John Downing : Legacy

John Downing MBE, doesn’t look terminally ill. Pulling open the front door to his Henley on Thames home, the 79 year old Welshman and former Chief Photographer at the Daily Express newspaper, looks a rakish Sir Ian McKellen. His crisp white shirt is unbuttoned and wavy grey hair combed back behind the ears. “I’ve lost two stone and half a lung,” he says laughing and directs me into the kitchen. The lines around his pale blue eyes suggest he’s laughed a lot. His photographs often document the less hilarious parts of humanity.

At approximately 2.50am, after a long day covering the 1984 Tory Party conference, the type of assignment he says can be “mundane and hateful,” John heads to the bar of The Grand Hotel in Brighton, “as all good journalists would,” he grins.  Down on his haunches, talking to a husband and wife sat at a table, at 2.54am, the Irish Republican Army bomb goes off. A 5-tonne chimney stack comes crashing down through the floors into the basement tearing a hole in the Victorian hotel’s facade. The bar goes dark and fills with debris, dust and silence. An earlier briefing at Chelsea Police station and John’s own experience of bombs kick in. Fearing a shower of small sharp shards of glass will devastate the woman’s face, he pulls her to the floor and covers her head with his body, emasculating the husband. While others in the bar are being led to safety, John works his way to the front entrance to photograph what he assumes is a car bomb. The entrance is stacked with fallen chimney. Climbing through a window, he sees an injured policeman lying on the ground and takes a photo. Out of the corner of his eye, he recognizes the Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher’s private detective running at full pelt. Charging after him, John asks if Thatcher is OK? The detective isn’t sure and endorses John to the gathered Police who allow him to stay. Coming down the fire escape, John spots a composed Thatcher. She calmly puts her attache case in the boot of a car and climbs in alongside her husband Denis and aide, Cynthia Crawford. The car takes off at speed. John instinctively jabs his pre-focused lens towards the car and depresses the shutter. One shot, one flash. He has the exclusive and knows what to do next. Covered in dust, he runs to the nearest hotel to use the phone, well aware that the deadline for closing the edition of the Daily Express is imminent. John pleads for it to be held. On Saturday the 13th October, under the front page headline ‘UNBOWED’ is John’s remarkable photograph of Thatcher, complete with pearls, earrings and handbag, looking stoically straight ahead.

The Brighton bombing cemented John’s name as one of Fleet Street’s finest. His earlier photographs from Uganda established it. A year after Idi ‘The Butcher of Uganda’ Amin seized power in a military coup, John was in the country covering the expulsion of Asians, many of whom were British passport holders. The assignment was going well until Amin declared that all Europeans were spies. John was arrested in his hotel room and taken for interrogation. In the frightening chaos that ensued, he had an army colonel press a gun to his ear before being tossed into the bowels of Kampala’s Central Police Station prison. They had forgotten to confiscate his camera. John did what he was paid to do. He took pictures of prisoners alongside him in the open sewer prison. He took pictures as they lined up to get food, the camera hidden under a towel, the shutter clicks masked by coordinated coughing. Once deported, on Friday 22nd September 1972, the Daily Express ran five and a half pages of his pictures. The set includes an exceptional photograph of British brothers, Andrew Stanley (4) and Robert (2), the tough and adaptable boys climbing the prison bars as if in a gym, staring into a ferocious sun at a world gone mad.

The Daily Express wasn’t the tabloid newspaper obsessed with royals and right wing political parties it is today. Launching as a broadsheet it 1900, by the time John arrived (after a five year internship at the Daily Mail he started aged just 15), it was a pioneering power with the largest newspaper picture team in the world, around 64 staff photographers and 14 freelancers, of which John was the lowliest. He worked his way up by being talented and smart. He recounts his first big break, an assignment to Eastern Pakistan (now Bangladesh) to document the Cholera outbreak rife among refugee camps. John was the only photographer to have an up to date Cholera inoculation, they had to send him. A photograph from the reportage, of a nurse trying to administer a vaccination to a terrified child, won 2nd prize, general news singles, at the 1972 World Press Photo contest. Not bad for a relative beginner. During a career that has spanned over five decades, 100 countries and all seven continents, John has witnessed wars in Vietnam, Rhodesia, Beirut, Iraq, Somalia, Rwanda, Croatia, and Bosnia. He’s reported on natural, man-made disasters and famine. He has covered royal tours, political events, photographed the famous, infamous and poor. His efforts have accumulated a cluster of awards including seven for British Press Photographer of the Year. He was appointed a judge on the competition panel so he couldn’t win an eighth.

©Peter Dench

Moving into the showpiece lounge, I’m introduced to his third wife, Anita. When I telephoned to make the appointment with John, it was Anita who answered. From her articulated voice, I thought I’d dialled the 1950s: “Hello Henley on Thames 123.” Sitting on the sofa in white jeans, mustard coloured top and precise cut bobbed hair, she resembles a 1963 Una Stubbs - the Summer Holiday year. When Anita met John, she was 33 and-a-half years younger than him, she still is. She is younger than me and John’s two sons. The room is a forest of Get Well cards. Who sends Get Well cards to a terminally ill man? Anita, an established pianist and teacher at Eton College, explains they were sent after John’s lung removal operation. “Clinton Cards don’t really cater for the terminally ill market.” Perhaps they should do, ‘Oh Well’ or ‘Demise with Dignity’ cards? As we take a tour around the sun saturated apartment, the humour is often dark.

John’s MBE nestles among his awards in a glass display cabinet. “I felt a failure to my father, who was a teacher, not having got into Grammar school. The MBE and awards are a part way of resolving that.” Moving on, he locates the four toilets, the walk in shower he’s always wanted, a bedspread from India, mirror from Jordan, chest from Iran, stick from Burkina Faso and a Mosque themed clock that plays the Muslim call to prayer. John’s not particularly religious. “I’m not down on dying,” he says, entering the walk in wardrobe. A trumpet hangs silently in the centre, not the best instrument for a man with half a lung missing to learn. “I’ve lived a fulfilled and healthy life,” he adds, running a hand across the red members jacket of his beloved London Welsh Male Voice Choir. He last sang as a bass before Christmas 2018 and hopes to have the breath to rejoin the choir for rehearsals. “My only regrets are leaving Anita…” he sighs, plopping down on the music room seat next to her Austrian Bösendorfer piano, “…and not having had a book of my work published.” 

