The lure of a heated picnic barn is too great even for the turkeys.
When is Summer Here?
It's cold and the kids are bored. The remenants of the summer still lie on the grass in the snow and even though it's several degree below, my eldest would still rather be outside than in.
The Odd Couple
It’s February but it’s still 29 degrees. I have walked into the down town area of San Diego from my cousin’s house in Hillcrest. The sun is very bright and direct, so whoever I am going to shoot will need to be in some sort of shade away from the harsh southern Californian glare. The streets are mixture of oversaturated light and dark pools of shadow as the buildings create natural corridors of light, but there is one interesting phenomena I see though that I’ve noticed before in Brighton down in front of the burnt out pier. In certain places the sun is hitting the glass front of a tall building at just the right angle to be reflected back down to the ground, creating an area of wonderfully soft light that is quite mesmerising. There is a security guard patrolling the area right where the light is falling and he has a gun so I decide to first ask if it’s OK for me to use the space to take a picture and surprisingly he says it’s fine.
Kathy & Fern
I ‘hang out’, waiting for someone interesting to approach. I’m a little on the back foot here because I am not sure of the rules; on the one hand, I know my English accent and British charm will go a long way. On the other, the political and social landscape in America has changed beyond all recognition recently. We might well be through the looking glass at this point and so I’m not confident that my quaint Englishness is going to carry the day.
I see Kathy and Fern approaching and immediately am drawn to them both and their potential for being the ‘Odd Couple’; I figure they are friends in their older age and perhaps rely on each other for companionship. Both their faces are etched with life lines and interesting expressions and there is a sense of independence about them I find intriguing. It’s a risk to approach them because I might have completely misjudged the situation but I throw caution to the wind.
I manage to persuade them to be photographed together and we move over to the spot where the light is falling best. I spend a little time just trying to get them relaxed a little and explaining what I do and what I want them to do but I can tell there’s a frisson of nerves from them both. I notice Kathy’s ‘US Army’ badge on her baseball cap and ask if she was in the army to which she says she served for 25 years in the logistics corps’. This helps as one of my other cousins (it’s a big family) served in the US military and was in Gulf One. This helps us bond a little and they relax a fraction so I step back to compose and take the shot.
As I look through the view finder I can still see the slight tension in them both. They are standing less than hand span apart, smiling but nervous, their arms hanging by their sides. I wait for a moment and then see them instinctively reach for each other’s hand, almost without conscious effort they find an easy grip. It suddenly occurs to me that my initial perception was way off. I lower the camera.
‘May I just ask, because it will help make a good photograph, what the relationship is between you, I mean are you friends have you known each other long…?’
I’m trying to be sensitive hence I skirt around the subject a little and try to give them the option to tell me whatever they are comfortable with. There’s a pause and before they answer they look at each other and laugh a little nervously and then pause again before Kathy says that they are partners and have been together for 25 years. The release of tension makes them relax as I tell them I am honoured and touched that they have shared that information with me. They tell me that it wasn’t easy to begin with, that there would be all kinds of terrible things called out to them as they walked down the street but that thankfully in recent years they feel they had gained acceptance.
It’s moments like these that really touch me as a photographer. They make me realise the bravery of people who just want to live their lives and find the person they want to be with. The shutter release is just a means by which these insights are revealed.
Kathy
Pin Prick Pupils & Polos
The sun rises over Brighton beach around 5am during the spring and summer months. I am there for a Sunday morning but the revellers are still there for Saturday night. Just as the sun starts to rise over the South Downs the club goers start to spill out of their dark dens and crash like waves onto Brighton’s’ pebbled beach, blinking like nocturnal animals in the bright early morning light. It is a truly wonderful place to be. Perhaps powered by the endorphins of their all-night rave or perhaps by chemical induction (or more likely both) there is a strong sense of collectivism and love here. People are instinctively drawn to each other, clumping together into groups as if under the influence of gravity. It’s hard to know if the groups of people sitting on the beach are formed on the basis of long held friendships or simply the result of being caught up in the moment, of the shared experience of simply being there as the sun rises. My experience so far tells me that the answer to this question is less important than the shared experience in the moment. The collectivism may well have deep roots but in that moment those roots are superseded by the shared experience; that some member of that group might have only met for the first time that morning makes no difference.
