Like many a Londoner, I always enjoy a day out in Brighton. Yesterday’s was for a family lunch at Terre à Terre, a walk around the Laines and finally a visit to the pier without which no day trip is complete. The fact that I decided to forego the ride on the rollercoaster and take some pictures instead had nothing to do with the cost, but at £5 for a 90 second ride I reckon it was more expensive per minute than flying first class to New York….and a lot less comfortable.
There is an idea prevalent amongst some people who don’t work in a creative industry, that those who do are somehow gifted or born with an innate talent for whatever they do. With the exceptions of the prodigies and geniuses, who are few and far between, any degree of success is much more likely to be the consequence of incremental improvement and considerable amounts of practice. By way of an example, the photo above is the first photograph I ever took, on my eighth birthday with my first camera. It is almost entirely without merit, being poorly composed, and soft due to camera shake and the limitations of a very cheap fixed focus plastic lens. The rest of the roll is little better, but the next one a few months later has fewer duds and subsequent rolls fewer still. Four years later I inherited a 35mm camera that had been my grandfather’s and the photographs got more interesting and by the time I got back from travelling around the USA in 1982, I had a few decent photos to show people. When I started to work as a photographer, three years later, my early editorial work was a blatant attempt to copy the style of Malcolm Fielding and Phil Sayer whose work for Management Today had been a big influence on me and gradually through my repeated failure to imitate theirs, my own style began to emerge. That style has continued to evolve over the years shaped by changes in both fashion and technology and it’s beginning to look as if work in a post pandemic world might well entail yet another shift in approach. If that should happen to involve a lo-fi monochrome 1970’s amateur vibe, and I can find a Kodak 126 Instamatic on eBay, the future looks bright….
Before the advent of digital photography I spent many hours of my life waiting for polaroids to process whilst setting up shoots. Often the subject was me, replaced later when everything was set, by someone more significant. I used to have some of these pinned up in my office and recently found several of them, along with some other bits and pieces, in a box file in my storage unit so I recreated the old pinboard along with, where possible, the results of the shoot that followed.
More or less from the top L-R: AAA pass for the Chilis Stadium Arcadium Tour; musician Steve Earle who actually fell asleep during the shoot (opiates may have been involved); Jools Holland at home in South London with a Bentley; set up for F1 neurosurgeon Prof. Sid Watkins; outside the Ferrari factory in Italy; set up for Trevor Brooking at Upton Park; set up for Lord Kirkham at DFS; at the Maranello test track with the lovely Magnetti Marelli logo; a Penske truck on the docks in Antwerp - yes, we just drove straight in and parked it there; a sports car whose fish-like front end sparked the angling theme; with Harvey Postlethwaite’s Ferrari Lusso; in Namibia for Land Rover with a (tame) cheetah; Joanna Lumley at home; waiting for Keke Rosberg at a track somewhere in Germany - note unusual use of rental car parcel shelf as a flag; on Miami Beach with Mark Blundell; set up for Harry Hill; an 1912 NAG car that I was allowed to drive back from the shoot on the Yorkshire moors; set up in a D Type - can’t remember why; set up in Florida for Dario Franchitti; shooting a book on sailing in Cyprus; set up for Lord March at Goodwood House; Chris Waddle at Hillsborough; Tony Slattery and Helen Lederer for the Telegraph Magazine.
A lovely obituary by Sid Lowe in the Guardian this morning for Michael Robinson who has died aged 61:
Having virtually no interest at all in sport, it was slightly ironic that I ended up during the nineties shooting quite regularly for 442, the football magazine published by Haymarket. As a result of the success of that magazine, for a short period of time they also produced a matchday programme for Liverpool FC in the form of a high quality perfect bound magazine but for reasons unknown to me it only lasted a few issues. This was the first shoot I did for them and Michael and I met in the bar of the Hilton in Islington. I used the long window with its vertical glass baffles as a background and that gave the image a bluish tinge which worked well with his suit and tie but I felt it needed a contrasting accent somewhere and asked him if he’d pose with his beer, fully expecting him to refuse but he was completely relaxed about it. When the shoot was done I joined him for another as he told me the lovely story of how, despite initially speaking hardly any of the language, this most English of footballers became a beloved commentator in his adopted home of Spain.
