People have quite often just vacated Ian Howorth’s pictures. English people. They have left behind clues as to the way they live, the language of the tribe. This image is on the opening page of his new book, A Country Kind of Silence, and offers some ideas of what will follow.
What can be learned from it? Might we see a loneliness in the single bottle of Coke, unfinished, its label picked at nervously? Is that anxiety confirmed or denied by the ashtray full of fag ends, too many for one sitting? The Carling logo threatens to locate the scene in a particular time and place – the pub garden tables of the 1970s, for those of us who remember them. But the Coke bottle is plastic, pastiching the iconic glass, so this is a tired reminder of that already tired decade. Still, the soft cocktail hour light draws us in. We might think we know it from a hundred adverts – “the real thing” – but the Coke dregs, the unscrewed cap, the unemptied ashtray, don’t want to sell us anything. It might not even be sundown, but a relic of an early morning after.
Howorth, who is based in Brighton, has an uncanny, tragicomic eye for these details. He conjures an idea of England from abandoned phone boxes and the facades of retirement bungalows; from caravan parks and portable TV sets and dusty cars in lock-up garages and empty deck chairs in concrete yards. He knows us by our wipe-clean tablecloths and abandoned paddling pools and velour car seat covers. Certain colours are crucial to his compositions, to the emotion of them. As another imagist poet, the American William Carlos Williams, might have observed here: so much depends upon the red Coke bottle top, on the grey bench seat, above the gravel footpath.