As an observer I feel like an outsider invading someone else’s space. The fact that I am there for Sunday morning and not Saturday night and I am on my own does seem to set me to one side. I don’t know if the apparent intrusion of a man with camera compromises any photograph I make in this situation, but I am happy to find out.
Having spent many Sunday mornings on Brighton Beach, I have found that some of these groups are indeed tribal in nature. Their collectivism is literal rather than spontaneous and metaphoric; they are living an alternative lifestyle, somewhat outside of the mainstream, subverting the conventional. It would be easy to judge this choice but one of my motivations for pursuing this project is precisely to engage with people whose perspectives, experiences and opinions might be radically different to my own; this is where the learning and insight is for me as a person. I have found that the motivation to photograph interesting people requires me to adopt an open and non-judgmental approach and that even if this adoption is something I have to contrive by force of will rather than by virtue of innate nature, the experience is positive and the result is lasting and hopefully makes me a better person.
I first met members of one particular collective on the area known as The Levels in the centre of Brighton about a year prior to this photograph. They were camping in the field next to the skate park although in reality it was less of a campsite and more of a makeshift outdoor living area, as if they had taken the space and belongings of a house and turned it inside out in an exploration of negative space. Now on this occasion I meet the same group again, this time expanded in number with others having joined them in that moment, lying easily on the beach and using each other as makeshift pillows or props. Time feels like it has slowed down for them; things are hazy and they are somewhere else. Their movements are drawn out, heavy and awkwardly deliberate, as if moving through thick tar. I sit down and join them to simply enjoy the moment.
The sun is now fully over the horizon and is pouring deliciously clean light onto the beach. Tom is one of the outsides who have joined this group in the moment. He is sitting opposite me with thousand-yard stare towards the east focusing on an abstract point so far off it might well be behind the rising sun. He has the most intense look in his eyes, his pupils are like pin pricks, his philtrum is encrusted with dried mucus that the group refer to anxiously as ‘polos’. He looks in my direction and I try to talk to him; he is responsive but struggling to talk. I really want to take his picture but I don’t want to do this without permission. We manage something like consent by simple gestures and he relaxes back into his stare as I focus the camera on his glassy eyes. Looking at him, I am reminded of the image by Don McCullin of the shell-shocked marine at the Battle of Hue. In that image, there is a numbness that is the result of the pain of battle. There’s an irony in the contrast with this image; here the numbness is chemical.
It’s easy to forget that the principle reason people do these things is because it’s fun; there’s a tendency to over analyse things, to try and find some metaphysical or pathological explanation for hedonism when in reality, the simple answer is ‘who wouldn’t want to feel this way?’ But still my thoughts run to the myriad possibilities that any one of these individuals might have experienced something in their lives that has caused them to want to numb themselves in this way. I know this doesn’t apply to Tom, but at least one or two of that group I have spoken to have hinted at such things. The result of those conversation is a strong desire to simply give the person a hug; to acknowledge their humanity and their value to society.
George from Clitheroe
I grew up in what was at that time a small village close to the meeting of the three county borders of Cheshire, Derbyshire and Staffordshire. Although effectively a suburb of Manchester, Poynton had more in common with a rural and working-class way of life than it did the emerging aspirational middle classes of the mid 70s. At that time, there was still an active farming community and the historic influences of small scale coal extraction were still easy to find. People lived in the ‘coal miners’ cottages’ because they had been coal miners rather than because they were highly desirable properties full of charm and character. The associated farming pursuits of wearing flat caps, carrying a large stick and drinking mild or bitter in the local pub were still evident in everyday life and you didn’t have to walk very far before you had to take care to avoid stepping in cow dung. Urban life may have only a commuter’s drive north but Poynton’s identity was still very much rooted in the soil.