As you might imagine, I have not done much work in the last month so I was pleased to see this article by Andrew Frankel in the current issue of Motorsport in which he is rather flattering about me and suggests that he and I might just have played a small part in British history. I photographed Stirling for the first in time, just before his 70th birthday in the autumn of 1999 at his house in Mayfair and although he was initially a bit wary and slightly irascible he soon relaxed as he changed into his Mille Miglia racing overalls for the shoot, telling me about the house with its high tech carbon fibre lift (made for him, I believe, by McLaren) and all the time addressing me as ‘dear boy’, a habit I later learned that avoided him having to remember people’s names, or so I was told. We met a couple of times more for portrait shoots for different magazines over the next few years, I doubt he looked forward to it much but I always did. The term ‘legend’ is carelessly used these days but he was undoubtedly one of the few people who I’ve worked with who had really earned that title, particularly as his racing career had come to an end with the accident at Goodwood in 1962, before I was even born, but for the next sixty years he remained a constant presence in the motor racing world. I can’t imagine that my pictures really played any part in his subsequent knighthood, but you never know….
You can read the article here: https://www.motorsportmagazine.com/articles/single-seaters/f1/is-this-the-magazine-cover-that-secured-stirling-moss-a-knighthood
I was at the Palladium Theatre on Tuesday night to watch Mick Fleetwood’s tribute concert for Peter Green, where he was joined on stage by a plethora of rock stars from both sides of the Atlantic. After a few of the early tunes, as I was fortunate enough to have an Access All Areas pass, I made my way to a row of empty seats four rows from the stage and who should I meet there but the legendary rock photographer and former colleague Ross Halfin who was shooting the whole show for Mick. We had a brief chance to catch up during the breaks between songs and find out what each other had been doing for the last fourteen years and he asked me when I had stopped shooting live gigs, which was after this lot in 2006. Watching him shooting Pete Townsend windmilling away twenty feet in front of us I was almost nostalgic for the days when I travelled around the world shooting musicians, particularly as today’s cameras would cope so much better with the light conditions, but although it was great while it lasted, I really don’t think I’d be enjoying it as much if I was still out there in my ‘stage blacks’ with three Nikons round my neck….
Going to visit Bentley at their Pyms Lane works in Crewe is a bit like going home for me because I was actually born just a couple of miles away as, at the time, my father was working as an engineer in the very same factory. It has of course changed hugely since then and as part of the process of continuous improvement they are endeavouring to raise their already legendarily high standards even further by encouraging all employees to take responsibility for every aspect of their parts of the manufacturing process. To this end they are hanging fifty giant banners throughout the production areas featuring images that I shot of colleagues at work along with inspirational reminders about standards, work habits and behaviours. Sadly I was only there for three days so I am only a small way towards a deposit on a Continental GT, but at least I now know which colour I’d like…..
Although this looks like a still from the superb recent HBO series “Chernobyl” it’s actually the secretary’s desk in the former office of Erich Mielke, who was the head of the Stasi in the GDR for over thirty years directly overseeing over 90,000 spies and 170,000 normal civilians who secretly watched and reported on their fellow countrymen, until the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. The former Stasi HQ is now an excellent museum.
Apart from becoming a successful musician I had few specific ambitions when I left school but I was fairly certain that I never wanted a job which entailed putting on a suit, travelling at the same time every day to the same place and doing pretty much the same thing, and for the last 35 years I have have managed to avoid doing just that, so it came as a bit of surprise recently to find myself shooting for 24 consecutive days for a corporate client in their city offices. I cycled in every morning, swiped my employee pass for access to the underground car park and then took the lift to the tenth floor, said hello to the receptionists, while my assistant got me the first of several flat whites from the state of the art coffee machine and I settled in to my “studio”, the surprise being, that in a way I really quite enjoyed the routine. The resulting 30,000 photographs, (backed up on three hard drives for safety) have been distilled down to about 700 and are being retouched for the website launch later this year so the bulk of the job is done and I’m back to a normal freelance existence but at least, as this test shot shows, I’ve still managed to avoid the suit…..
I have never felt entirely at ease in a studio. Having spent most of my career trying make the best of whatever I find wherever I happen to be, walking into an empty studio is a bit like driving into an empty car park and wondering where to park. Dispatched by Livewire magazine the other day to photograph Dan Dark, the immaculately dressed and charming head of Warner Bros. studios in Leavesden, I was briefly excited by the possibilities as he gave me a tour of the studios and backlots, containing entire city streets from both past and future but of course all of it was confidential, even some abandoned action vehicles from past productions were off limits, so we ended up in C stage, 32000 square feet of…..empty studio.