©Peter Dench

When news of John’s illness hit friend and renowned photojournalist, Tom Stoddart, Tom initiated a process to get a book of John’s work published before, well, you know. A crowdfunding campaign was launched and a day later, I’m here to talk to, and photograph John to help drive momentum. There is no need. Seven hours after the launch, the £8,000 funding target is breached. By the time I arrive in Henley, it’s doubled. My day with John and Anita has become a celebration. We head  across the road for a late lunch at Shaun Dickens at the Boathouse. Over plates of Porthilly oysters, tartare of salmon, pork tenderloin, skate and chilled glasses of Languedoc wine, we exchange stories as boats chunter merrily along the River Thames. John recounts dressing in a Burqa to enter Afghanistan; a shooting challenge with the son of a Mujahideen chief in which the loser would be shot dead (John won, no one was killed); starting the Press Photographers Association (now The British Press Photographers’ Association) as a response to the creeping trend in paparazzi photography and a way to preserve quality; mastering black and white photography, “I had a secret method for preserving detail in the blacks.” The challenges of shooting colour. “Only two things work better in colour, fire and blood, but I never felt so in control.” For a man rapidly losing weight, John can eat what he likes. When the waiter brings low in salt butter, we ask for more salt. When the Languedoc runs out, we ask for Sauterne.

John is not in pain. He is not bitter at the possible causes of his asbestos related cancer. He’ll refuse Chemotherapy as long as he can. We walk through Henley in the August warmth among men returning from Lord’s loosening their Marylebone Cricket Club ties. “I don’t feel like you’ve asked me anything important,” he says. I embrace the important and inspirational Press Photographer I’ve only just met and may never meet again. As the train pulls out of the station, I check the crowdfunding campaign - it says, 28 days to go.

John Downing: Legacy published by Bluecoat Press: hardback book with dust jacket, size 270 x 290mm (landscape) and 192 pages.

A version of this article first appeared in Amateur Photographer magazine UK 19/10/2019

©Peter Dench

Raiders of the Lost Archives

Canning Town is the most depressing place I’ve been to in London and I’ve been to the Emirates Stadium to watch Arsenal play football. It’s a place you pass through not go to. There are bus depots and taxi ranks. Underground and overground trains. Subways and bridges. The whole area is on the move. The walk to my destination is brutal and bleak. Lorries pin me to razor-wired walls. Electricity cables crackle ferociously above. There are warning signs, police sirens, guard dogs, dirt-filled pot holes, dust, discarded laughing-gas canisters, CCTV cameras, tyres, hub caps and skips. The parrot in The Durham Arms swears at passing strangers. I have a clearly printed ‘how to get here’ sheet of paper and get lost twice. Stood among the industrial units of Toolstation, Edmundson Electrical and Screwfix, there’s a clue to my destination. A man smoking a roll-up cigarette wearing a brown apron sips hot tea from a mug. On the mug it says Getty Images.

Welcome to the Hulton Archive, a remarkable visual resource of over 80 million images contained within 1500 individual collections. At the turn of the 21st Century, Getty Images merged London based Hulton Picture Collection with Archive Film and Photos, New York creating Hulton Archive. The buzzer says press firmly and await response. I fluff the firmly bit and await response. This state-of-the-art facility was around two years in the making. I push open the state of the art door and breathe in.

Melanie Llwellyn (née Hough) in the Hulton Archive ©Peter Dench

The gigantic archive is overseen by one of the world’s smallest curators. Melanie Hough is ‘five foot nothing.’ Her jaw is strong, face freckled, grip firm and blue eyes imposing. Melanie is in her thirties and third year as curator of Hulton Archive. She has been in the photography and gallery business for over a decade, working her way up after graduating from Goldsmiths University, London, with a BA (Hons) History of Art and an MA Contemporary Art Theory. Stepping onto the temperature-and- humidity controlled level one (of two) of the Hulton Archive, the scale of her task is staggering. This is what The Cloud must look like. 13 kilometres of racks and rows of boxes, packages and files. That’s 8,530 head-to-toe Melanie’s.

The heart of the Hulton collections is the seminal British weekly Picture Post magazine and it’s one of the first things you see. Melanie snaps on pair of latex gloves. “I find cotton gloves clumsy, these more dextrous,” she says, and flips to a spread by photographer Bert Hardy of 'Firefighters during the London Blitz, 1941'. From the accompanying contact sheets you can track the picture editors forensic eye and process. Another latex flip and there’s a lay out of Hardy's iconic images from the Korean War Battle of Incheon, which James Cameron wrote the article for. Between 1938 and 1957, over 9,000 articles were commissioned for Picture Post. Only 2,000 of these actually ran in the magazine and the other 7,000 were filed away. Around half a dozen photographs accompanied each published article, from the hundreds, sometimes thousands of negatives the photographers delivered, creating a colossal archive of unpublished and often unprinted images. Readership in Britain during the second world war reportedly peaked at over 80% of the population.

©Peter Dench

“There are probably 200 negatives to one print in the Hulton Archive” says Melanie. “Less than 1% is online. Around 30,000 images are digitised a year with more coming in all the time.” She adds, pushing her tawny hair behind a pierced ear without an earring. It’s a job for life and the challenges are daily: researching; identifying and documenting; devising strategies for library care, accessibility and conservation; acting as spokesperson; leading tours of the archive; assisting external researchers, scholars and curators find what they didn’t know they were looking for. She even handles the Instagram account @Gettyarchive. Melanie is always busy during the day and often kept awake at night. Terrors include: reticulated negatives (the distortion of the emulsion layer of a film); indecipherable index codes; problems with original and now inappropriate captions and the most horrifying of all, off-gassing, film that is actively decaying, often known as vinegar syndrome as the film begins to release acetic acid, as you’d find in the vinegar doused over chips. The process cannot be recovered, only stabilised. We both rapidly sniff the room. My stomach starts to rumble.

©Peter Dench

During my tour of the archive, one of Meanie’s two curatorial assistants ghosts past, triggering on the strip lights. A herculean librarian who has been working at the archive for 20 years and spends their entire time meticulously patrolling the racks, rewriting faded labels and refiling requested material - requests that often mirror what is happening in the modern world. Demands this month are for women playing football (the FIFA Women’s World Cup is currently under way) and images of D-Day in this 75th anniversary year. Images of royals and British royals in particular are among the most popular genre.