As a child I would walk from our front door, out through the modern built semi’s of the 1970s aspirational middle classes and up into the local woodlands and green fields neatly bordered by wild hedgerows. Copses made fabulous dens and whispered adventure, open fields swirled with long grass and crawled with busy insects as well as small boys. My childhood memories are a bit of mixed bag (a bag I still carry with me today), but my happiest memories are of being out in the small foot hills of the Peak District, playing wide games and having adventures. Proper and unashamedly, boy’s own stuff.
Associated with this cultural heritage, Poynton always had a great summer fete on the August Bank Holiday weekend. Every year the large field in the village next to Poynton Pool is taken over by braying farm yard animals and an array of chugging steam powered machines. The behemoths would rumble in belching black smoke and fizzing with steam, the smell of burnt coal mixed with hot water vapour mixing with fragrant dew laden grass.
The smaller steam powered generators are simply wondrous machines; they would rattle and pop and chug in a rhythmic almost alliterative sort of way, their fly wheels spinning with dizzying motion and connecting belts flapping and whirling. The noise was calming, almost hypnotic.
Chug, chug, chug chug, POP, chug, chug, chug, POP, chug, chug, BANG, chug, chug, chug….
The animals, hemmed in by five bar fences and studied by knowing farmer’s eyes would bray, whinny, moo or bleat. The farmers would stand like silent monoliths, studying the animals with critical eyes. There is a particular stance that must be adopted when undertaken such scrutiny; both elbows must be equally placed on the top bar of the fence but with one shoulder slightly dropped. One hobnailed shoed foot must be placed on the second rung up from the ground, the other should be at 45 degrees on the ground. Rough hands can be clasped in a number of ways, but a pipe must be in one of them and the obligatory flat cap should be pulled down just enough to shade the eyes and hide them from meeting the stare of anyone else. Conversation is kept to a minimum; an occasional approving grunt as a particularly fine sow or a well-set bull is paraded by is permissible, possible a few stunted words with some semblance of a sentence. But under no circumstances should any emotion be shown let alone expressed verbally.
Poynton Show is an institution; a past, present and future; the beating heart in the year of a village’s cultural heritage and I love it for all the reminisces and clichéd nostalgia of halcyon childhood days growing up in a semi-rural community that it represents.
I haven’t been in perhaps ten years but infrequent attendance is now part of its charm. It is what allows my attendance to feel so nostalgic. It means that when I bump into people that I perhaps only vaguely knew at school, perhaps didn’t even like at that time, in that single moment the serendipity of the meeting creates a shared sense of empathy. It’s like we were always friends and the literal time and distance and coolness between us over ruled by the shared space of the show.
Above all else though, the event is still an agricultural show and a competition among those who still keep and farm animals. The judging is taken very seriously and the position of judge is highly regarded as one of status and importance. To give the show more credibility and avoid the inevitable nepotism of judging within a still relatively small community, the judges are mostly recruited from other communities. Artisanal farming and food production might be big business these days but the real earthly connection with hard way of life taken through inheritance or necessity is disappearing. The recruitment of judges who have a keen eye and innate understanding of the animals they are evaluating is harder and the net needs to be cast wider.
Clitheroe is located north of Manchester, in proper Lancashire. George was a judge, recruited from Clitheroe to the show because of his knowledge and expertise on farmyard animals. Even among the characters and stalwarts of Poynton Show he had clear and commanding presence. Who could not fail to notice the fabulous combination of beige moleskin jacket and matching Stetson and polka dot tie. You can’t see his cowboy boots in this frame unfortunately, but it’s not a massive leap of imagination to picture them. He’s an obvious character to photograph and I’m sure that with such a strong personal expression in style and dress, he’d be completely up for having his picture taken.
I am here with my two boys and my parents for some reminiscences and entertainment. I’m not really here to shoot portraits and Poynton Show is about as far removed from the metropolitan locations I usually work around, where unusual creative and artistic endeavours are not just tolerated but actively encouraged. I may be home home, but I suddenly feel like a stranger and rather than approach George, I spend a few moments looking gormlessly at the animals while fielding my own two critters, trying to prevent them from grabbing handfuls of prize billy goat fur and getting head butted in the process. Eventually I decide I cannot let him pass and put my boys in my mum’s care and take a moment to say hello.
