Skinheads.

Friday, 23 April 2010 Almost all of my photographs of skinheads were taken between the summer of 1979 and the summer of 1984, and the vast majority in the earlier of those years.  They were taken either in London or in some of the seaside towns easily accessible from London.  Some first appeared in a show called 'Skinheads' at the Chenil Studio Gallery in Chelsea, in October 1980.

Back then, I wasn't a professional photographer, (in truth, not even a particularly keen amateur) and to begin with, I hadn't intended to start photographing skinheads at all. Rather, they found me.

In early '79 I was already engaged in what eventually turned out to be a lengthy photographic study of the New Romantics (though back then they were not known as such).

I'd been documenting this nascent scene in the Soho nightclub 'Billy's' and, one evening, a group of about half-a-dozen skinheads turned up.  They saw me taking photographs and one of them asked me if I'd like to take some photos of them too.  They seemed pretty friendly and not at all camera shy.  I took a few snaps, we got talking and Wally suggested I go with the whole gang on one of their Bank Holiday jaunts to the seaside.

That was what led, eventually, to five years of photographing skinheads.  In those five years I got to know some of the skinheads quite well and liked many of them.  Almost all were polite and courteous to me.  I saw virtually no violence, just a handful of scuffles.  If I had seen any fighting, I certainly wouldn't have photographed it for the simple reason that I wouldn't have wanted the presence of my camera to affect the situation.

Other than that, there was no self-censorship.  I wanted to remain objective (although I later came to believe that to be impossible).  Susan Sontag famously wrote that "the photographer is not simply the person who records the past, but the one who invents it."  I certainly hope this isn't the case with my photos.  They were all chosen to be displayed on the basis of two criteria: if I thought it was a good photograph; or if I thought it helped to tell the story.

Back in the early '80s, I turned down a couple of opportunities to turn the photographs into a book. I didn't want either to glorify the skinhead lifestyle or become an apologist for them.  And I still don't.  My political and social views were not the same as most of the skinheads of that time but I hope the photographs can now speak for themselves.

Update 14/7/14 - my book has now been published by Onibus -

http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/178305171X/ref=wl_it_dp_o_pd_nS_img?_encoding=UTF8&colid=1AF4WPYXJPJ57&coliid=I8OV5L4XTO2WG

livepage.apple.com

Jarvis Cocker, London 1994.

Thursday, 22 April 2010 I’m not the sort of photographer that will turn up to a photo shoot and think that I’m automatically going to be able to stare deep into a subject’s psyche and, on the basis of a one-hour meeting (and sometimes a lot less), be able to say something deeply profound about them. Some photographers can do it.  Yousuf Karsh or Arnold Newman, certainly. But IMHO an awful lot of photographers just think they can do it. I don’t. I think that approach can often just be asinine. Because, besides anything else, some people (especially actors and politicians) are no doubt very adept at disguising certain realities about themselves.

So, my modus operandi has become, over the years, the opposite if anything. I try to free my mind of anything I may know about the subject and allow something to just fall into my lap out of the ether. The criticism of this approach, of course, is that it’s superficial. As a young photographer, I must admit I thought this myself and would always strive for a great meaning. But experience eventually came to show me that sometimes profundity can come more easily in the casual, unthought-through stuff. And, in all honesty, when you’re not even thinking about anything. That’s the great beauty of the form.

I didn’t even see this shot until the film was developed. I don’t remember him standing there rolling his eyes back into his head. But, for some reason, I liked this shot more than all the others that I shot when I was really trying.

I suppose I could describe the method (if you can really call it a method) as being open to the serendipitous.

Incidentally, this photograph was taken in Carburton Street in the exact spot that Boy’s George’s infamous squat used to be. They’d pulled the building down by this point though.

Nick Cave, Southwark 1984.

