When my parents left the country, my dad left me a half finished tin of shaving cream named Pagan Man. Looking for something to photograph, I chose it because I liked the name. When I was 18 or 19 I bought a fedora and a cashmere coat and thought I really looked cool. I decided I would use the hat for my shadow pictures, so off I went to my Battersea outdoor studio. I mostly went in the evening when the shadows were long. Seeing their potential I began to use them.
In the attempt to produce a commercial portfolio, I decided to use a wine bottle. I liked the the shape and label of the Mateus Rosé bottle so used that. I bought an off cut of laminate board and used a mirror as a reflector to light the label. I cannot remember how I came up the shadow of a hand but I may have it as I was setting up. I shot it on my seminal roll of film that gave me three folio shots.
This last shot was taken on a crisp fresh day in early November. I saw the cloud
coming and had to work fast. I used polarising and neutral density filters to slow
the shutter and get movement in the tree.
I started showing my work around and although there were those who professed to love it, no one would give me a job. One the few times I ever tried to be an assistant, I went to see a big name advertising photographer. He saw the wine bottle pictures but did not remark them. On my way home on the tube station platform, I saw a large billboard of a shadow of a hand reaching for a pint of Guiness that was perched on wall. I had been to see several art directors Guiness’s agency, Ogilvy and Mather. It made me think. I later found out that the photographer I had just been to see had taken it. Years later I was undoubtedly plagiarised by an ad agency. So much so that they were too lazy to change a thing in the picture. They had to pay me money in the end.
I came up with the idea of a man standing on one leg bending down to pick up an object. I could not think what the object should be but I knew that in true surrealist style it had to have “resonance”. The object had to lend the shot significance. There was a a Fiorucci shop on the Brompton Road that loaned me clothes and it was in there that I saw the Jackson Pollack pattern shoes. It immediately brought to mind the Guy Bourdin advertisements I had seen in the annual, Modern Publicity, so thought I would use them.
The Fetish I, The Two Towers
I shot this around midday on top of one of the derelict buildings in front of Battersea Power Station. I put on a polarising and warm up filter and set the 28 mm lens set around f22. I mounted the tripod column upside down to get low to the ground and the shoe gave me an indication of where I would be placed in the frame. A woman in a block of flats across the road saw me and went back indoors to fetch her binoculars. I started to feel self conscious and ridiculous standing on one leg but carried on. Seeing the result, I realised that there was not just one definitive way to depict this shoe and thought I would make it into a series. I photographed over the next three years and eventually won me a competition for young photographers, the Vogue Sotheby’s Cecil Beaton Award.
The Fetish II, The Shrine
The way to the power station was past by a large Post Office sorting office. I liked the difference in pattern and shot this early one Sunday morning when the light was right and there was no one about.
The Fetish III, The Dream of the Masturbator
I had taken another shot and was about to leave, when I saw the warm light on the side of building. The quickly setting sun was shining through a hole in the canopy. I had to set up fast, quickly banging in two large nails to support the shoe. This was the penultimate shot before the light went.
The Fetish IV, Umbral Spectre at Eventide
I had shot a Newtonesque nude in the doorway and looking at the result, I thought there was something missing and eventually came up with the idea of having the shadow of a man climbing the ladder. I could not get another naked lady back to the spot, let alone when the light was right so decided it to use the idea in my shoe series. Covering half the lens, I held up the shoe and shot the right side then climbed the ladder and shot the other half. I had to wait two or three weeks for the shadow to be that defined. It was shot about eight in the evening.
A couple of years ago I was in the doctor’s waiting room and picked up an interior decoration magazine. In it was an ad for Italian or Spanish furnishing and it had the shadow of a man climbing a ladder in exactly this attitude in hat and coat. I thought this could easily be influenced by me but where could they have possible seen the original? It was then that I remembered that my first book, Bernadinism, How to Dominate Men and Subjugate Women, had been published worldwide. I did not mind because the concept had been altered significantly. It is only when people have copied my work with hardly changing a thing that I am bothered. This has happened in the past. My modest gripe is the photographer probably made more money out of the concept than me. Such is life.