‘Alreet, ‘ow do?’, George talks in classic ‘Lanky Twang’ and memories of Lancashire Hotpot and Eccles Cake supers at my dad’s cousin’s house under the looming presence of Saddleworth Moor come flooding back. I compliment him on his sartorial elegance and ask if he wouldn’t mind being photographed. As I suspected, he’s very willing and immediately pulls himself fractionally higher. The light is quite strong however so I walk him over to an area of shade cast by the row of large equestrian lorries big enough for a rodeo. I’d like to compose to include one of these trucks but it doesn’t quite work; I need his character to fill the frame so I step a little closer and the sun is momentarily obscured by cloud softening the light just as I take the picture.
George from Clitheroe goes back to judging the animals, I go back to herding my own flock and the show goes on.
"Are you ready for me darling?"
“Hello darling are you ready for me?”
It’s an interesting non-sequitur . It is only 10am but this is London’s Soho where anything can happen and I’ve chosen this spot to shoot street portraits precisely because I know I’m more likely to find the most richly colourful characters here than I am most other places. I am experimenting with using a strobe to light my subjects and this particular spot is perfect for that exercise. My light is set up and ready to go and I am just taking a meter reading as all six feet something of this fabulous looking creature glides into the alley way where I’m setting up.
Chapone Place is an otherwise dingy dead end alley next to the Soho Theatre off Dean Street. It is rather squalid and on a Saturday morning it can smell just a little too strongly of the night before if you get too close to the walls. But it’s covered and so out of the glare of the sun and it’s off one of the busier side streets in Soho so there is always a steady stream of people walking past. The location allows me to set up, keep out of the way and then accost unsuspecting characters as they walk by and persuade them into my project.
“As ready as I will ever be”, I reply, trying to be cool. I stall for time and ask her name half expecting her to say that it’s Lola, L, O, L, A Lola.
“Latoyah” she replies. I’m vaguely disappointed but as I said, it’s still only 10am and before I’ve even spoken to anyone I’ve had about the most fabulous looking and most photographically interesting subject actually proposition me.
Latoyah’s gender identity is relatively easy to deduce; she identifies as female but was assigned male at birth. Her structure is simply fabulous; long strong arms, fine cheek bones, slim hips, penetrating eyes; she is every inch Grace Jones and is captivating to look at. She is also incredibly easy to talk to. There is an easy comfort in her engagement that lacks any kind of antagonism and she has an affable style that is strongly suggestive of someone entirely at ease with themselves. It’s not that I’m suggesting this is anything other than I would anticipate, but my understanding of the issues associated with gender dysphoria is that the complexity and emotional burden of having to reconcile your assigned with your innate gender isn’t something that most people going through that experience would describe as easy.
My insight here is of course limited although I do have a little more than perhaps the average person simply by virtue that my best friend, whom I have known since we were 14, came out as transgender three years ago. She made the incredibly brave decision to pursue her transition as fully as possible, first choosing to outwardly express her female gender and then, very bravely, using surgery to correct the misalignment. I’ve tried to support her as best I can throughout that process; I am her best friend and she mine but I always have a sense that this must be a terribly lonely journey given how little most people can ever help to understand the complexities of the experience let alone have any real empathy for it. Few people have any frame of reference by which to understand the experience.
But Latoyah’s perspective is remarkable uncomplicated; we talk animatedly about my friend, about her own style and about her very big and very messy night out that she is only just returning from.
Having explained what it is I do, I ask if she was serious when she asked if I was ready for her and she hesitates for just a moment, expressing some concern that she won’t be looking quite as fabulous as she would like given that she has been up all night. I reassure her that this is complete nonsense (it really is) and she settles in to a pose for me. I want her to be bold and proud but just a little wistful and uncertain. It takes a little while to get beyond the burlesque (though the burlesque shots are also really quite fun) but we get there eventually.
