Little Miss Muffet Loses her Arachnophobia
I came across this handbag in Fiorucci. I borrowed it not knowing how I would use it but it looked interesting. Back home, thinking what interesting articles I could put in it, I tried it over my head. So it was back to Battersea with a model and a flash gun.
I befriended a guy at frame making class. He was a geologist for petroleum locating company. I did my first ever job for his company. Anyhow, he had a 15 year old step-daughter, Psyche. In search of a model, I asked her to pose for me. We turned up at Battersea just as a storm was clearing, with her and her mum.
I had borrowed clothes as usual from Fiorucci. The first shot was taken just as the sun was coming out. I got her mum to act as my assistant to throw in the fish. This was the first adumbration of my Trained Fish picture I did three or four years later for GQ.
The Imperial Embrace of the Male: Alva and Psyche on the Tickle Point
As the sky cleared further I took this one. I went there with the idea of a woman and man dancing i got from a Bruce Weber photo but did not know where I was going to take it until I saw the wall. Although it might look dangerous, there was only about a 13 foot drop to the next level of the roof. I set up the the camera and her mum took the picture.
By the third shot the sky had cleared and I had her mum throw a bunch of flowers in front of her face. The sun by then was so low it threw my shadow into the picture so I used it. You can see Vauxhall Bridge in the background. I used to have my work printed up on Cibachrome (long discontinued), and some art directors used ask which country I had shot, not believing you could get that sort of light in London.
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.
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.