Fetish V, Hand and Knife expressing the Sentiment of Love are Metamorphosed into a Sundial Illumined by the
Light of the Moon, Whilst the Shade of Alessandro Valente sings Non Piangere Liù from Turandot by Puccini
I shot this in a disused goods lift with concertina gate. I shot the flash through the gate, not quite knowing how the shadows would fall and hoped for the best. I wanted to create the impression of a hand stabbed in the act of reaching for the shoe. The shadow of the knife combined with the placing of the fingernails reminded me of a sundial and I was listening to Valente at the time I made up the title. Incidentally, it is the only time I put both shoes in the same picture.
The Fetish VI, Eucharistic Altar
By this stage I was probably going through a religious phase in my work. The bread and the wine were undoubtedly referring to the body and blood of Christ. I was trying to infer that the shoe was worshipful. I made the cabinet for my woodwork exam at school and still have it to this day. I took out the back and while I was taking another picture it fell on it’s front, breaking a piece off the door. I laid it on the ground hoping it might imbue the image with perhaps more depth. I had to wait for the sun to get in the right position then work quickly. I used what Cokin described as a colourback filter effect. That is putting a green filter on the lens and the complimentary magenta one on the flash. Where the light falls the colour is neutral while the background turns greenish because that is the colour over the lens. I used gels that turn fluorescent light to daylight and vice versa. You can see the powerstion in the background.
At the Close of the day
After spending the spring researching and immersing myself in art and photography, I had sketched out several ideas on paper and come June, was good to go. Only I had no models so used myself. I shot three portfolio shots on one roll of 35 mm film. The other two were of a bottle of Mateus wine and the first of my shoe series, The Fetish I. I kind of treated them like a still life shoot and just bracketed the exposures, hence did not use much film. Three to 5 frames were enough. These three images set the direction of my photography permanently. By the end of the summer and eighteen months after taking up photography, I had a style which has hardly changed over all these years and does not need to. There are just more pictures. In a short space of time with little formal teaching and an “I can do that” attitude, I had done what it takes others years to do. I had achieved a style.
One of the facilities I have is finding two ideas and putting them together to make a third. I had seen a picture of a model on a beach picking up a large glowing shell and I wanted to do something similar but with a Magritte flavour. I shot this on the rooftop of the flats I could see out of my window. At first I was scared to get near the edge of the roof because there was no guard rail and I had a minor fear of heights which I had not realised until then. Later as I started climbing the roofs of several abandoned buildings, I lost the fear.
I wanted the picture hopefully to be commercial and cast about for a transparent object I could use. I settled on a bottle of Schwepes. I got a glass bowl from the kitchen and wrapped the inside with tracing paper and put a pocket flash with a slave underneath it. I mounted a Hanimex flashgun off to one side on a second tripod but I could not afford a flash meter so had to go by the exposure index on the back of the flash. The only trouble being I had no sense of distance and afterwards would often ask the model how far away they thought they were. They never knew either but it never occurred to me to buy a tape measure. I bought a flash meter the following year. I shot these with self timer and would have to correct the cloth over my face just before the shutter clicked.
It was very much an experiment because I had never shot outdoors like this before. I had never used a flashgun off the camera before and I was not even sure how long to expose for the sunset. It took years before I got a Polaroid back for a 35 mm camera.
The Easter before adopting my current style, I took a walk along footpath, the south side of the River Thames from Vauxhall Tube station to Battersea Power Station. The path meandered in an out of derelict areas and ran roughly parallel to Nine Elms Lane, until it at last went by the power station. In front of the station there was a disused goods yard and three derelict buildings, which you can see on the right hand edge of the Pink Floyd album cover. I climbed through a whole in the fence and explored the place.
When I began taking my pictures two months later in June, I took them all along that strip and it was there that I really learnt to take pictures. I used the goods yard as an outdoor studio, find interesting compositions around and atop the buildings. I had recently moved to Brixton, London and I knew few people, so my early pictures were of me. Armed with a tripod and a prop or two, I could pick up and walk there from the tube station when the weather was right. I would usually go in the early evening and and use the warm light and the shadows thrown by the setting sun. There are a lot of skies in my work of this period because of the use I made of the rooftops.
There were alot of derelict buildings around London at that time. I would come across them while riding my bicycle but had no transportation to take models to them. Some years later, the roof was taken off the power station and the goods yard flattened and remains so to this day.
Whilst I was engaged in the previous styles, I came across the work of Rene Magritte but wasn’t quite sure how it could be translated to photography because I thought what works in painting may not necessarily work in photography. I then came across the work of first Cheyco Leidmann, then Guy Bourdin.