Melanie has a shifting top 10 of her favourite photographs. Among them an image by renowned photojournalist, Terry Fincher (pretty much every photographer in here is renowned): a scene of Carravaggion-quality captured on 35mm film of Marine chaplain Eli Tavesian giving communion to marine Louis A Loya, at Forward Command Post in Hue, Vietnam, 1968. It’s also a favourite of the Archive Vice President and Melanie’s boss, Matthew Butson. It was to Matt that Fincher (one of the many photographers he knew personally), confessed to shooting the image from the hip - it still didn’t need cropping. A John Chillingworth image is another of Melanie’s favourites: a controlled test reveals the frightening speed with which clothes can catch fire, published in Picture Post alongside the article, 10 Seconds Can Mar A Life, 1953. 

Opening the boxes and peeling back the beaten wrappers of parcels, I realise everything I thought contemporary has been done deep in photography’s past. There’s macro photography of insect tongues; erotic photography featuring tongues and food photography to make your mouth water. There are drawers full of political cartoons and maps charting new territories a century before Google. 5% of the Hulton Archive is estimated to be non-photographic: etchings, lithographs, postcards, letters and valentines cards among others.

©Peter Dench

History is democratic: boxes of prints of comedian and actor Benny Hill alphabetically align alongside those of Adolf Hitler. History is also fluid, a tide. No ones place in it is guaranteed. There are gatekeepers, authors, editors and curators who prioritise what’s important and champion some photographers over others. Melanie understands and welcomes that the findings and decisions of the team of ‘Hultonites’ at the London facility (including five editors, four in scanning and an on-site conservator whose job is to stabilise and repair) can be challenged or changed as new, old archives are opened and verified.

©Peter Dench

The doyens of photography at Hulton Archive are resident in Melanie’s favourite room, the Vintage Room. One of only five people with access, she fobs us into the windowless space, the walls lined with Brassaï, Bill Brandt and Lewis Carroll. She delivers to the viewing table the book: Illustrations to Tennyson’s Idylls of the King and Other Poems by Julia Margaret Cameron, one of only eight known copies in the world. Other lifted lids reveal hermetically sealed stereo Daguerrotypes (a photograph taken by an early photographic process employing an iodine-sensitized silvered plate and mercury vapour), Ambrotypes (a positive photograph on glass made by a variant of the wet plate collodion process) and Calotypes (an early photographic process introduced in 1841 by William Henry Fox Talbot, using paper coated with silver iodide). There’s an order of service from Ronald Kray’s funeral; a 1738 letter from Louis XV of France (the most beloved Louis); a 3-D stereoscopic of the moon and marking the 200th anniversary of the birth of Queen Victoria, one of the latest discoveries from the archive files. Believed to be the earliest image of any British monarch by a woman photographer, the portrait was captured by Frances Sally Day (c1816-92), possibly on 26th July 1859, according to Victoria’s own journals. We respectfully whisper our conversation across her royal highness.

©Peter Dench

Melanie ends by showing an image by Eadweard Muybridge (1830-19040, the English-American photographer important for his pioneering work in photographic studies of motion. He’s arguably best known for shooting and killing his wife's lover, a crime for which he was acquitted in a jury trial on the grounds of justifiable homicide. It’s been an overwhelming and dramatic three hours. I feel guilty for only glimpsing a fraction on offer at this analogue centre of excellence. Melanie half-jokingly suggests checking my bag on the way out. I suppress my inner Indian Jones (Raiders of the Lost Archive?). In truth, I don’t want to steal anything, I want to leave something and consider slipping a folio of my images onto the shelf.

The Wiltshire-born, Devon raised lass, who hates being photographed and is driven by what she is yet to see, has to go. She softly guides me back into the open and I stride deeper into the drizzle. “We didn’t even make it to the Man Ray’s!” She shouts.

A version of this feature first appeared in Amateur Photographer magazine 24th August 2019

Viewpoint : Imposter Syndrome

When do you become a photographer? When you receive your first camera? When you graduate from college or university? When you receive your first professional commission, sell your first print, publish your first photo-book, reach a 1000 YouTube subscribers or decide to watermark your Instagram posts?

©Peter Denc'

On a recent visit to the hairdressers, to have what hair I have left cut, I was asked by Kostas, my assigned barber, what I did for a living? I hesitated. Assignments had been a bit sparse, my photo-mojo a bit dulled. The words, 'I’m a photographer' lodged in my throat. I felt a fraud. The weight of photographic history pounded in my mind. Images by James Nachtwey, Tom Stoddart, Don McCullin, Robert Capa, Robert Frank, Diane Arbus, Nan Goldin, Walker Evans, Paul Strand and Edward Weston trampled across my retina. “This and that.” I finally squeaked. “Bits and bobs.” I added. Kostas finished the cut in silence.

I was a Judas to my my craft! The denial of photography felt biblical. Was I still a photographer if I hadn’t taken a photograph for a few weeks? Would I become one again if I went home and grabbed one of my three Olympus cameras and went out to photograph for the day - was it that simple?

I’d always believed I’d been a photographer since the age of 14, when I took myself away from the distractions of the amusement arcades and flirty girls to patrol the local nature reserve snapping herons, coots and butterflies with my second hand Pentax ME Super.

It’s not the first wobble I’ve had and won’t be the last. I’ve had my photography career interrupted by necessary stints working in a canteen, as a builders mate and jet-washing patios (a word of advice, don’t wear flip-flops when jet washing patios or try to clean your feet with the high pressure jet wash).

In a time when everyone’s supposed to be a photographer, I don’t see a deluge of outstanding new photographers. Great photographs have to be grafted for and photography has it’s own unique attributes that have to be mastered: composition, content, colour (or lack of), lighting and perspective. It’s a ridiculous way to live, trying to make sense of the world and how you feel about it, through a rectangle or square. 

Photography can be a deeply unsatisfying pursuit and profession but a compulsive and all-consuming one. Renowned photographers, often without question, spend days away from their loved ones, spending money they may not have, in situations they may not like, hunting that moment when everything, for a fraction of a second, makes sense - when all problems and doubts are blown away and the only thing that matters, is they got the shot.

If you don’t understand that, then you’re probably not a photographer, no matter how many social networking followers you have or how many expensive cameras and gadgets are hanging around your neck. It’s a state of mind, you just know.

This article was first published in Amatuer Photographe magazine March 2019.

Documenting The Fallout

In 1984, anxiety over nuclear war was at it peak. American President Ronald Regan’s Strategic Defence Initiative (Star Wars), intended to protect the United States from attack by ballistic strategic nuclear weapons, was in development. The landmark television film Threads, about the effects of a nuclear holocaust on the working class in the British city of Sheffield and the eventual long-term effects of nuclear war on civilisation, disturbed the nation. The British New Wave band, Ultravox, released Dancing With Tears In My Eyes, their second single from their seventh studio album Lament. The music video depicts band frontman, Midge Ure, driving home after discovering that a nuclear explosion is imminent. The video ends with the power plant exploding. I was twelve years old and I was terrified.

