Street photographer Rodney DeCroo says he has zero interest—he puts an expletive in there for emphasis, then repeats the phrase for still more emphasis—in photographing “hipsters in $500 jeans” on their way to some punk rock show. He’s also not interested in the “very composed” shots he sees, taken by some contemporary street photographers, “where there’s a tiny profile of a person walking, and there’s a shot of a ray of light coming between two enormous skyscrapers. And they waited there, when they noticed that shaft of light was coming through. It’s all very well done, technically. And a lot of that is about how anonymous and how tiny we are in the face of modern society. And I’ll be honest: it doesn’t interest me that much.”
By contrast—even in reaction—DeCroo is interested in “the guy who, maybe he’s 52, he’s been living on the Drive for 30 years, maybe he’s always been single, and he’s going to walk into SuperValu to get some cat food and some lunch meat to make sandwiches for work tomorrow.”
Imagine yourself in the cockpit of a fighter jet, practicing maneuvers over the desert of the American Southwest. Suddenly your altimeter reading is falling, and you must act quickly. The complex panel of instruments in front of you should be second nature to use, but in the moment of crisis, the panels blur together, and your muscle memory must take over. You begin to make adjustments to solve the problem while simultaneously considering the worst-case scenario. A voice interrupts you, firm but calm, in a soothing alto that reminds you of your mother: “Pull up … Pull up … Pull up,” it repeats, and you do what the voice commands, avoiding disaster.
Sometimes you need to leave a place before you can write about it, and Colwill Brown’s Doncaster from the late 90s to 2015 is that place. This lacerating, exhilarating debut novel, written almost entirely in South Yorkshire dialect, spans nearly 20 years in the lives of its protagonists Kel, Shaz and Rach, from the Spice Girls to the drug spice. It manages to be both boisterous and bleak, life-enhancing and life-denying, familiar and yet wholly original. It feels essential. You will probably read nothing else like it this year.