What better antidote to a fairly relentless schedule of corporate portraiture than a trip to the country to spend a day with someone who really knows what they’re talking about. Dave Goulson is Professor of Biology at the University of Sussex, one of Britain’s foremost experts on bees and has just published a book on making your garden bee friendly. He gave me a tour of his wonderful garden, a pleasing mixture of managed and wild areas with a large fruit cage and even larger state of the art greenhouse, pointing out the various different bee species visiting the flowers that he had planted to attract them and the “bee hotels” he had made to give them somewhere to live. I then had to work out, as someone who is not known as a wildlife photographer, how to photograph the bees, which was an interesting challenge - they move rather more quickly than I was expecting….
The full story is in this month’s BBC Wildlife magazine, out today.
Edinburgh’s Waverley Station in the afternoon sun
Health and Safety culture has come a long way. In the mid nineteenth century my Welsh ancestors ran an ironworks in Llanelli and the story of the Glanmor Foundry contains a litany of terrible accidental deaths of workers in the factory. When I started work as a fitter’s apprentice in what is now the Arcelor Mittal steelworks at Dunkerque in 1981, things were a lot better but our PPE (personal protective equipment) still consisted of nothing more than a blue overall and a hard hat, drinking alcohol during all the breaks in the working day, including before work, was completely normal and we washed our hands at the end of shift in a barrel of paraffin. By contrast Fujifilm’s contract chemistry plant in Grangemouth is a paragon of cleanliness and safety but just as in every other factory I’ve visited, I still couldn’t find a way of taking a photograph without taking off my safety glasses and putting them on top of my head where they really aren’t much use at all.
Shalom Nyandiko as Adidja in ‘The Widow’ starring Kate Beckinsale, Charles Dance and Alex Kingston. I made several trips to South Africa, as well as Rotterdam and Wales during the course of filming as one of the unit stills photographers which was incredibly hard work but a great experience. ‘The Widow’ starts tonight on ITV….
A recent shoot in Belper meant an overnight stay and time for a walk along the River Derwent where I found these boats chained up for the night
A Christmas Eve walk on Marazion beach with the wet sand at low tide providing an almost perfect mirror surface. As it was around midday, the family are making for the King’s Arms opposite which, very conveniently, is Philps Bakery the home of a truly world class pastie.
Dominik Scherrer is one of Britain’s most successful and prolific composers of music for film and television and he invited me to the studio to watch some strings being recorded to accompany the forthcoming ITV series “The Widow” which he has scored. Being a barely literate musician myself, I’ve always been fascinated by session players who can read a piece of music they have never seen before, and then play it together, perfectly, the first time through. All that was then required was for the composer in the control room to occasionally suggest a slight variation via gnomic instructions such as “make it a bit more flautando” or “a touch more ‘vib’ but not baroque”. Photographically it was a case of trying to be unobtrusive, silent and alert and making the best of some terrible lighting - nothing new there…..
Miami is not an early morning city so arriving at 5am I knew there was little point in heading into town in search of breakfast and I went straight out to Ocean Drive for a refreshing barefoot stroll along South Beach while the restaurants slowly came to life. Later, fortified by eggs, bacon, pancakes and endless coffee at the 11th St Diner, I walked around Little Havana (wishing I smoked cigars) and then over to the newly hip Wynwood district, accidentally discovering an amazing store on NW 26th Street that sold both vintage cars and guitars where a delightful chap called Patrick tried, and failed, to sell me an original 1952 Fender Telecaster........for $56,000.
http://www.waltgracevintage.com
According to my rainforest guide and contrary to popular belief, the leaf of the giant water lily cannot hold the weight of an adult human, so I was not tempted to try and cross this flooded rainforest lagoon in the Amazon using the leaves as stepping stones. It didn't look very deep but I was already acutely aware that there were a large number of creatures lurking about both on land and underwater who would be best left undisturbed, especially as I had just seen a particularly beautiful bright green vine snake nearby which he had assured me was safe.......more or less.
I was invited back to the Channel Island of Alderney recently to shoot some more images for the tourist board and using only local volunteers instead of professional models, we managed to create an excellent suite of images for the next year's tourism marketing. Unlike my previous visit three years ago, we were blessed with some great weather and a couple of unusually wind free days which made the sea look almost tropical but also meant that for the shots with the surfer, in this case the PE teacher from the island school, I had to be a bit creative in my choice of viewpoint to hide the fact that sea looked like a millpond, without a wave in sight....