We spend probably 15 minutes trying to get it right; I have a sense that it’s important to do that, to do her justice and make her look fabulous. Afterwards we hug and say goodbye and I offer to send her a copy giving her my contact details but oddly she never gets in touch. This is not unusual; often I think the anonymity of the moment is what allows the person to be engaged in this very direct way and maintaining that connection after the fact and in particular obtaining a copy of the results, would collapse that wave of anonymity into something more real and inherently more threatening.
Mostly this lack of follow up contact doesn’t bother me and if I think it might (because I think that the results are something I really want the person to have) I ask for their email address rather than rely on them having mine. I don’t know why I didn’t do this in Latoyah’s case; it’s something I regret.
Sant Cugat
By good fortune and coincidence I’ve been travelling a lot to Spain this year, either Madrid or Barcelona and, from time to time, Zaragoza, which lies almost prophetically half way between these two great cities that suddenly find themselves on opposite sides of a political divide.
My last trip was to Madrid and then on to Zaragoza. This time it’s Barcelona.
Barcelona is such a beautiful city. I was here earlier in the year just at the beginning of spring and had spent a few hours of an afternoon wandering around the narrow streets and the food market off La Ramblas. The sun had started to dip low in the sky, shining through the apertures of the market’s roof casting brilliant patches light that spilled next to inky pools of intense shadow. It was fun to have the chance to indulge in a little of the street photography that is guaranteed to get loads of likes on Instagram; throwing silhouettes of people against brightly lit colourful walls or catching figures half in the light and half in perfect shadow. I don’t know who first came up with this highly stylised and much copied aesthetic, but being an extreme take on chiaroscuro lighting I guess the nod should go to Caravaggio.
Now in November as I drive from the airport to my hotel I notice that the light is being wonderfully rendered by a thin layer of gossamer cloud. It’s falling in abundance everywhere but is wonderfully diffuse and gentle so any splash of colour is super saturated. I’m excited and start imagining a new aesthetic of brightly lit and evenly toned cityscapes with vignettes of colour and that fine white balance that is so much easier to achieve when the lighting is this good. It’s still only 10am local time and I start to plan my day around all the work I need to do so that I can create a small window for when I might get the chance to shoot. My plan is built around maximising the daylight hours when a camera is most profitably used and booting the work work until after sun down. I do have got a lot to get done and I can’t afford to play fast and loose with the job I am here for but I don’t have to be up super early in the morning and the previously mooted client dinner hasn’t been confirmed so the evening is my own and can be used to work.
And then the client emails me to say that the dinner is on after all. Bugger.
Apart from anything else the emails have piled up between leaving home and arriving at the hotel and I also now have the added complication of a taxi strike in the city, making my transfer from the hotel to the following day’s meeting in Sant Cugat some 24km away a significantly more challening undertaking. I work solidly from 10.30am until it’s time to go to dinner at nine o’clock in the afternoon (but apparently we only have the table until 10.30pm when another party will need it to sit down to their own evening meal. Only in Spain!), and never even look at my camera.
My meeting the following day however is all done by 1.30pm including a light lunch and my flight is not until 6.30pm, plus I now also have a hire car (in lieu of a taxi) so suddenly the possibilities open up. Sant Cugat is a small town, quite independent of Barcelona and lying to the north west of that city. It is compact, neatly presented and populated mostly by families where one or both parents commute into Barcelona, leaving the town with a weekday mix of the children and grandparents. I decide to leave the car where it is and with assurances for how pretty the town is and where to find the prettiest parts, I head out on foot.
The light is not as flattering as it was on the previous day; it’s clear and very bright and the sun is still relatively high in the sky so shooting portraits is going to be tricky. I play a little with the fall of light and the strong contrasting shapes this makes with the shadows but I did that in Barcelona and it feels contrived and ultimately unfulfilling. I’m also finding that the majority of the people around are children of school age and while they are more likely to speak English and make an approach easier to broker, I’m still steering clear of the complications that such approaches create.
