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Celestial Tramp
by A. Reiser Perkins
Described as a “good-natured Englishman” by those who didn’t know him very well, Charles Thomas (1955-1999) left England for France in the late 1980s, joining the Chambre5 Collective soon after his arrival in Paris. He quickly became one of the group’s most influential leaders and was responsible for initiating the concept, later solidified in the group’s charter, that one should “only take photos under duress.” Not much else was known about him until his friend, the poet Jean-François Le Bevillon, wrote a tribute following Thomas’s untimely death in 1999. It was Le Bevillon who first put forth the case that Charles Thomas, though he took relatively few pictures, was a major influence on European street photography.
“Charles was a kind of savage with the manners of a dandy who was extremely lonely and sad, but never bitter,” writes Le Bevillon. “He didn’t expect anything. He found a useless, sufficient joy in the texture and tone of asphalt, the movement of bodies, the faces of strangers passing in the street.”
The work featured in this issue was made between 1993 and 1999, during which time Charles Thomas stationed himself in a two-square-meter area at an intersection in Paris, facing the Stalingrad metro station. “There is no need to move,” he would explain to anybody who asked. “Why would you want to run through the streets, photographing the whole world? All nature is included in a piece of sidewalk, all humanity is present in each of its ephemeral occupants.”
He had, previous to this, taken photographs, in the style of Soviet realism, with a camera stuck to the end of his shoe or upon his back, which allowed him to avoid seeing whatever it was he was photographing. He called it “The Invisible Photographer.” He also experimented (long before selfie-sticks) with a camera strapped to a 6 foot pole that he operated with a cable release. This he called “aerial photography for poor people.”
Had he been a novelist, his books would have been titled Tiny Lives or Life in the Interstices. “He wanted to be surrounded by people, characters, subjects, but not have to interact with any of them, to be simultaneously camouflaged and exposed,” writes Le Bevillon. “He used decoys to distract passers-by until 1993 when, in order ‘to prevent the calcification of anything resembling a system,’ he began hiding his head and shoulders under a large cardboard box with a gray gelatin screen over one side. This allowed him to photograph the surprised faces of people who previously had not noticed him, using a telematics camera equipped with a 35mm lens, set always at a shallow depth of field (1/250th at F2.8).”
Charles Thomas often said things like, “I am astonished that all these people persist in existing. Every time I find myself on the street I am frightened. Nor can I believe that I too am still alive. It is this banal miracle that interests me.”
“He refused to let his life be ‘dominated by the fear of death,’ though at times he admitted to feeling like a ‘hunted rat,’” said Jana Caslavska, another early member of the Collective, when reached by landline. (Contacting members of Chambre5 Collective is notoriously difficult as their “code of conduct” does not allow them to hold exhibitions, foster personal ambitions, or interact with the art world in any way.) Caslavska told us that Charles Thomas’s greatest dream, frequently repeated to those closest to him, was to die in an asylum, “an atypical, asocial, ferocious, precocious beast of paradise who took daily walks with Napoleon, God the Father, or Dionysus, depending on his mood, and a photo on the 6th of each month.”
Caslavska disputes the rumor that Charles Thomas came from a wealthy family, arguing that even though several people claim to have heard him say he once participated in a polo tournament in his hometown of Newquay, his clothes were threadbare. According to her, “Charles could often be seen dressed in a beautiful, expensive white shirt full of holes, his hat over his eyes, napping in the dirty grass of a Paris square. He subsisted on bread and sardines in oil. A celestial tramp is what he was, one who has nothing, one who needs nothing.”
“He was suspicious by nature and did not trust reason, good manners, or agreed upon feelings,” writes Le Bevillon. “‘Failure is invigorating, success sleeps,’ was one of his catch phrases. Another one was ‘art does not exist.’ His favorite word was why and he refused to obey moral codes and laws, even when he agreed with them. He was incapable of joining any club or group, other than the Collective. When he first arrived in Paris, he set out to join the communist party but was more passionate about Stirner and Nietzsche, whom he had never read, than Marx or Lenin.
“Charles did not believe anyone, including himself, had anything to accomplish,” he continues. “He was indifferent to whether or not anyone ever saw his pictures. Sometimes he hung a few in the tiny room in which he lived but not many people saw them even then because he went to bed so early, rising at 5 a.m. to go for a walk during which his attention was often drawn to a poppy in the park. He could spend the whole day staring at a flower without trying to hold back the tears that such a spectacle inspired in him. He was a friend to all rats, cockroaches, pigeons, rabbits, squirrels, ferrets, foxes, and even falcons, which, believe it or not, can be found in Paris under the ring road or along disused railway tracks. ‘All creatures are useless,’ he often said, ‘their loves are like the melting of snow in spring.’”
According to Ethan Lichtenfeld, the Collective’s only American member and the most difficult to locate, the group lost its raison d’être after Thomas’s death. In a postcard sent in response to our many phone calls and telegrams, Lichtenfeld explains that without Charles the group simply “degraded.”
“They like to call those fourteen years following Charles’s death when they produced almost nothing their ‘period of occultation,’ a term inspired, of course, by Le collège de Pataphysique,” wrote Lichtenfeld. “I can’t tell you much other than that except for this: Charles never even called himself a photographer. It wasn’t art that interested him. It was the gesture, that particular position a person holding a camera experiences. He never called what he did work because that word is derived from the Latin tripalium, meaning an instrument of torture with three stakes. He called it practice. He used to say, ‘What’s the point of living if you have to work?’ He blamed himself for not having the courage to photograph without film which would have been the ultimate expression of his core beliefs, allowing him to put everything into the act of shooting and thus saving himself the chore of printing negatives which would, in turn, prevent him from constantly soliciting money from his friends in order to continue.”
“It’s true that he disdained all artists and professionals,” said Caslavska when asked to comment. “He liked to say he was a ‘super-amateur’ or even a ‘garnish,’ by which I think he meant the kind of person who wants only to go to Mexico and listen to jazz with street children then take them to play pinball. And I think that’s exactly what he would have done had he not been killed.”
Charles Thomas was stabbed to death in April 1999 outside Stalingrad Station. At the private commemoration held in his honor, his friends described an anxious alcoholic who collected shoes. He had seven pairs, one for each day. In the evening, after returning to his small room in the 6th arrondissement, he tucked the rolls of film he had taken into the shoes he had worn that day. They spoke about how much he admired the life and work of the painter / musician Louis Soutter, who would stop playing his instrument whenever the music delighted him. They remembered his childlike glee when discovering new French expressions like “goose poop” or the existence of a kitchen utensil known for a thousand years, and took turns reading aloud the aphorisms he had scrawled on the scraps of paper left scattered around his room.
Yes no yes no, it's the same thing.
I put each of my thoughts (today alone there were 5) in small coffins that I bury under my bed.
Only idiots need science and laws.
The pig is superior to the man (if it is legitimate to establish hierarchies, which I do not believe).
There are no gods and yet the gods guide our every step (we are free and yet we are not free).
I collect poppies and then place them in glasses of Champagne
in various shapes.