The Way I Dress: Mr Matthew Moneypenny
The second in the new series of 5 films for Mr Porter, shot in an apartment in Paris. Matthew Moneypenny is the CEO & President of Trunk Archive, the people who represent the absolute best and greatest in photography that is available for licensing usage. I know photo editors who spend their lunch hour looking at this site because the work they represent is so pleasurable to look at. I would say that though, I’m lucky enough to have my archive represented by them too.
Agent Provocateur Classics
My second campaign for Agent Provocateur, a shoot for their 2012 Classics range of underwear, kicked off with a 6am start on a cold, dark February morning at Spring Studios in London. My set was to consist of 20 square metres of charcoal grey silk and a yellow perspex floor. This later became off black in post production but for technical reasons I needed a light floor to reflect some light back onto the model. The AP team built a frame to support it all, at a height off the ground that would allow me to get far enough beneath the models to be able to shoot from the low angle that I wanted to achieve on these.
For inspiration I had been thinking a little bit of Bill Brandt’s work, particularly his beach nudes. I wanted to light these pictures so that there was nothing direct coming from in front of the model. All the lights, 6 in total, heavily softened and diffused, came from behind and were directed towards a long screen of white polyboards in front of the model. I wanted the tone and texture of the skin to take on an alabaster feel which I felt I could only really achieve by bathing the body in purely reflected light. Think of it as being done under the thickest, whitest, blanket cloud imaginable, with only the subtlest kisses of highlight round the edges of the body. This was what I had in my head before we began and, unusually for me, I stuck to it on the day. The second part of the Brandt influence was to take the idea of using quite a wide angle lens and to shoot from extreme low angles, so as to exaggerate the length of the legs. Wide angle lenses are anathema in fashion photography, longer lenses are more flattering to the features and compress the subject so that it’s easier to make everything look softer and more beautified. I liked the idea of going against the grain for Agent Provocateur in this way.
As the crack of dawn showed it’s face outside the studio windows two of my all time favourite collaborators, make up artist Kay Montano and hairdresser Eamonn Hughes, set to work on the blonde Valerie and the brunette Charlotte in their own talented way. Meanwhile, the rest of us sat around and ate carbohydrate products until we were ready to start shooting.
Two wind machines, two laptops and two camera bodies later, we had 19 shots in the bag and a tray of Margheritas to end on. The great thing about working for Agent Provocateur is the attitude and energy that creative director, Sarah Shotton, contributes to the day. She has a brilliant way of ramping up the girls to a level that brings out a great performance. Her red headed presence is the living embodiment of AP, she is the AP girl and can get away with saying things that, coming from my mouth, would just be plain wrong.
To see more of my work for Agent Provocateur please visit my website.
Here’s a montage of behind the scenes shots. Thanks to Nic Serpell-Rand for doing these.
Agent Provocateur Classics Shoot - February 2012
The Way I Dress: Mr Waris Ahluwalia
The first of a new series of 5 films for Mr Porter. This was shot at the Mercer Hotel in New York City in February 2012.
One Hundred And Forty Characters: The Book
One Hundred And Forty Characters: Front/Back Cover and Spine Proof. Designed by Wayne Ford.
This feels like it will never end. While everybody else came to the party, stayed for a drink and left, I have been stuck in the room with all 140 of them for almost a year. It has taken me that long to gather up written pieces from as many of them as I can. Those that didn’t get back to me are too late. I tried, oh I tried. Nevertheless, over 120 people worked their brains to a pulp to give me something insightful, revealing, funny, thoughtful, worrying and optimistic on Twitter, photography, being photographed, 9/11, society, evolution and a thousand other things, as well as collectively creating an impression for future generations of what it means and feels like to be alive today.
The end result is a fantastic 172 page book, featuring written contributions from almost everybody who took part in my 2010/11 quest to photograph 140 of the people I follow on Twitter, as well as the portraits themselves.
One Hundred And Forty Characters: Front/Back Cover and Spine Proof with Blind Emboss Outlines. Designed by Wayne Ford.
In all the talking I’ve done on this project over the last year, time and again I have come back to the role technology plays in making human lives infinitely more convenient, while at the same time conspiring to drive a wedge between us physically. This has been so ever since the invention of the telegraph. The overwhelming response to ‘One Hundred And Forty Characters’ has been positive. The trolls have been contained to an area the size of a trolley and I am convinced that this is because the people who have seen it have innately understood and recognised that deep in our make up we understand that we are pack animals. We need to meet, gather and be together in common cause. OFC is that writ graphically and simply, only made possible because of technology, a lever to allow the conversion of potential energy into kinetic energy.