And then in happened. At 1:23:58 AM (Moscow time) on 26th April 1986, a catastrophic nuclear accident occurred at the No. 4 nuclear reactor in the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, near the city of Pripyat in northern Ukraine. The reactor exploded and burned, spewing radioactive material into the atmosphere. It was the worst nuclear accident in history. My family and I would gather round the television to watch the news and progress reports of the radioactive cloud. I would sit at the front so no one would see the tears in my eyes.

The first photograph to be taken of the reactor 14 hours after the explosion is accredited to Igor Kostin. Shot from the first helicopter to fly over the disaster zone to evaluate radiation levels, the view is fuzzy due to radiation, which may explain why the photograph wasn’t taken too close to the window. Radiation experts later learnt that at 200 metres above the reactor, levels reached 1500 rems (a measurement of the biological effect of absorbed radiation), despite the fact that their counters did not exceed 500 rems. Working for the Novosti Press Agency, Kostin was one of only a handful of photographers in the world to take pictures of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster (he died in a car crash in 2015 aged 78). In subsequent years there would be many more photographers. The area has an undeniable lure.

In 2002, a week before my wedding, I was on assignment for Men’s Health magazine in Minsk, the capital city of Belarus. I was shooting a reportage on male life expectancy - the men die nearly 12 years before the women. About 70% of the radioactive fallout from the Chernobyl disaster landed in Belarus, heavily contaminating a quarter of the country, a fifth of its agricultural land and affecting at least 7 million (of around 10 million) people. Chernobyl’s nuclear power plant lay less than 4 miles from the border of Belarus. The journalist and I locked eyes, we both agreed we had to go and scrambled on to a train heading 300 kilometres south.

©Peter Dench

The town we alighted at was primitive. Patched-up cars were filled with fuel from plastic containers. Home made alcohol was swigged from plastic containers. Plates of mushroom stroganoff were devoured feverishly from plastic plates (in an area where radiation was prevalent, it seemed absurd to eat a soil based fungus, however delicious a food source). We hired a local to drive us to the edge of the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone (CEZ), an area of approximately 2,600 km2 immediately surrounding the nuclear power plant where radioactive contamination from nuclear fallout is highest and public access and inhabitation are restricted. Belarus has more territory classed as a ‘dead zone’ as a result of the catastrophe than Ukraine. The country has two exclusion zones: one in the south near the Ukrainian border, and one in the east near the Russian border. The drive took us through a damp flatland of marshes, meadows, forest, abandoned farms and the occasional horse drawn cart. The soldiers at the red fence that marked the edge of the CEZ, posed for the camera with guard dogs and smiles. If we’d felt inclined to pass through, for a few rubles, we think they’d have let us. 

©Peter Dench

There were less than twenty people on the flight home. Myself, the journalist and a dozen ‘children of Chernobyl’ with their carers. The children had suffered terribly, their bodies evidently handicapped. The air stewards had to lift the drinks trolley over giant rucks in the airplane carpet. Faded wallpaper peeled from around the windows. 'What type of aircraft is this?' we asked. 'Second hand Aeroflot,' was the reply. Aeroflot didn’t have the best safety reputation; a second-hand Aeroflot jangled our nerves. 'What have you to drink?' we asked. 'One bottle of red wine. One bottle of white wine.' The journalist grabbed the bottle of red. I grabbed the bottle of white. Neither of us grabbed a glass. Landing in London, I didn’t feel the immediate urge to photograph in the CEZ.

Photographer David McMillan felt the urge. He first photographed in the CEZ in 1994. His 22nd visit was in November 2018 and he’s not finished. "I’m still intrigued by the place and I’ll go as long as I feel I’m still getting new photographs. If I can’t add anything to what I’ve done, it will be time to stop." says David. "The scope of Chernobyl is broad enough to make me want to return. I haven’t found an alternative as compelling." he adds. 200 photographs are published across 262 pages in his poignant hardback book, Growth and Decay: Pripyat and the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, (Steidl 2019). "Until relatively recently, when I started using a digital camera, I used 6x7 cm and 4x5 inch film cameras. There were no precautions taken to protect the film from radiation and no consequences from my lack of precautions." The images are mostly devoid of people but full of presence. They’re poetic, have beauty and depth and light. Perhaps an echo of his early training as a painter? "I trained as a painter but I think it’s all about a person’s sensibility - how one reacts to the world and what one finds significant. But then there’s also one’s colour sense and use of the frame and all the formal choices that transforms the world into a picture. It’s probably small, incremental things that makes a photograph resonate."

Luke Massey’s main reason to photograph the CEZ was to see how nature is reclaiming it. The naturalist, conservationist, educator, film maker and photographer spent 12 days in 2016 laying camera traps and searching for wildlife. He didn’t fail, witnessing among others: hares, moose, mice, red deer, bees, black grouse, black woodpeckers, great white egrets, raccoon dogs, beavers, cranes, ospreys, kestrels and most unexpectedly, a wolf. "I didn't get to photograph it as I was clambering across some very uneven ground on the edge of one of Chernobyl's cooling ponds when I looked up to see my first ever wolf exploding from the reeds below me and running in to the forest. Pretty epic to not only see a wolf, but in the CEZ too!" You could edit Luke’s photographs to make the CEZ appear a wild Eden. His images of the rare and endangered Przewalski’s horse, now thriving in the CEZ, are divine. "My work in the CEZ was to show it for what it is, not what has been written about it in the past, of mutant animals, where wildlife is thriving without the interference of humans."

It was human error that contributed to the disaster and human interference is returning. Ukrainian photographer Andrey Lomakin was born in 1974 and raised in Pripyat. On April 26 1986 he went to school as usual. "My family survived but it affected our health. My mum, sister and I were evacuated on April 27th. Dad stayed in Pripyat - he worked at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant as shift manager of one of the reactors. We were reunited in October 1986 in Kiev." For Andrey, the CEZ is all about the people. "I cannot imagine Pripyat without people. On the first trip I could not take pictures at all. Just watched. I wanted to see at least some life. Even if it was just tourists." Andrey, who can assemble an AK-47 with his eyes closed, a legacy of the Communist regime he hates has returned home five or six times to shoot his reportage, 'Visitors'. He only travels for a day or so at a time as health doesn’t allow any longer. The sharp, crisp black and white photographs show people taking pictures and posing for pictures and looking at pictures on their phone next to a statue of Lenin. "This is normal. That's the way people are. But it’s still hard for me to accept. Tourists will never understand the pain of the inhabitants of Pripyat. As a child, I could not imagine that this ordinary city would become famous to the whole world this way.”

