2014

Its almost too cliché to bear to say that I am always re-learning my relationship to photography. But it's true. A year is enough time for the ground to shift significantly for me, but also for the medium. This blog is a good example. In the world of broadcasting images, even a well tended and lovingly updated online diary struggles for traction next to the manifold digital highway. The internet isn't a slow place anymore. And its permeation day to day makes our lives feel the same, distracted to the point of distraction. And so this place lies dormant, unable to match the speed my mind and my work move at.

But a year has passed nonetheless. So this post is no attempt to explain away the decline of the blog, nor is it a typical review of a year complete with boastful proclamations and grand ambitions. After all, it is about the only time of year we are allowed to think slowly about the past and the future, as we transition into a new year. It remains as ever, just another thankful nod to the camera. The constant change that my eye is always noting. Fastening down faint irregularities and profound expressions beyond the point of memory. As I think about all the activity ahead, there is a deep gratitude for all the little things I see and the stories I begin to tell, the non-moments that stop me. Frames of someone else's world that build up the small picture, of what it is to be living in 2015.

The Phantom Band

Rock & Roll, they say, is all glamour.

It's a good thing that this is all lies and that The Phantom Band don't exactly fall under the simplified banner of rock. Them, their music and even their name have never been simplified, so why should a photoshoot be straightforward?

To coincide with the release of their third album Strange Friend,  The Skinny asked if I could shoot the band for the latest cover and in Dumbarton. Enter stage right: two car loads of Phantoms and myself, on the road west one sunny Sunday afternoon, what could be simpler? In the run up to shoots like this I always like to prepare. I pencil down visual ideas or a theme and check out artwork. I was sent a clandestine link to the new album which I listened to in complete darkness. I packed and repacked my gear like a sherpa. I even had time for some chakra vowel chanting before meeting the guys. The band though, were suffering from their side-project obligations from the night before and had used the morning to spontaneously move their entire studio.

Fifteen minutes later, we have bypassed Dumbarton looking for a good location, made every wrong turn and both cars are now totally separated in an Exodus scale downpour. Unimaginably, the only constant to the shoot is our original idea to eat some ice creams by the seaside. We career into the first sodden, seafront we find. A phalanx of Phantoms head off to find somewhere for ice-creams and to genuinely buy chips, priorities. As always, at the height of the struggle, from the wall of rain emerges the most enthusiastic local out for his Sunday rain walk who see's our head scratching as an opportunity for the chat of a lifetime. By the time the band are back, shielding their dissolving ice-creams with takeaway bags, we've been on the go for 2 hours. But we've had chips.

Fifteen minutes later, Helensburgh pier is littered with flakes of sodden cone wafer and streams of ice-cream runoff. The sky and the sea are the exact same colour and the rain has charmed its way inside my camera making all my pictures look like we are in a turkish bath. Except we aren't, and to our further disbelief Andy's car battery has died during the shoot. What a scene this must have looked from above as me and Iain push-start the car and it rolls to a halt in the centre of a lagoon of rainwater. A lucky set of jump leads at hand we wait wringing with monsoon, listening to the revs of a very low fuel tank from the other end wondering if we need to start thinking about something more substantial then chips.

Back on the road and soaking the upholstery, the guys all kick back and get talking about albums and afterpartys with no afterthought to the shoot as if this was as ordinary a day in the life of The Phantom Band as they come.

 

 

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Artist Residence - Aloha Glasgow

I am almost at the end of my current three week residency with Team Effort! in Glasgow's southside. A residency is an exciting thing. It is business as usual really, but with a hard focus, and a hard deadline. Two things I sorely crave when I can focus on personal work. I have taken these 3 weeks to break from my commercial diary to focus on, and actually begin from scratch, a project I have wanted to try for a long time. I don't say "try" lightly. The project itself ticks all boxes of Team Effort's "ethos of exploration, risk-taking and collaboration" and I cannot put enough stress on the risk-taking.

Since this project is in two parts I wanted to explain a bit more about it and its background. I have split it into two parts, I am just finishing the R&D phase. The notion of a breezy holiday tripping through Glasgow's galleries have been quickly dismissed! Instead, my research here has been hard currency. It has been pavement pounding, door knocking, emails and phone calls. The life of a producer, and not much a photographer (bit of a running joke here.) But for what I want to achieve, it is the approach.

The working name of my project is PARADISE and its aim is to explore notions of identity, of veracity and, most urgently of all, of Glasgow. Its practical aims though are to visit everyday scenes of city life and dress everyone within in a Hawaiian shirt. Anyone familiar with my other personal work won't even bat an eye. Part of my learnings these last few weeks have been deeply personal, and it would appear that the only projects worth my salt are those that are only as preposterous as they are ambitious. 

For this work, I am drawing on the early colour photography and practice of John Hinde. Photographer/ ringmaster/ visual embellisher extraordinaire, Hinde is widely known for his saccharine and idealistic scenic representations of Ireland and the UK. He was commissioned by Butlins Holiday Camps during the1960's to impart his signature saturation to a series of postcards depicting the ceaseless delight of the resorts. He worked as a director, with a team that would pose holidaymakers and add lighting and props where necessary to crystallise his great modernised Arcadia. Injecting maximum colour into the frame, Hinde's team would saturate a scene however they could, including carrying a bag of bright shirts to dress anyone too pastel. In its excess and artifice, colour forms an inadvertent caricature of the setting of the images.

Fast forward to Glasgow. Here is a city that seems a living caricature. A historical and modern city, it wears itself openly. It visually balances its past with its future in an immediate, hacksaw affect; splicing old merchant sectors with motorways and modern housing. A city infinitely grey, commercial, derelict and rain-soaked, but electric with personality, character, creativity, myth and legend. That humour in Glasgow even is antipodean, renowned as dark and deadpan, wit becomes an intrinsic part of its ambiguous character. These romantic contradictions were my first impressions of Glasgow when I started to visit for work years ago. And it is these naive and flawed assumptions that I wish to nourish for this project. 

Drawing on, and frankly inverting, Hinde's approach have begun creating caricature scenes of Glasgow's sub-urban life. I want to inject disproportionate colour into packed, mundane scenes in pubs, bus stops, pool halls, care centres, chippies, the park, tea rooms, art classes and the streets of the city, by dint of a wardrobe of colourful shirts. Faithful to Hinde, I am shooting everything on large format colour film. I wanted to draw individuals, communities and organisations in to an art project that presents a humorous, relevant image of the city. Where Hinde set out to use colour to create a hyper-reality, I am creating a sur-reality.

The good news is, the hardest part is almost done. After an electric three weeks, I have bounded forward. Over the next few weeks when everything returns to chaos, I will have results to show that take me to the next chapter. This is a collaborative project, and in the not too distant future, I will be calling for helpers, assistants, collaborators and conspirators who like the feel of a Hawaiian shirt and know where to find Glasgow's intangible colour.

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