Today Is Tomorrow's History
The second in my series of portraits of Chertsey shopkeepers is Claire the owner of The Dinky Dove, which opened two years ago this week. The Dinky Dove sells a range of gifts, cards and homeware and has built up a regular loyal customer base; in fact whilst I was there one of her regulars came in to “get her fix” as she called it!
I recently received a brochure through the post from a discount supermarket chain stating that they were considering opening a store in Chertsey where I live. This set me thinking about all the independently owned shops that are present in Chertsey and how they might be affected by the opening of this supermarket. There are a nice range of businesses in Chertsey including a butchers, bakers, green grocers, gift shop, florist, delicatessen, pet food shop, bike shop, electrical shop, hardware stores, pharmacist, and antique shop among others. These are all independently owned shops, some of whom have been in Chertsey for over thirty years.
I decided it would be good to celebrate these businesses and so have embarked upon a personal project to photograph these independent shopkeepers in their shops, would like to exhibit the final prints in one of the empty shops in the main street in Chertsey. I aim to emphasise what we have on our doorstep, in the hope that the residents of and visitors to Chertsey, embrace and support these local businesses.
I started with the most recent shop to open in Chertsey – The Chertsey Fruit & Veg Shop, which is owned by Sabba who hails from Syria but has been in the UK for twenty years, working in various restaurants, making his way up to restaurant manager, and in McLaren in Woking. Because of his experience with food Sabba is able to offer advice on his products including choosing the best orange for juicing or for eating! He has been open for just a few weeks and is open 7 days a week.
So that time of year arrived again when I received my annual email from the Taylor Wessing Portrait Prize saying that “I am sorry to inform you that on this occasion your work has not been selected for exhibition.” Not that I think I have been singled out by Taylor Wessing – I also got rejected when the event was sponsored by Schweppes, when it was the John Kobal Portrait Prize, and even the year when there was no sponsor.
This years entry.
To be fair it’s not an easy competition to get in to – this year there were 4929 prints submitted (yes you read that right – it’s a prints only competition, which I find quite refreshing in this digital day and age) of which about 60 are selected for an exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery in London, as well as reproduced in a book. The exhibition also embarks on a national tour, so it really is quite something to be selected for.
On the other hand being rejected is now becoming the in thing due to the Portrait Salon, which is a sort of Salon Des Refusés for the Taylor Wessing Portrait Prize. The Portrait Salon has been running for 5 years, and showcases the best of the work that didn’t get selected. There are some really quite amazing images in the Portrait Salon by some great photographers like Julia Fullerton-Batten, Harry Borden and Kelvin Murray, so being rejected puts me in very good company!
This image won the AOP Assistants Awards in 2008, but didn’t make the cut in the TWPP.
It’s impossible to know what the Taylor Wessing judges are looking for (and some of them change every year) but there are definitely are some constants – twins and redheads being amongst them – and in some cases red headed twins! Also a lot of famous people seem to feature; smiling is generally omitted; and there is usually somebody naked. So planning ahead for next years prize I’m on the look out for some miserable, red headed celebrity twins who won’t mind being photographed naked!
I have been thinking about starting a new project and have decided that I am going to have a shot at putting together a body of work that will Try To Win The Taylor Wessing Portrait Prize, which is a bit of a mouthful for a project title so I will call it TTWTTWPP (much catchier), and reserve the right to change the title if the lead sponsor changes in between now and the announcement of next years awards! I’ll post updates along the way with the work I am creating, but for now here’s a quick look back at some of the photos that didn’t get in.
Eric
Charles
Boy
Skerries Frosties
February 15th – Joan Griffiths
Craig is a tall actor with close cropped hair who is often cast as a thug or villain due to his looks, and he is keen to expand his repertoire of characters, so we decided to take a light hearted approach to this portrait and cast him as an exhausted surgeon, who was on auto pilot, so much so that his breakfast turned in to just another operation.
I also photographed Craig another time for a different look.
… or shoemakers to most people. These guys make orthotic shoes and each pair is hand made to order. They start by making a cast of the feet and then the wearer gets to choose the style they want and can custom design them too. I was recently commissioned by Remember Creative to photograph portraits of the craftsmen involved in the process of hand making these shoes, and these are the resulting portraits.
See more portraits on my website, and I’ll shortly be adding some detail shots of the manufacturing process to the projects section of the website.
I was recently commissioned to take some portraits of staff working for a leading healthcare company to help with their latest recruitment drive. The portraits were of real staff in some of their hospitals, and were taken as though the staff were being observed during their working day, to show what a great place it is to work.
The Chef was convinced he would look like Casper The Friendly Ghost in the photos, due to being dressed all in white and spending most of his time in the kitchen!
You can see more of the shots on my website.
Another of my actor projects saw us in Peckham working with Michael who took on the role of an Urban Soldier, living on the woods and heading in to the city to fight the powers of evil.
It was a horribly cold and wet night, but Michael was a true professional and stood there in a t-shirt looking like you wouldn’t mess with him, although as Michael put it himself “a black guy, at night, in Peckham, with a gun, is kinda asking for trouble”! Luckily none came and we managed to get these fab shots.
Special thanks to my assistants Oli and Tim for braving the elements and for wading through the mud keeping the lights covered from the rain.
Continuing my collaborative projects with actors, I worked with Liz who is an American actor living in London.
We decided to try and make her origins and profession a feature of the main shot, and so I did some research, looking for American words used in London. I was particularly looking for a sign that had an Americanism, such as Sidewalk, when I discovered a film from the 1930s entitled Sidewalks of London, with a sub-title of St Martin’s Lane. The film starred Vivien Leigh and was about a pickpocket operating in London. So armed with this information we headed for St Martin’s Lane, where we had Liz acting out the part of a pick pocket.
The final shot ended up being one of the early shots where Liz kept her gloves on (it was very cold), and I felt they added a Fagin-esque quality to the shot.
We had to wait for the area where we wanted to shoot to clear so we grabbed a couple of other portraits first.
Thanks to my assistants Oli and Tim for all their hard work.
I’ve been collaborating with actors on some new personal work recently and got some great shots from it.
This session was with an actor called Adnan, who had recently grown a fabulous handlebar moustache, this being the first time he had been photographed with it. We worked through a variety of looks, and with Adnan complaining that a headshot he had had taken recently was so ridiculously over-retouched that he looked extremely young, we decided to emphasise the character of his features.
We also worked on an idea where he played a playwright deep in thought at his desk.
Here are the results.
Thanks to Tim from the University of Surrey for being my assistant for the day.
There’s been all sorts of things going on lately, including some personal work using actors which I’ll be posting details of over the next few weeks. But I thought I would re-kindle (if that’s not a trade marked expression nowadays) my blogging spirit by posting some stuff and nonsense from a variety of my shoots.
Imagine the scene – you’re setting up on a shoot and the lights don’t fire, so you check that the camera’s on, that the radio slave is properly attached, and that it is on the same channel as the receiver, test the shutter release, and get a photo of…… an (out of focus) light stand:
Once you’ve got the lights firing consistently it’s time to check the lighting, but in the absence of any subject you have to improvise and use…… your hand:
When your subject shows up it’s important to help them relax with some of those Gretag Macbeth moments:
“It’s no good hiding behind there, I can see you…”
“Who me?”
“Perhaps it might help you to relax if you imagine you’re leaning against a bar?”
“That’s a very high bar!”
“You’re expression is quite blank……..”
“….. can you be a bit more pensive?”
“That’s better.”
“You’re looking quite skinny – can you make yourself look bigger?”
And that moment when the photographer says for the umpteenth time “Just one more shot…”
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