If you’re planning a trip to photograph the CEZ, here’s some advice about what you need and need to do:

“Good shoes with thick soles. There’s a lot of broken glass and debris on the floors.” David

“Do it properly, get a good guide and the correct permits.” Luke

“You need to plan a story that you will shoot, not a visit. There is a huge amount of photos from the Chernobyl zone. And they are all the same. Do not be afraid of radiation, you will not be taken to dangerous places. But stay away from large metal structures. And take some batteries for the camera.” Andrey

As I flick back through the work of David, Luke and Andrey, I’m reminded of the impactful words of Gerd Ludwig, photographer of the book, The Long Shadow of Chernobyl: (Edition Lammerhuber, 2014). “As engaged photographers, we often report about human tragedies in the face of disaster, and take our cameras to uncharted areas with the understanding that our explorations are not without personal risk. We do this out of a deep commitment to important stories told on behalf of otherwise voiceless victims.”

A version of this feature first appeared in Amateur Photographer magazine 3rd August 2019

In Conversation With John Bulmer

Don McCullin is running, running as fast as he can. His mouth is open, hair neat and jacket crumpled. In his arms is an elderly woman, her thickset legs bent over McCullin’s left arm. Her gnarled right fist clenches two long sticks; wire and trees blur in the background. This unlikely couple are fleeing missiles fired into Turkish territory by the Greek army during the 1964 conflict in Cyprus. It’s McCullin’s first conflict and the now-famous war photographer is captured in action in an extraordinary black and white photograph. The previous evening, McCullin had crashed on the spare bed in the hotel room of the photograph’s author, who then drove them both into battle the following morning: “If I was going to get killed, I thought I might as well take some photographs.” The photographer is John Bulmer. 

 ©John Bulmer

Strolling past the lake populated by pike and stopping to pull cobwebs from the bronze busts cast by his wife, the sculptor Angela Conner, on display in the grounds of his Herefordshire home (a house he bought on the telephone for £5,000 in 1965), Bulmer seems far removed from the front line. It’s 49 years since he captured that moment on an assignment for the Sunday Times (McCullin was shooting for the Observer).

Bulmer was one of the first photographers to adapt to the sudden change to using colour photography for editorial photojournalism and one of the first to be employed by the Sunday Times Magazine (STM) when it launched in 1962. The professional relationship secured him a 60-page-a-year contract and had him travel to around 100 different countries in more than a decade on the newspaper’s behalf. The magazine’s first cover featured a footballer photographed by Bulmer surrounded by pictures of Jean Shrimpton’s armpit, photographed by David Bailey, who Bulmer initially thought “a bit of a shitbag,” before swiftly mellowing his opinion of him.

This credible Doctor Who doppelgänger (more Jon Pertwee than Peter Davidson) with his ebullient frame, pince-nez spectacles and thick white hair, has the knack of being a master manipulator of time. The 75-year-old was a pioneer of colour photography ten years before Martin Parr, deliberately stalking his subjects through rain and fog with slow-responding Kodachrome and Ektachrome, well before the publication of Parr’s Bad Weather. 

©John bulmer

When Hunter Davies took over editorship of the STM and explained to Bulmer a change in direction of the content of the magazine to “crime, middle-class living and fashion”, he diversified into film-making where he remained embedded for the next 35 years, making documentary films for the BBC, Discovery and National Geographic television channels among others. Bulmer photographed and directed the films Fat Fiancees; Planes, Pigs, and the Price of Brides; The Witchdoctor’s New Bride and other films not featuring brides. In the film Beehives and Runaway Brides, written, photographed and directed by Bulmer for Essential TV Discovery Channel, husbands talk about the price of brides, brides gone AWOL, having several brides, forcing brides to marry and brides marrying cousins. Women with ferocious facial piercings talk about being beaten. It could be a script live and direct from the studio with Jeremy Kyle but is a matter-of-fact tale of the Sheko people living their real-life soap in the far western highlands of Ethiopia.

©John Bulmer

Malaria has weakened Bulmer twice and in 2005, after recovery from a tropical disease stole a year of his life, he decided it was time to hang his travel hat back on the rack and attend to his archive of stills photography. Sheltering from the afternoon rain, we each take a seat in his low-beamed office and nestle among myriad rosettes that Bulmer achieved in carriage driving, the sport that keeps him trim and his love of horses sated. The short-sighted Bulmer peers at his Apple Mac from inches away and presses a digit on the keyboard’s oversized bold black letters. The screen illuminates into life, showing life after life; more than 200 pictures from his in-progress new book were thrown down in a day into a Blurb layout. The provisional title is Other Places*, that’s places other than The North (of England), the title of his first solo monograph.

Published in 2012 by the local interest, Liverpool-based Bluecoat Press (Thames & Hudson didn’t reply to his book proposal, ditto Dewi Lewis) The North quickly sold out and it wasn’t even about the fun part of England (a 2nd edition has been published). Other publishers should have replied, the profit from the 2012 book was enough to buy a house over the telephone in 1965. The book put Bulmer firmly back on the photographic map; the north was part of the map this Herefordshire-born black sheep hadn’t witnessed before he first headed to the Lancashire town of Nelson. It’s the first town the viewer visits in the book, a town Bulmer thought as “exotic as darkest Africa.” Around 78 photographs in the 224-page book are in colour and 47 of those were shot in Manchester on commission for German Geo magazine, whose picture editor wanted him to capture the ‘swinging Manchester’ of 1976. Bulmer didn’t capture swinging Manchester; he captured empty canals and isolated pubs; cluttered corner shops; terraced houses being demolished and ravaged faces pulled taut against the elements by too-tight headscarves. When the Geo article was published, pictures from other sources had been used to complement Bulmer’s. Though annoyed at the time, he can now understand why. The quality of the printing of The North has had its critics and the criticism is valid but they miss the point. Bulmer is not a ‘look-at-me photographer’, he’s a ‘look at this’ photographer, bred from the mass circulation magazine market. All of the images have been scanned and cleaned by Bulmer and some scanned from prints when that’s all that remained.

