialogue; nor would it cause such discord that those who march around a church building swinging incense and singing canticles find it unsavory to reach across the isle and say without derision, “Tell me, brother, of your history.”
Stay tuned…
-Noah D.
