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.
