NNF10: Thank You!

With a mug of tea in one hand, wiping my brow with the other, I sit at my computer agog at the flurry of brilliance that has passed my eyes over the past fortnight. I have seen middle-aged men causing pandemonium using streams of paper and leaf blowers, and a lady performing acrobats inside a chandelier. I have seen a man playing a ukulele standing on a fellow man’s back, and the front and back of a van welded together on a golf buggy chassis, blurting out music. I have seen an enormous Red Ball jammed between my hairdresser and a city church, and I have seen ice cream vans dreamily calling and responding to each other around different Norwich neighbourhoods.



The past fortnight has been an eclectic frenzy of excitement, expertise and eccentricity. This year’s performers at the Norfolk & Norwich Festival have delighted and stunned their various audiences, bringing colour, verve and, significantly, the attention of the nation to the fine city. This year, no single act or performer stands out amongst the others – not even John Cale. The strength of this Festival was in the collective participation and the array of glittering acts that graced the Festival Gardens and Norwich’s other familiar stages.



I chatted to a man a few weeks ago who bemoaned the Festival, claiming that it was too ‘exclusive’ and had ‘ideas above its station’. I couldn’t disagree any more fervently. Ideas above its station, indeed. I repeat: I have seen middle-aged men causing pandemonium using streams of paper and leaf blowers at this Festival, and that was on the very first day. What could be more accessible? The world premiere of Dan Jones’ ‘Music for Seven Ice Cream Vans’ was held nowhere other than around the neighbourhood of Mile Cross, bringing smiling children, parents and elderly couples to their living room windows and front gardens in droves. No, no, sir, you’re right, how terribly exclusive…



At a Festival so well timed to coincide with Norwich’s bid for City of Culture 2013, it was tremendous and heartening to have been both amongst the audience and, as a photographer, at the forefront of so many vibrant performances. The events of the last two weeks will surely have helped the city’s bid – but more importantly, whether it was for fifteen minutes of dreamy music floating around people’s back gardens, or for night after night of fabulous enjoyment, the Festival brought beaming smiles to thousands of people.



Right-o. Time to look ahead. 6th – 21st May 2011 – I don’t know about you, but I can't wait to feel this exhaustion all over again...

Red Ball

It won’t have gone unnoticed to many of you that I have been following Kurt Perschke’s Red Ball as it has popped up in (so far) ten places around the city of Norwich, as part of the Norfolk & Norwich Festival. It has been at times inconvenient and at times tiring; I have sought it in pouring rain and in gleaming sunshine; I have photographed it from staircases and from the ground, amongst ants, but over the past fortnight (and for the next few days, indeed) I have followed its progress, interested to see how it transforms the appearance of the various areas of the city that it graces. Lord, how it has transformed them.

My thinking throughout the project has been predominantly focussed upon one aspect of the Red Ball’s presence – how it highlights certain aspects of the city’s features and architecture that would otherwise go unnoticed. There are other aspects of the Red Ball project too, of course – of which more later – but as a photographer, the altered cityscape (bet you never thought you’d hear that word in Norwich) has been a particular area of interest. In simple terms, the simple focal point of the Red Ball has transformed impressive, though perhaps less photogenic, buildings into photographic opportunities really worth thinking about.

The first location, Norwich rail station, represented a particularly good example. Myself included, many photographers appear to have struggled to make genuinely good use of the architecture of that building, for a striking and imaginative image. Cue the Red Ball:



Suddenly, there is a focal point, an object of interest for the eye to begin with as it moves around the photograph, beginning in the bottom right hand corner, and moving anti-clockwise. The lines of the building suddenly become significant, leading the eye first upwards, then on a slope to the right hand corner, capturing a host of details of the building along the way, before the eye returns to the Red Ball. The really interesting thing about it is that this effect does not necessitate the Ball being a massive presence in the image. In this, and in the other photographs, it has been enough simply to include it as an incidental detail. It's not the Ball, it's the work that it does.

This way of thinking applies to each of my Red Ball photographs, and hopefully encourages you to take more notice of the city around you, as it has done for me. Who would have thought that the railings of St. Peter Mancroft Church could play such a dynamic part in an image? Again - it's a photograph that wouldn't work half so well without the Red Ball to provide the initial point of interest.



This morning, I managed to collar Kurt Perschke for a short chat, outlining this one interpretation of the Red Ball project. Nodding in agreement, he was also keen to highlight the other effects that the project has wherever it goes. The Red Ball has the most significant element of a brilliant piece of public art: the ability to capture the imagination of all the public. I have seen children playing dead beneath it for comic effect; Kurt mentioned a pair of old ladies he observed discussing the Ball: 'It works better here than it did yesterday!' There is a wonderful humour in the thought that these ladies' attention could be captivated by something so simple, in a completely different way to young children who enjoy it in a more physical manner, bouncing off it and flying about. 'Its presence is like a Monty Python sketch', Kurt said, and he certainly wasn't the first person to say that to me.

