I'm a bit embarrassed and annoyed with myself that I've still yet to finish this project. It's been on the go for a couple of years now & it's time I got it completed and find something to do with it, be it an exhibition, book, or whatever. Anyhow, a recent Facebook plea for participants has drummed up a lot of interest & I got four more in the bag over the last few days & when I get hold of their younger pics they'll be added to the main gallery on the site. Many thanks to the four volunteers below and to those who've put themselves forward. I'll be getting those shot as soon as possible.
If anyone else would like to volunteer please have a look a the list of ages I haven't shot yet on
here. All subjects have to live in Sheffield, the shot needs to be taken in daytime, and I'll need to borrow a photograph taken when you were younger, ideally about half the age you are now (this will obviously be returned along with a print of the shot I take of you). Drop me a line at
info@chrismsaunders.com. Thanks.
Matt Howden, aka Sieben is, to quote him, a "Record producer, composer, music arranger, performer, programmer, film scorer. Sock puppet. I loop it and layer it, I beat it, I pluck it. It being my violin." Matt plays, records, and performs completely solo and...oh sod it, just watch a video to get an idea....
I first met Matt about year ago when I photographed him for an
interview with Counterfeit Magazine. The photos came out ok & Matt mentioned that at some point he'd like some more doing when his next album comes out. At the end of last year the email arrives. I ask him if he's anything in mind for the kind of thing he'd like for the shots..
"Oh do you now", I laughed. Crewdson is one of my favourite photographers and for anyone unaware of his work his pictures are produced with a crew of up to 60 people, use up to 80 lights with some on cranes, are often shot on huge soundstages, take up to 4 days to set up, are shot on a 10x8 camera, & have a budget of around a quarter of a million dollars. Per shot. Basically it's a movie set but with the end result being one frame, not 24 per second. Crewdson doesn't even light or take the shot himself, he's a film director in essence, instructing the technicians around him to help get the image he has in his mind into the camera.
"We can do it at my house" Matt says "but I'm not flooding my living room.."
I'm obviously aware given the above mentioned details of Crewdson's shoots that there's
no way I could replicate the effect his pictures have. I have 3 lights, a crew of myself and hopefully one other person around to assist, a miniscule budget in comparison, no huge soundstage with specially constructed set, and one day to get a range of shots. And most pertinently I don't have his imagination. But a visit to Matt's house does get me thinking that I could possibly pull off a pastiche of his work to a certain extent, albeit a very simple one.
I get the Crewdson books out & reacquaint myself with the visual motifs he likes to use throughout a lot of his work. Lampshades - lots of them, different colour temperatures of lighting, unseen presences, the use of yellowy orange light against blue walls, strange scenes in gardens, living rooms, & bedrooms, people in dazed, transfixed, or anxious states, shafts of light coming through open doors etc etc...
So with a volunteer assistant, Nina (who really gets into the spirit later on), we set about it. I couldn't really attempt to really do a proper Crewdson with any of the interior shots, I was going to save that for a shot in Matt's garden..
First set up I initially thought had quite a bit of potential. Amazing lampshade in Matt's bedroom & I thought I did ok technically but it looks a bit dull. Bit of a failure this one therefore..
2nd shot on the stairs came out much better. Shaft of light & lamp both present & correct. The X-Files/Close Encounters style light coming from the room behind him was a *nightmare* to get looking right though..
The 3rd shot I wanted to do out in the garden had to be postponed as it was blowing a gale outside plus it was getting too dark, so we decide to do that at a later date. I wing it & on the spur of the moment combine 2 ideas I had - a lot of lamps & George the cat, into one. Bit of a daft pic this & I didn't really like it much at first but it's grown on me a bit. This has the most retouching I've ever done on a shot. I won't go into details because I don't like knowing what the original image looked like from any other photographer - obviously the power leads from the lights have gone but that's all I'll say. It's the end result that counts, but the original looks *very* different...
So the last shot, again I'm not going to go into details about how it was shot, it should be fairly obvious if you look closely enough. I had access to a smoke machine (ok, not the conventional sort used on film sets, more the human kind), lots of lamps again, a subject willing to possibly look daft if the shot doesn't work in the end, and an assistant who not only braved a horrendous hangover, but after initially having the idea of her in tight black clothes to get a good silhouette said "No. I'll wear a baby doll nightie. And I'll do it in bare feet". OK... It was *freezing* when we did the shot, hence the breath around her head.
I really am quite pleased with this one. There is an idea behind it, like there seems to be in all of Crewdson's shots, but like him I'm not telling. Click
here & scroll along to see it a bit bigger .
A few people have asked me whether I'm pissed off at being asked to pastiche someone else's work rather than use my own style (by which they really mean, without knowing it, mix Steve Gullick, Perou, Kevin Westenberg together and be nowhere near as good as any of them). Not at all, I don't think any of the shots come really close to looking like Crewdson's do, either in style (except maybe the last one) or standard, but I'm nevertheless pleased with most of them. I do like it when the subject has a good awareness of visuals for a start, and it did take me back to my college days when we'd occasionally get set projects where we'd be asked to copy another photographer's lighting. I'd always learn more technically on these projects than on any other. I'm always learning and learned a lot doing this...
Thanks to Matt for making me think a lot, and to Nina for services above and beyond the call of duty.
Part of helping out on a shoot involves being a lighting guinea pig. The shoots that I've done recently would've been a whole lot harder without the help of these fine people.
