Black Sun and Dark Rainbows.
Brighton, A Postmodern Tale Of Two Cities.
‘‘really great images and it’s an amazing portrait of excess -of all kinds.’’(Dewi Lewis)
Brighton is a fun and happening, very elite, sometimes dangerous, seaside city, home to the rich and the poor. Attracting an eclectic group of visitors, from the lagered-up lairy Londoner to the International connoisseur of techno music and raving. It firmly retains the Zeitgeist and is the location of choice for musicians, digital bohemians, and intellectual elites. Even Left-Wing Politicians are attracted to its shores. As the annual Labor Party Conference is held here. Brighton also hosts many alternative events with such spectacles as a naked bike ride through the town center. Most notably, Brighton serves as a beacon for the LGBT+ community to live and party. And the cultural milieu pitches Brighton as an ultimate vanguard and the precursor to a golden, utopic age.
Things are not looking very golden, from Covid to war in Europe. Still, years before these crises, while this epicenter of culture danced ent mass in Europe’s most prominent gay pride event, the spectator hysterically laughed at the naked bike riders as the bars and clubs buzzed with excitement, and the hipster galleries celebrated the Postmodern trend with poorly crafted and readymade art like a fool in the street with no one listening and a stranger amongst my academic peers I saw a Black Sun on our horizon, rising over this Progressive seaside city of love and Rainbows Hiding in plain sight, it was visible in the tent-filled streets and reflected in the lost faces of an ever-increasing homeless community.
Brighton is a wild and fascinating city, but with 1 in 78 of its citizens living on the street, it is also a tragic and conflicted space, An absurd black comedy of an intersection where picturesque seaside banality and radical cultural change are linked with an economic crisis. (Paul Hynes-Allen)