Kurt seemed initially a trifle reticent in telling me his thoughts on the purpose of the project - with good reason. Clearly, my photographer's eyes created their own reason for the project's existence; the old ladies he mentioned had their own; the multitude of children will have had their own reasons too, as well as the parents, and all the people who have walked and driven past it over the fortnight. As these layers of meaning, individual to each different person, began to unravel during our conversation, Kurt returned to the point - the project inspires new visions, stirs the imagination, encourages thought, in more ways than any blog could hope to document. That, my dears, is good art.

Red Ball on Flickr

Red Ball Project

Just a wee suggestion...

This seems a timely time to make a little suggestion. At such an early stage of my career, I am fully aware that I am no voice of authority in any capacity on matters in photography, and I must add, and emphasise, that the suggestion doesn’t even need to be made to most photographers who may read this post, but I do feel justified in commenting on this one bugbear.

The launch of the Norfolk & Norwich Festival last Friday was a wondrous event, such enjoyment, excitement, enthusiasm amongst both the crowd and the performers. The Festival really did get off to a flying start (of which, plenty more later). Like tens of other photographers and hundreds of people, I was there, sometimes joining the crowd to sample that magnificent atmosphere, sometimes running ahead of the performers for action shots. It was cracking fun to be amongst the audience and amongst the other adrenaline-fuelled photographers, as it always is, although I was a trifle saddened to observe one or two children being shoved forcefully out of the way for a couple of shots. This is no reflection, you understand, on the jovial spirit on the part of almost every single photographer present, and I do sympathise entirely with the desire to get shots right – but surely attending an event such as Friday’s launch must carry with it a responsibility to allow other people to enjoy themselves, not to sully their experience, and especially not to cause actual upset to the young children that the performance was in no small part created for.

The three things I always say to budding new photographers are to learn the camera’s functions inside out, to get used to embarrassing themselves and, above all, to endeavour to be good company when photographing. Good photography is often intrusive, and often does involve a degree of self-centredness, of course, but I think I have good grounds to say that there is very, very rarely any need to behave like a churlish wet blanket - particularly to children.

I do hope that the rest of the Festival goes as swimmingly as it has so far – and I am very sorry to have magnified and scrutinised one or two small actions, when the attention should of course be on the hundreds of wonderful acts dotted around the fine city – it just seems a pertinent time to encourage people to enter the spirit of the most enjoyable two weeks of the whole year – or at the very least, not to prevent other people from entering that spirit.

...and the mystery photographer is...

Many of my favourite artists, writers and musicians tend to make eccentric choices. From the melancholic atmospheres of Caspar David Friedrich, to the tickling wordpsmithery of PG Wodehouse, via the outright gut laughter inspired by Jerome K Jerome and the veering imagination of Tom Waits, they are masters of their chosen arts. As far as photographers go, other people will know far more than I do but you would have to dig really rather deep to come up with a photographer whose work would captivate my attention, and have me poring over every minute detail, more than that of a comparatively little-known German called Hans Göhler.

Göhler – or John Gay, as he anglicised his name after fleeing to England with Jewish friends in the 1930s – showed a wonderful blend of technical mastery, flair, vision, empathy, humour, imagination, individuality and, above all, understanding in every image he captured. Judging from the tremendous book of photographs I have in front of me, whether adults, children, animals, rural scenes, railway stations or even cast iron were his subject, Göhler demonstrated that he could set up a scene with playfulness and skill, or disappear into the background with equal ease; his understanding of types of light allowed him to create atmospheric photographs in all conditions, while his ability to capture multiple significant details in the same image – a vision he demonstrated time and again – is something that all photographers, at all levels, could learn from. I could, of course, gush on all day about the output of this wonderful photographer, but to do so would a) do a massive injustice to his work and b) bore you to tears. Here, then, are some examples to set you on your way. Enjoy Hans Göhler in what would have been his 100th year.












I think you'll agree. Superb. He will influence my work for years and years to come.

(Photographs appear courtesy of English Heritage)

Vicki Johnson & Jo Stafford @ STEW

My pleasure yesterday to photograph an exhibition of prints and textiles by NUCA alumni Vicki Johnson and Jo Stafford, on throughout this week and intermittently for the next month. Talent in profusion (and they haven't asked me to write this, by the bye) - do head along to STEW gallery (not far from Norwich Cathedral) and have a look for yourself. Have provided a couple of taster images, if you're interested.