Thursday, 22 April 2010 I suppose Nick Cave is close to being the perfect subject for any photographer. For a start he’s particularly photogenic. And he seems to like photography (his wife Susie Bick was once a top model). Also, although he’d undoubtedly deny it, he actually seems to like to have his photograph taken. So he’ll usually go the extra mile to help you get an interesting image. Not that that’s particularly hard with Nick, since he always engages with the camera so well. Not to say gurns, occasionally. This photograph was from the second session I ever did with him.

Sinead O’Connor, Battersea, London 1988.

Wednesday, 21 April 2010 I decided to do this blog after the encouragement and support of my website guru Rupert Field.  We reckon that it'd be as good a place as any for me to write about and explain how some of my photographs came about.

I’d also like to thank my son for coming up with the title for my blog, I just hope he’s not taking the mick.

Anyway, I'm starting with one of my favourites - of Sinead O'Connor, photographed in Battersea in 1988.

A couple of weeks before this shot was taken, I’d got a commission from the NME to photograph Sinead in Liverpool. The writer and I went up there and we were booked into the same hotel as Sinead and her manager. In the evening we all met and went out for a drink in order to get to know one another. Later, long after me and the writer were tucked up in bed, Sinead had gone out again, got involved in an altercation with a nightclub bouncer and been given a black eye.

Anyway, in the morning we awoke to find a still very upset Sinead and, understandably, she was unwilling to do any photos. In those days, I thought it was paramount for me never to go home without getting “the shot”, whatever the reason, so I offered to photograph her from one side, so that the black eye would be in shadow. But, in all honesty, that would have not helped either of us much and she wouldn’t do it anyway. It was agreed that once her face had recovered the photo shoot would be rescheduled.

I heard nothing for a few weeks and then it was just my luck to be given a date when I was due to be in LA on another job. I was desperate not to lose out, so I figured that, if I flew back from LA and got a cab from the airport straight to the location in Battersea (where Sinead was making a pop video) I could still do it. This shot was taken soon after I arrived. But initially I wasn’t satisfied. Sinead then told me that if I waited around for a while, we could do some more photos later on. I was tired but I waited around for her all day until the evening. At which point she just upped and left without saying a word.

So, why am I doing it myself?

Monday, 19 April 2010 Okay, first off I want to explain why I decided to withdraw all my images from the various photo libraries they were with and why I then decided to market my work myself.

There were two reasons.  

First I figured that, in the digital age, I might be able to do a better job myself anyway.  The majority of my rock star/celebrity images were with London Features International and, in truth, I'd long thought that they weren't really the right picture agency for me.  But I felt somewhat obligated to the owner, John Halsall, who I really liked.  When he put LFI into receivership in 2008, that gave me a bit of a kick in the pants and an excuse to sever my links with them.  Although LFI quickly found a perfectly decent buyer, my mind was made up.  When I went into LFI's offices to retrieve my work, and I saw just how awful some of the dupes they'd been using were, I wished I'd made the move a lot sooner.

The second reason I decided to market my work myself was that I thought that it would be a very good idea if I had more control over the images that were out there.  That I didn't have previously was entirely my own fault.  But until a few years ago, I was flying around the world so much and working so hard that I just didn't have the time.  For instance, when I worked at the Glastonbury Festival (throughout most of the '90s), I'd drive home after the last band had finished on the Saturday night, process and print the black and whites during the early hours, deliver them to the NME offices in the morning and then drive straight back to the Festival.  It was great fun but not always conducive to great work.  Oftentimes I'd shoot so much that I'd find myself dumping armfuls of of prints and transparencies on people's desks and then run off to get to the next job.  Inevitably, sometimes the best images didn't always get used.  I suppose the people on whose desks I dumped my images were busy people too.  So, now that I have more time to think, I'm gradually going through everything, re-apraising and re-editing and picking things out that often I just didn't see at the time.  I also want to refocus on what I always thought was my main USP - dramatic portraiture.

So, that was the genesis of me putting my archive online.