Leidmann’s work was graphic and very colorful and there was nearly always some sort of surrealist incident in them – a thrown cat or a stuffed zebra out in the desert. In one of his books he even had the technical details of each shot. I analyzed the pictures to try to work out why they were so super saturated. The conclusions I came to were firstly, he put color into his pictures in the form of colorful lycra clothes or props and secondly he would use flash in daylight, so that even on an overcast day the colors would zing. He would use an 18mm lens at f22 square on to the subject without any apparent distortion. I could not afford an 18mm lens but I soon realized the smaller scale of my London back drops needed a longer lens. I settled on 28mm, which has since been my standard lens. 50mm is like a telephoto to me.
About the same time I came across the work of Guy Bourdin in an old advertising annual. It showed about 4 of his shoe pictures for Charles Jourdan. In the same book I found another two pictures in the same sort of style and these six pictures influenced me profoundly. When I had eventually digested all this and finally went out to take pictures, it was these three people who were at the front of my mind: Magritte, Bourdin and Leidmann.
The following year, 1985, I came across Bourdin’s work in French Vogue and followed him in it until he disappeared from it in ’87. There were no books or exhibitions and I saw no more until his book in 2001, the same year my own book came out. Before that though, I thought it a shame that he had been forgotten and that there was only 3 pictures of his on the internet so I created the first Bourdin site on the net with the few pages I had in my possession.
Charles Jourdan shoe advertisement
Although I liked aspects of Leidmann’s work, I could see the limitations of it. You could not describe life with pictures of girls in pink lycra and graphic blocks of color but in Bourdin’s way you could.
The winter after my Cokin summer, I joined an adult education course and started doing still-lifes with a 5×4 camera. In the facility, which was pretty basic, there were no large softboxes I had heard about, like “fish fryers”and “swimming pools”. I had to make do with hard 5oow Photax lamps. I was endevouring to create a commercial portfolio. I had read somewhere that to be successful your work had to be different. I later found the opposite was true but I’ll come to that in a later post.
I was not into art before taking up photography but came across Rene Magritte whom I liked. I also started searching out books of photography, advertising and illustration, deciding what I liked and didn’t like. One of the very few photographers I had heard of at this stage was David Bailey so I checked out his work. Apart from his iconic Sixties black and white portraits, his work held nothing for me. In the library of the London College of Printing, I loaned books by the likes of Cartier Bresson, Andre Kertesz and Cheyco Leidmann. I started sketching out ideas and collecting interesting magazine pages.
I came to the conclusion that the meticulousness of the studio still-life was not for me and I would start shooting outdoors again.
At the same time as doing my Cokin pictures, I discovered another technique. The effect was random and would produce blistering, distortion and colour shifts all at the same. I had to use the originals and it would enhance a nondescript picture or totally destroy a good one. For me the random nature of it was its virtue. I rarely used it for commercial work but would use it for my holiday snaps up until recent years, when I would take car trips around Britain. I would take snaps as I went along, the lighting conditions not mattering because the technique that I would apply, sometimes years later, would completely alter the final picture.
Houses of Parliament
Girl and Pedaloe, Serpentine, Hyde Park
Merry-go-round, Royal Festival Hall gardens
Folk dancing festival, Camberwell
When I became seriously interested in photography, I thought I could not go down a well trodden path such as documentary because hundreds of thousands had already gone down that path and it was hardly likely that I could match the masters. I cast about for a less rutted pathway and my first influence was the Spanish photographer, Francisco Hidalgo. He toured the great cities of the world producing romantic impressionist pictures with many and various Cokin filters.
I adopted that style and every week I would look through the Cokin catalogue, dream of what I could do with them and order some more. Every Sunday I would go about London visiting the tourist spots and often the parks, trying to capture them with a plethora of filters and double exposure. I enjoyed walking about seeing new things always on the alert for a photo opportunity. I got about 20 decent pictures from that style but ran out of new ways of using the filters. It was while taking these pictures that my love for colour photography began.
Some of these pictures were the first I ever had published and that was in a photography magazine. It is always exciting to see your first pictures printed for the public to see.
Looking Down on Concert from Rooftop
Tower 42, formerly Natwest Tower
From The South Bank looking north
The Serpentine boating lake, Hyde Park