Bulmer was sent down from Cambridge six weeks before the finals of his engineering degree, officially because “the University believed I wouldn’t pass my degree” (they would probably have been proved right, he spent more time focusing on photography) and unofficially because he had recently sold a set of pictures to Life magazine (under the alias, David Brinkman) depicting students climbing university buildings at night. The images were captured with an investigative style and starkness that Weegee would have been be proud of. The company of English photojournalist, Larry Burrows, (best known for his for his pictures of the American involvement in the Vietnam War) had already alerted Bulmer to a broader life beyond the roof of Senate House, where he had photographed a car positioned there by the prankish night climbers. Bulmer headed to London without a degree of regret and to the offices of the Daily Express where he quickly secured a job that gave him the confidence to set out and stride the globe.

©John Bulmer

Bulmer’s Other Places are other worldly and of another time: wide-grinned Cubans smoke long fat cigars; there are half-naked Romanians who welcomed him to photograph their picnic and completely naked Germans in Romania who flung mud at his lens; there’s a shot from a bathroom in North Korea, away from his watchful minder, and mindful shots in China where he spent five days photographing without restriction after defecting there when he missed a connecting flight in Moscow en route to North Korea. Figures stare out from across the landscape of Ethiopia, his fondest country to photograph from all of his travels and one where he had to run for a mile alongside a carriage in which Queen Elizabeth II sat, head cocked, flashing her pearly whites at Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie. Only when the crowds had fallen back did it allow Bulmer the opportunity to shoot a clean frame, this exertion achieved while carrying four cameras, usually two Nikon’s and two Leicas, loaded with a mix of colour transparency and black and white film.

The most recent photograph Bulmer took was on his phone three days before we meet for a chat; his last photographic assignment was three years before I could talk. He checks his digital watch for the time and it’s time for wine; it’s Chilean. “A New World wine,” I declare as I tsunami the welcome taste back over my tongue. Bulmer scoffs and winces at the memory, when, in 1965, a vessel he describes a “hog’s head” holding 144 bottles of Chilean wine that he had had shipped in from the New World was accidentally smashed on the road of Elgin Crescent near his home in Notting Hill. I make a mental note to pay my respects at the disaster spot on my return to London.

As the glasses of wine are vanquished, Bulmer tells tales of sharing a darkroom with Philip Jones Griffiths during the printing of the Welsh Magnum Photographer’s opus Vietnam Inc; of infuriating the captain of the QE2 on its maiden voyage after he climbed to the top of one of the ship’s funnels to photograph her arrival into New York; he talks of his disrespect for religion and disgust for the public school system to which his cider-making father decided to send him. He remembers Travellers Cheques; receiving free first-class flights around the world; 42-hour six-stop flights to Australia; flights with no security bag checks; meeting Henri Cartier-Bresson and Eugene Smith; of missing an historical photograph of Winston Churchill as the former Prime Minister was loaded into an ambulance (Bulmer had nipped away to make a call from a telephone box). He remembers a lot but regrets little and rarely looks back.

©John Bulmer

This ahead-of-his-time-traveller has always embraced change; he shot in colour when ‘traditionalists’ shied away; drank New World wine when wine was white, warm and meant for women; he used lightweight 35mm cameras while others persisted with the physically restricting Rolleiflex (with flash) and he wrote words to accompany some of his reportage features when words were meant to be the exclusive domain of writers.

We down glasses and jump into Bulmer’s TARDIS blue coloured, environmentally friendly car and smooth past the humdrum semi-detached homes of Hereford and back to the railway station where the next train home isn’t for an hour. That’s what happens when you visit the countryside. The only open and nearby place to grab a bite to eat is a fast food outlet. That’s what happens when you visit the countryside. Inside, families order their burger box and fries while a kid sweating out a viral infection cries for an overdose of Calpol. Fed, alone and thirsty, I seek the company of the Commercial pub across the road. “What would you like to drink?” asks the cherubic barmaid. There are bottles of Echo wine for £6.99 and another brand for a pound less but I ask for the only drink that can be drunk after a day like today: “I’ll have a pint of Bulmers cider, please.”

The North is published by Bluecoat Press

*Other Places was eventually titled Wind of Change published by Bluecoat Press

In Conversation With Peter Dench

Peter Dench is a late imitator of colour photography, best known for his projects endorsing stereotypes of the British working class. I meet him in The Alex, the pub where he now lives in a small room above the bar scratching out a living doing odd jobs for pork scratchings and the occasional leftover scotch egg. Dench, now 60 years old, looks nearer 80 and still dresses as he always has: in the tired football casual terrace style of the 1980s, a vintage, vintage, vintage, red Fila polo shirt buttoned up under his cascading chins. He is sat staring at The Alex’s impressive 6D television in the spot where he can be found during the rare moments he hasn’t s**t himself. This fecal incontinence is an unfortunate medical consequence of being brutally attacked at the 2012 Visa Pour l’Image International Festival of Photojournalism by a gang of photographers who had had enough of his formulaic photography, an action that was largely applauded by the industry. Repeats of the American TV sitcom Cheers flicker past as I introduce myself; Dench barely acknowledges my arrival and mutters an order for a litre of cider.

Dench threw away a promising career as an opening batsman for his county cricket side and, by the age of 14, had finally stopped wetting the bed and started wetting his appetite for photography snapping butterflies and coots at the local wildlife reserve in his hometown of Weymouth. From there, he pursued a routine academic path in photographic education graduating from the University of Derby in 1995 with a third-class degree and a portfolio of prints depicting himself in various stages of undress. Arriving in London, Dench was deluded, delivering his portfolio to the Reuters news agency UK headquarters where he hoped to become a regular contributor. The portfolio was lost in the Reuters system. Consequently, Dench signed on the dole for two years and sponged off his parents, spending most of his days flipping the 50 pence pieces he could muster into the pint pot for topless dancers at the Griffin pub in Clerkenwell. 

After his parents tired of supplementing his slothful lifestyle, Dench momentarily pulled himself together producing a reportage on the alcohol drinking habits of the English; what was essentially a three-year pub crawl produced a significant archive of images, one he has since bled to exhaustion. Initially, the industry took notice and awarded him a World Press Photo award for the People in the News Stories category for his Drinking of England reportage; this subsequently generated a purple period of assignments from editorial publications; Frank; the Face and Arena magazines, all of which were forced to close shortly after Dench began contributing. As the editorial market declined and digital photography swept aside analogue, Dench failed to adapt and decided to take up the pen, with catastrophic results.

