Umbra Sumus
Recently, I had a long – and hopefully fruitful – chat with Chris King on his podcast, Documentary Storytellers about my past, my work and where I’m going next… and quite a lot of other stuff as well. Have a listen on either – Spotify or Apple Podcast.
I was recently invited by the Museum of Art and Photography in Bangalore to speak about my work on the Indian Coffee Houses. I was joined by the Australian artist Alana Hunt who spoke about her work on chai in Kashmir.
You can see the interview here.
There is much current debate around photography and ethics. Despite the fact that I’ve been asked in several interviews over the years, I don’t necessarily think of myself as any sort of paragon of virtue. I’m sceptical of any set of ethical guidelines that are set in stone for a particular place and time and for me, I think my ethical guide has always been to treat people fairly and try and be a decent human being.
Ironically, that is exactly the notion that I contributed to Paul Lowe’s new book, Photography Rules: Essential Do’s and Don’ts from Great Photographers.
Paul asked me to contribute my thoughts on how to behave as a photographer and he accompanied it with a sensitive image of mine, a man being dressed by his mother in a secure ward in a mental health facility in New Delhi.
Michael Freeman, an old mate, a prodigious photographer and author – and an all-round very smart chap – has generously included me in a list of thirty photographers from across the world who are illustrative of various photographic practices that link to the title of this post.
I’m not sure whether I deserve to be in this list (along with the exceptional William Albert Allard) but Michael’s new book, Get the Photos Others Can’t illustrates, amongst many others, the notion of home territory – the idea that your knowledge of the everyday familiar will be invaluable in making images – with my work on London’s pie and mash shops. It’s ironic as Michael says that I’ve spent almost all of my career abroad, but it’s true that one never forgets where one comes from…
There’s an interview about how I approach and how I photograph people from a culture that I’m very familiar with as well as three illustrative images.
It’s a lovely book and, apart from my contribution, well worth a look.
Over the summer, I wrote on this blog about my series, the Heirs of the East London Group, the inheritors of the almost forgotten group of working-class, realist painters who had depicted life in a changing East End at the start of the twentieth century.
This week, Amateur Photographer magazine published a piece written by me about the work and, I’m delighted that the publication has been dedicated to, as I hoped, the late Ronald Morgan who passed away some months ago and whose image dominates the feature.
I’ll publish some of the text of that interview here next week if anyone would like to read it and hasn’t, by then, had the chance to buy a copy of the magazine.
