At Gossips Club, Soho 1979.

Saturday, 5 November 2011

I discovered today that there is one slightly peculiar similarity between me and one of my photographic heroes -

Garry Winogrand.

We both had deadbolts on the inside of our darkrooms, both for a rather unusual reason.

I would have thought that the only normal reason anyone could have for wanting to lock themselves into their own darkroom would have been to stop someone accidentally opening the door and letting the light in.  Either that or to preserve one's privacy whilst one is working.

In the case of me and Garry this wasn't the case.  It was to prevent the ingress, or in my case the egress, of one particular person.

According to a fascinating blog entry from Norman Bringsjord (link below), a one time student of Garry Winogrand, Garry had a large deadbolt fitted on the inside of his darkroom to prevent his belongings going astray whilst he went through a divorce.  Since he, or someone, would have had to be inside the darkroom at the time, a fact that would be obvious from the outside, one might normally have expected that to be enough.

Maybe Garry Winogrand's ex was a particularly formidable woman?

In my case, having a deadbolt on the inside door of my darkroom was to prevent someone getting out, not in.  That someone was me.

It was the late ‘70s, when I'd just started  to take photography really seriously.  Due to finances though, my whole set-up was still amateur in the extreme.  I only owned one camera body and one lens, and my flash unit was a cheap Sunpak, which I mounted on my camera upside down, with a contraption made from a bent coat hanger and a lot of sellotape.

I set up a small darkroom in the house that my family rented with a couple of our friends.  The only spare space I could utilise was the cupboard under the stairs (which we used as a larder).  If I moved all the food out, I found that there was just enough room for me to stand between the inside of the door and the larder’s bottom shelf.  But only just.  I found that (and this is no exaggeration) if I breathed out too heavily or leant back only slightly, the door would ping open and I’d fog everything.  I solved this problem by fitting a deadbolt on the inside of the door and locking myself in.

It wasn’t a particularly pretty arrangement but it worked and I kept that set up for several years.  My first three one man shows were all printed in the darkroom/larder including 'The Kiss' at the Photographers Gallery in 1982.  The above shot was in that show and also used on the poster.

http://www.bringsjord.com/about/index.php

Nick Cave, London 1989.

Wednesday, 2 November 2011 Commissioned by the German magazine Spex, this photograph was done in Bridges Place, which is an alleyway close to Trafalgar Square.  It’s a smelly, somewhat medieval passage which, even on sunny days, is quite dark and dramatic and it narrows down to about two feet at one end.  My photograph of Douglas Adams was taken in exactly the same place.

It's one of the places in Central London which, just a few feet away from the hustle and bustle of everyday city life, can photographically be made to look quite otherworldly.

Because, in those days at any rate, lots of hotels, record companies, film companies, PR agencies and management offices were concentrated into a few square miles of Central London, I had a few fail safe spots where I knew I could always go and make an different looking photograph.  Bridges Place was often preferable to a chintzy hotel room or an anonymous, windswept roof.  And it certainly suited my downbeat style better.

I don't work that way now and I don't necessarily recommend it but it was the way I worked then.

Over the space of about 12 or 13 years, I’d photographed Nick Cave at least half a dozen times and every time I met him he acted as if we’d never met before. You’ll photograph some musicians for five minutes and twenty years later, you’ll run into them again and they’ll instantly remember your name.  It’s not that way with Nick Cave.  I never saw any glimmer of recognition in his eyes each time we met.  None whatsoever.

It’s okay though, it doesn’t bruise my ego.

Well… maybe just a bit.

But perhaps it’s a good thing. The first time I ever photographed Shane McGowan, he seemed slightly disagreeable (though one learnt that it was never easy to tell with him). Whilst I was out of the room, he told my assistant that he didn’t like me at all because I was some “c**t”  he’d fallen out with when I photographed the Pogues.

I’d never, in fact, ever photographed the Pogues.