Dench pinpoints his demise in the photographic industry to the day his first Dench Diary was published in Professional Photographer magazine; a cringing account of his incapabilities to succeed in the industry. The diary was commissioned on the understanding that it was as an honest account of the daily life and struggles of a sometime working professional photographer. The diary begins with an entry chronicling a time Dench was forced to take a job flipping eggs in the canteen at Capital Radio to help pay for his hair regain treatment. He now sees this as a missed opportunity and believes if he had remained working in the canteen at Capital Radio, he could have achieved the position of deputy shift manager. The Dench Diary backfired spectacularly after his often shocking travails and tales of binge drinking were exposed as fraudulent. This, ironically, lead Dench to begin boozing heavily. Professional Photographer magazine sued and an industry turned its back. Increasingly desperate attempts to ingratiate himself back into favour with his profession ended in shame when Dench exposed himself during a book signing at the prestigious Arles photography festival in France.

After an uncomfortable hour in his company, I ask the taciturn Dench; “Is there anything you miss in life, anything at all?” I’m sure I detect his eyes moisten as he fixes my gaze. “I miss… I miss… I miss the cricket.”

Peter Dench is an innovator of 21st-century image-making, best known for his projects documenting important social issues in a witty style. I meet him in The Alex, the bar he now owns and from where operates his global business. Dench, now 60, doesn’t look a day over 40 and still dresses as he always has: in the revered football casual terrace style of the 1980s - a vintage, vintage, vintage red Fila polo shirt buttoned neatly under his noble chin. He is sat in the spot where he can be found when he isn’t off doing charitable deeds under the ‘Freedom of Perpignan’ plaque awarded to him after he thwarted a riot at the 2012 Visa Pour l’Image International Festival of Photojournalism, which had threatened to engulf Perpignan’s main square. Dench propels himself enthusiastically from his seat as I arrive and shakes me warmly by the hand, whispering a request for a bottle of 1989 Château Haut-Brion and two glasses from the sartorially elegant and delightfully fragrant maître d’.

Dench achieved what he set out to do as a cricketer before turning 14 and then turned his attention to photography, documenting the life of the elderly at the care home where his doting mother worked. From there he romped through academia achieving a double first from the University of Derby for his photographic reportage on upper-class English schools and a dissertation that redefined the work of Dr Hugh Welch Diamond’s use of photography in the treatment of nineteenth-century female lunatics (a copy of the paper is available on request from the British Library and The Royal Society of Medicine). Arriving in London, Dench immediately impressed and was invited to join the prestigious Independent Photographers Group (IPG), an agency that represented many photographers Dench had studied at university, photographers that are now friends and godparents to the eleven children he adopted after they were orphaned as a consequence of the civil war that engulfed Scotland shortly after it rejected independence. In collaboration with IPG, Dench would eventually complete an assignment in every country across the planet.

After Dench had paid off his parents’ mortgage and upgraded them to a house in Poundbury, Dorchester (a town built according to the principles of Prince Charles), he embarked on an ambitious three-year project documenting the alcohol-drinking habits of the English. The reportage became an instant classic, delivering the first of his 13 World Press Photo awards and was subsequently published as a book translated into 27 different languages, a book described by international thriller writer and winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature Tom Knox as: “A clever, poignant, challenging, sometimes dazzling, sometimes affecting photo-diary of Anglo-Celtic drunkenness. The result is a unique and compelling visual history, full of photography that bears a striking resemblance to the drinking it depicts: at best it is perfectly intoxicating.” Dench’s editorial career blossomed, his constant contributions to the Sunday Times, Telegraph, GQ, Marie Claire and Tatler magazines reversed a decline in editorial publications and revived an industry. As the editorial market continued to recover, Dench decided to take up the pen in addition to the Olympus, with hilarious results.

Dench pinpoints the catalyst for his global success in the photographic industry as the day his first Dench Diary was published in Professional Photographer magazine; it was a sharply observed, layered and satirical account of his life as a sometime working professional photographer. The diary begins with an entry chronicling a voluntary eleven-day stint he undertook, flipping eggs in the canteen at Capital Radio to raise money for the Save the Children charity. The Dench Diary became to photography what Kitchen Confidential is to the culinary world. The royalties enabled Dench to launch the flagship Gallery Dench UK in London’s Mayfair, a brand that has been rolled out across Europe and become a career highlight for photographers to exhibit at.

After an engaging afternoon in his company, I ask the enigmatic Dench; “Is there anything you miss in life, anything at all?” I’m sure I detect his eyes moisten as he fixes my gaze. “I miss… I miss… I miss the cricket.”

In Conversation With Chris Floyd

What is love? Before Christ, at a Greek drinking party, Plato hypothesised about the purpose and nature of love. In A Lover’s Discourse Roland Barthes pontificates on love: “I encounter millions of bodies in my life; of these millions, I may desire some hundreds; but of these hundreds, I love only one.” And in 1993, the Trinidadian-German singer Nestor Alexander Haddaway, better know by his stage name, Haddaway, sang the question: “What is love?” Love has led nations to war and back again to peace; it has inspired men to greatness and driven them to take their own life; it has given us the freedom to dream and a million reasons to breathe.

©Chris Floyd

What is love? I take a trip to Marylebone railway station, arguably the most adorable gateway in to and out of London. Men in straw hats smooth their Marylebone Cricket Club ties; the shoeshine stand is brisk with business; soft bellied ramblers and academics dressed in paisley mix among the smell of freshly baked bread; an elderly gentleman rubs charcoal across a sheet of paper covering a blue plaque fixed to the wall dedicated to poet and friend of the railways Sir John Betjeman. With the Haddoway hit resonating around my head, I board a train to Banbury to meet the man who has answered the question ‘what is love?’ He has seen it, experienced it and, most remarkably of all, photographed it.

At Banbury, the man I’m here to meet isn’t and I’m instructed instead to take a taxi to the Falkland Arms pub (silver award winner of the Toast of Wadworthshire 2013 Marketing Pub of the Year) in Great Tew. The taxi driver asks which route to take; I tell him I’ve no idea how to get there. It’s a rookie mistake; he chooses the longer of the two routes. As we sweep past green ‘Fresh Asparagus for Sale’ signs, and brown ones to denote ‘Ducks Crossing’, the taxi driver asks if I mind if he makes a phone call. I say I don’t mind; it’s a rookie mistake as it turns out I do mind. In between snapping chewing-gum bubbles, he hacks forth a dialect down his cell phone loud enough to be heard in the dustiest corners of Baghdad.