I first saw Henry Rollins in 1993 at the Octagon in Sheffield on what I think was one of his first spoken word tours. I can't think why I went, his band in the 80's, Black Flag, weren't really my thing, but I must have read an interview with him & liked what he had to say. It's the only thing I can think of. I do remember coming out of the show, which had consisted of him talking non stop for nearly 3 hours, thinking it was one of the best stand up shows I'd seen. It wasn't really actually stand up comedy though, more a monologue of funny anecdotes about his life on the road, his upbringing, his crap jobs, meeting his heroes (one phrase stuck in my mind, on nervously meeting Iggy Pop, describing him as 'muscle dipped in skin'). A lot of material, then, that ordinarily would be common stand up fare, the difference being that it was delivered with a supreme storyteller's skill which most comedians fall way short of. All really good but what sealed it was the closing 20 minute story of how he met his best friend, their lives & japes together, leading up to how his friend had recently died horrifically in Rollins' presence and how he was dealing with it. His closing statements about the aftermath were incredibly moving & uplifting considering they were coming from someone who was obviously in a very dark place. I left the gig thinking that the man was the real deal.
Annoyingly over the subsequent years I've missed most of his tours, for one reason or another, save for a couple of times. I've followed his stuff online, got the cds, he had an excellent cable
tv show a few years back which was particularly good, where he'd interview great film directors, actors, musicians etc and get good interesting conversations out of them. Seeing as I like to photograph people who I think are the aforementioned real deal I resolved to try and do so when the next opportunity arose.
The Sheffield City Hall gig was announced a few months ago, ticket bought, & entered in to the diary 10 days before the show "Email Rollins".
10 days before the show, email sent. Reply straight back. It's to the point..
"Chris, hello. Thanks for the interest. Sure. How long will it take? Has to be brief. Thanks, Henry".
"No problem. 5 minutes"
So come the day I arrive at the venue expecting the five minutes and no more. Thing is the City Hall, while a beautiful building, has a backstage area that is useless to take a portrait that shows the subject in their surroundings, so I know it's probably going to be a close up shot and pretty much nothing else. A quick scout around the backstage confirms this is still the case & I head up to the dressing room on the first floor & knock on the door.
"Hey man, come on in".
Instantly he starts talking about photography & starts showing me loads of pictures on his laptop that he's taken on his travels. Rollins' life, basically, involves going to places that no-one wants to go to, having great experiences, then coming home, writing it all up, and then going on tour and talking about it for the next year. He shows me great pictures of soldiers in North Korea, in what looked like a portakabin situated right on the border with South Korea where the leaders of the North & South meet to argue, who didn't want their photograph taking at all, fierce looking tribesmen somewhere in Africa who look *really* bizarre due to the fact that, along with their chalked skin & tribal facial scars, are wearing pink shorts. And so on, all punctuated by rat a tat tat anecdotes. He's a very good photographer and has a book out,
Occupants.
So we do the photos in between me barely getting a word in edgeways as he talks about filming Lost Highway (a subject I brought up, obviously), a spirited defence of Obama's signing of the National Defense Authorisation Act (that I didn't completely agree with I have to say, but I wasn't going to possibly balls the shoot up by saying so too much), being asked to curate a Stooges gig to commemorate them being given the keys to Detroit as well as joining them on stage, the merits of At The Drive-in reforming.. etc etc etc. It felt like I was basically was the audience for a mini Rollins gig. I was there longer than five minutes, the man can talk. The show later that night was phenomenal, a couple of the many highlights being a story of how he & his aforementioned friend scared Dennis Hopper to death, and his trip to North Korea during which he was constantly in the presence of a security officer, ostensibly completely devoted to The Great Leader, but who seemed desperate to show regular human emotion. Go and see him.
Anyway the photos. I'm reasonably pleased with them, I've caught the image that he likes to put across ok I think. I just wish I'd caught him smiling, he's a warm bloke beneath the stern image usually seen in photographs, but it's not on to be holding a camera up at someone when they're in full flow I don't think. I did, annoyingly, forget to tell him my Chuck D anecdote though, which would have definitely got him chuckling (one to be retold some other time on here maybe. Or maybe not, it's excruciating to recall...).
Bit of catching up to do - some of the stuff I've been up to...
My most momentous news is that my shot of David Lynch has been bought by his company to promote his new album. It took 7 years of me hassling his various assistants to get to photograph him (and ended up being commissioned to do so in the end) which resulted in my favourite shot of mine. To have the shot chosen to promote his work by the man himself is quite a thrill.
And one showing it being used in the London Underground, courtesy of
Grenville Charles.
I also have an exhibition currently running at renowned Sheffield artist
Pete Mckee's gallery showing a selection of shots I've taken of Richard Hawley over the last decade. I took some new shots of Richard just before the show which I'll upload when the show is finished. Ten years of photographing him, we're not quite sick of each other yet..
Steve Edwards is probably most well known for his vocals/ writing on
"World Hold On" by Bob Sinclair which was a worldwide hit a few years ago. He's currently finishing up his new solo album after many years working on it and I've been doing the album cover & press shots. The cover has been shot in the fabulous Okeh Cafe. Many thanks to Chris the owner for all his help. Not going to show the one's from there yet so here's some that I like from another shoot we've done around the same time, for the press shots, that aren't going to be used..
