Everyone is Watching

Megan Bradbury

This is a tribute to the city of New York as creative inspiration, via a series of vignettes featuring four of the cultural icons who helped to immortalise aspects of the city’s life in their work.
The documentary style of narration, written in the present tense, creates a literary photomontage which does not shy away from shocking imagery, including graphic details of gay masochistic sex acts which may not be to everyone’s taste.

Extract

Everyone is watching Robert Mapplethorpe. They say this is how it should be for a photographer. As someone who has spent his whole life looking, in the end it is him who must be watched. They say, Robert would want this, Robert would want that, But Robert can no longer speak.
He is dreaming of the Brooklyn docks. There is no grinding of ropes or hollers of foremen. No swing or snap of cargo and cranes. New York Bay is an inky swell of moonlight ...
The buildings are empty glass structures ... one day someone will look at the city from the other side of the glass and take a picture.
Welcome to the sixties.

Parallels