Stepping from the taxi at this outpost of English countryside, I take an outside seat at the 300 year old (looking) table opposite the forty-something (looking) portrait photographer, Chris Floyd. The pubs motto swings silently on the sign behind him: In Utroque Fidelis ‘faithful in both’. As Floyd gets the beers in, I look through his book of love Things May Change, But This Will Stay The Same. Across the thick textured pages, amongst the autumnal colours and setting sun, we are able to join Floyd in his infatuation. We gaze at a flame-haired young woman stretching out in a car; disrobing in the bathroom; eating a sandwich; smoking a cigarette; sleeping. Sometimes she gazes straight back, more often not. The book represents a short sharp moment in time of how you fall in love. The relationship between Floyd and the young woman, ten years his junior, accelerated from the ruins of 9/11 across the roads of the USA; New Orleans - Houston - Alberquerque, - frequently stopping at motel rooms and Amaretto-stocked bars until, inevitably, this listless drifting love with no agenda reached the end of the road.

©Chris Floyd

He tells me the name of the Botticelli beauty but I won’t tell you. If you have seen, or you own, one of the 100 books produced, you’ll already have your own name for her. As Floyd writes so eloquently in the introduction; “It doesn’t matter what her name is because I’m looking at an ideal of how I wanted love to be and remain, of how I saw a woman when I fell in love with her. This is love, for the first time, as shell shocked and stunned wonder that this thing, this person, has been put here, on Earth, in front of me, in my lifetime and has the emphatic power to make the time in my days go quicker, slower or nowhere at all.” In time, Floyd has loved again and relocated from London to the countryside with his loving family: wife Alice and children Scarlet and Belle. It’s taken time for this self-confessed London obsessive to readjust to the country and its everyone-knows-about-you life.

Aged 22, during a summer break from his studies at a Surrey technical college, Floyd left for London, his head full of stories from his London-lived grandfather who was hit on the head by notorious British gangster, Jack Spot. Against a backdrop of Poll Tax riots, Floyd quickly landed a job (via an assistant photographer’s recorded message telephone hotline) with a jobbing photographer shooting for Woman’s Own, the TV Times and crafting head shots of aspiring thespians. Floyd quickly lost the job, on the anniversary of the French Revolution, after too many rolls of film perished on the metal spools in developing tanks. Floyd was only familiar with the self winding white Patterson brand plastic spools.

©Chris Floyd

As Floyd forks ham and eggs into his mouth and German-American parents change a baby’s diaper in the boot of a Volvo parked opposite, he explains discovering photography in his mid-teens and rapidly realising it could be an effective tool to meet people who do great or even dastardly things. He talks of the photographers he admires – Ewen Spencer, Elaine Constantine, Juergen Teller – and he talks about his passion for listening to black soul music jamming sessions. It’s a process not unlike his own photographic practice, where each image is layered with choices: lens, location, post-production and light – each element building up a style and momentum that can be tweaked, enhanced or pulled back on. His work has taken him from London to Paris to New York (where he met Alice) and to many places in between. His portraits and short films of some of the world’s most high-profile stars have earned him global recognition and accolades. Floyd was there at the beginning of the lad mag phenomenon, photographing for Loaded magazine and he was one of the few photographers who made the successful transition to GQ magazine, when Loaded’s inaugural editor, James Brown, took the helm there.

Floyd puts down the lady’s hairclip he’s been intermittently fiddling with and we depart the Falklands Arms in high spirits, then immediately burn our backsides on the black seats of his leased Mercedes Benz estate. Driving like a Londoner, Floyd points out the general direction of the home of fellow portrait photographer Nadav Kander, that bloke who created the Daleks and fashion designer Patrick Grant, who persuaded Floyd to move here after they toured the country together on assignment for Esquire magazine. We scorch to a stop at wine bar in Chipping Norton, sommelier Richard informs us he has just spotted actor Patrick Stewart, then we scoot over to Trev Beadle, the family butcher, for rib eye steaks. Unfortunately Trev wasn’t there after busting his leg in a field, Floyd asks Lee, who has a pig hoisted on his shoulder, to send Trev his get well wishes. A final look at the book shop before finally heading home towards family Floyd, past Tracy Farm, a proposed new outpost for the Soho House set and across the boundary of Hook Norton, a village on the way to nowhere.

Stepping over sleeping schnauzer Marmite (I love him), past a framed David Bailey contact sheet, Floyd takes me up to the ’hub’, a former cinema room in the house from which he conducts his day-to-day business. There are open draws full of Kodak Portra 160 and Ilford FP4 film and party invites from the American Ambassador to London as well as notes of thanks from fashion designer and film director Tom Ford and former visual editor of the New Yorker Elisabeth Biondi. A bronze cast of Belle’s baby foot stands on stacked Agent Provocateur postcards, a commission that has unfortunately run its corset (insert groan). 

#Portwit - The Great Twitter Portrait Project - Day One from Chris Floyd on Vimeo.

In one corner of the hub leans a framed poster from another of Floyd’s notable projects, which I finger with regret. In the summer of 2010, Floyd began to photograph the people he followed on Twitter. I received an email asking if I’d like to participate, the sun was out, a bottle of wine was open and I declined the invite. Others flocked to take part and the project ended where it had to, at 140 characters, the maximum number of a single tweet. The Great Twitter Portrait Project (TGTPP) aroused the interest of a nation. Never the quickest to realise a good idea, I belatedly tried to get involved, taking my family to be photographed at Wallpaper* Tweetlife, a TGTPP inspired initiative hosted at the 2011 Multiplied Contemporary Editions Fair at Christie’s in South Kensington. Heading downstairs to take the kids to the convenience store for sweets, Floyd summarises that for him, truly creative individuals make truly creative things whether they are being paid or not and confesses to having a short attention span, lacking confidence and being prone to focusing on his failures and what he hasn’t achieved. 

Back from the shop, I excuse myself from a conversation with Scarlet about earwax and probe the kitchen, where Floyd and Alice are squabbling about the type of taps required for the new shower room. I grab a San Miguel lager from the fridge, exit for a seat in the garden among the warblers and blackcaps and open Things May Change at an image of a jackknifed juggernaut by the side of a road. As the ballad It Must Have Been Love by Swedish pop duo Roxette crescendos on Absolute 80s radio (‘the UK’s only 80s music radio station’) Floyd strides purposefully past en route to the Banbury bathroom showroom, clips closed the gate, pauses with keys in hand at the car and turns back to face Alice who is leant against the front door frame and asks “Blow me a kiss?”.