Stephen Leslie has an occasional YouTube channel on which he talks about photographs he likes – some his own, some by photographers he admires. In one recent episode he featured this picture, which he took on Oxford Street in London in February 2018. The theme of that YouTube chat was the idea of anemoia, a niche form of nostalgia that prompts a yearning for a historical time and place that you have never actually experienced. Photographs can be perfect anemoia triggers, and this one works by layering retro longing from several different eras.
The snow sharpens those emotional cues, of course. But it is the combination of the self-consciously vintage HMV sign – with all its vinyl associations – and the bowler-hatted man at the kerbside (a now redundant Oxford Street “greeter”) that properly opens up those possibilities. Leslie came upon the surprise of the scene when he emerged from the underground – it hadn’t been snowing at all when he boarded the train; all its constituent parts were waiting for him in the make-believe of Oxford Street, a gift from real life.
Looking back at the picture – which is included in a terrific, off-beam new collection of the photographer’s work, Mostly False Reports – Leslie retells the story of His Master’s Voice, the name itself sentimental shorthand for communing with the ghosts of the past, which made it such an evocative piece of branding. By 2018, the famous Victorian picture of the fox terrier Nipper cocking an ear to his late owner’s voice on a gramophone had gone through many different neon renderings on the famous storefront, once the biggest record shop in the world. That this one, which itself referenced a 1920s version, was boarded over not long after this picture was taken – by the garishly ubiquitous American House of Candy – gives it an added poignancy; anemoia squared.
• Mostly False Reports (£30) is available at stephenleslie.co.uk