In the centre of the town there’s a 14th century monastery that seems to be both the literal and spiritual centre of the town. The walls are bright limestone tinted with yellow and around the perimeter are young saplings that still have some of their leaves offering the possibility of dappled shade. One side seems to act as a thorough fare from one side of the town to the next and there’s a gentle flow of people going about their daily business and passing through the grounds. A young couple wander in and drift a little around the grounds taking careless steps from the shade of one tree to the next. He is dark and brooding with a baseball cap and hoody, slightly swarthy and with intense eyes. She is lithe and angular, her jeans falling down over her hips and her top slightly cropped above her waist revealing the tops of her briefs. It’s something I try not to notice but it is both alluring and disconcerting; it is a detail of youthful hubris and growing sexual confidence and it is impossible not to notice it. The couple settle in the shade of one of the saplings and proceed to remove their roll tobacco and filter papers.
The wall behind where they have chosen to sit has the dappled shade of the sapling they are sitting under as well as the dark shadow of a vertical buttress. A crack also runs up the wall in dog leg fashion creating a natural framing element. The wall also has a lower horizontal buttress running around the base of the monastery and meeting the main wall at a 45 degree angle. It’s only waist height and I being to wonder whether this wall with crack, buttress and dappled shade would make a good setting for a portrait despite the fact that it would require the subject to be a little adventurous and climb onto the base of the supporting wall. I look around but apart from the couple, now unambiguously ‘skinning up’, there’s suddenly no one around. I ponder for a moment, weighing up the age gap between us, the fact that she is the more photographically interesting of the two and the more likely candidate (and the whole middle age man approaching a young woman has become somewhat political lately), and the fact that they are in fact rolling a joint. I decide to be brave. I have no more than three words in Spanish to my credit so any approach has to be in English but, being young, of course they do speak English.
I approach them acknowledging that I can see what they are doing but reassuring them that it’s entirely none of my business and not the reason I have approached them. I ask if they would let me explain what I am doing and I introduce myself but the young man has one ear plugged into his music and the rest of his attention focused on his tobacco. The young woman is more receptive and introduces herself as Beth. I explain that apart from my day job, I’m a keen photographer and that I like to engage people and persuade them to let me take their picture. I show her some examples of my work on my phone and Beth is both immediately and genuinely enthusiastic, explaining that she is also a photographer. She is fascinated by and complementary of the examples I show her and this is of course terribly flattering; I experience the flutter and nervousness again. Beth shows me some of her work; the first examples she shows me are strong fashion shots with great perspectives and lots of natural light. I comment on this and ask if she is indeed a fashion photographer but her answer throws me.
“Well I’m only 18 so I still don’t know quite what I want to do.”
The instinctive trepidation I had initially felt based on propriety and appropriateness are confirmed by this information but my sensibilities are sent into a slight tail spin when she then shows me more of her work. The examples are bold and daring and while there is nothing inappropriate about them, it’s clear that she is nude in many of the images and it is impossible not to acknowledge her physical beauty and sexual appeal alongside my admiration for her self-confidence. It’s an exploration that I couldn’t bear to do of myself, lumpen as I am in my sprawling middle age. My emotional response to her showing me this work is a complex mixture of excitement, respect, admiration and self-admonishment as I reconcile my feeling of excitement with the fact that I am old enough to be her father. I have always been very wary about photographing any woman that on first sight I might find physically attractive (and especially if they’re considerably younger than I am) because I want to avoid objectifying my subjects (and slipping into middle aged lechery). But Beth is genuinely excited to engage and wants to be photographed. I reason that I should just set the picture up and see how it works; if nothing else it will be a learning outcome and I can always say ten Hail Marys later if I feel I’ve violated my own moral code of conduct.
I give Beth some direction, asking if she can indeed clamber onto the low buttressed wall and crouch half in and half out of the shade so that the crack in the wall runs above and round her head rather than straight out of it. She is compliant and willing and I have that sense that I better know what I’m doing or else I will be discovered as a fraud. After we make the shot, I share the result with her on the back of the screen and she expresses how much she likes it. We part and I promise to share a copy with her.
Perhaps the oddest part of this whole experience though is that her boyfriend has remained uninterested, almost implacable, throughout the entire process. Maybe there is some male pride thing going on, maybe there is distrust or resentment and perhaps the more interesting thing to have done would have been to also try and engage him. It’s perhaps more interesting that I didn’t.