This has happened in several phases and stages. One, I invited people to my studio via Twitter. Right there they are out of the Twitter window and through my door, in my face. I can see how tall they are, what they sound like, what sort of phone they’ve got, where they came from and on and on. Two, when the project ended there was an exhibition and about 100 of the 140 came to the opening night. This made real a physical manifestation of Twitter’s daily virtual world, where they could all get up in each other’s faces and find out the same stuff I did, but with added alcohol. Finally, all of them are brought together for posterity, into hard copy format, ink on paper, with their thoughts to stand beside them.
“It’s a confessional, a Samaritan, a water cooler and a soapbox all rolled into one.”
- @mostly_grumpy
'One Hundred And Forty Characters' at Foto8 Gallery, London - November 2011
As the years pass and we travel ever further into a world where online relationships will be nothing more than our daily reality, this combination of portraits and words will come to serve as a big old time capsule of what we thought social media was in its earliest days. Oh! how we will look back and laugh at our naiveté, I’m sure.
‘One Hundred And Forty Characters’ is available as a 172 page book, printed in England by F.E. Burman, in a limited edition format, on Fedrigoni Xper 140gsm with a blind embossed cover on Fedrigoni Xper 320gsm. Thank you to Wayne Ford for his beautiful design and art direction and also, Eleanor O’Kane, who proof read every single word and made the necessary corrections to the text.
The book is available directly from here for £35.00 for UK buyers. Click on the first link below:
For buyers from outside the UK the book is £40.00 and you should click here:
Finally, one more treat for you. So you can see just what you’ll be getting for your money, here’s a great little video of the book’s text pages, with a voiceover by me, that took 14 attempts to nail. Lots to look at, lots to read, get yours today. Thirty years from now your kids will be staring at this in wonder thinking, “How did they live like that?”
Guess Who?
I must give the man some kudos here. With most of the people that I photograph it’s a ‘that’ll do’ attitude that carries them through the process. A collaboration is what I’m looking for but, often, what I get is a muted co-operation. Yeah…go on then, just do it quick. I know one Hollywood publicist whose number one criteria when approving photographers for shoots involving his clients is ‘How quick are you?’
Ricky Gervais, photographed for the American edition of Mens Health on 5th December 2011.
I have photographed Ricky Gervais 5 times and, unlike most, he gives much more. He can be tentative initially, a little wary, but once he has committed to an idea he’s up for it in all it’s forms.
I once photographed him for a Christmas related story, in the middle of July, which involved a terrible sweater and Kermit the Frog. We were trying to make it look like Ricky & Kermit were sharing a laugh together in an old skool Christmas Radio Times kind of way. We shot hundreds of frames and were really struggling with it. He persisted with the inanimate frog for much longer than one would have expected until, at last, he decared, “Wait! I’ve got it, I’ve got it! Whattabout like this?……”
The second time I photographed him was at the Dorchester Hotel in London. I was told I had 3 minutes and when he came in he acknowledged how little time we had been given, so offered to do whatever he could to make it work. I said I was going to recite a list of 1970′s sitcom actors and would photograph his reaction on hearing the name of each one. Number 8 was ‘On The Buses’ star Reg Varney, who I think looks like Gervais in a sort of lackadaisical 1970′s way. Evidently, Reg’s name had it’s own effect on him because it yielded this reaction…
This time we were doing a shoot to illustrate his recent heavy weight loss, brought on by boxing and running. It needed some energy and he really did bring it. He battered that punchball for as long as I exhorted him to keep at it and after each kick he would come to the computer, examine it carefully and then insist on giving it another go until he felt the image looked right. Here’s what we got…..
The Badge Of A Wifebeater
This is as heavy as any piece of armour worn at Agincourt. Created by Fee Doran of Mrs Jones in London. Among her other creations was a pair of trousers made for Justin Hawkins of The Darkness. The unique thing about those was that they were made entirely from pairs of knickers thrown at him onstage by female fans. Tasty.
Remembrance Of Things Past: Elizabeth Jagger & Bodybuilder, 2002.
Elizabeth Jagger & Bodybuilder 1. New York City, 2002
I have been digitizsing a lot of my archive in the last year. Well, I say ‘a lot’ but really I’ve bagged up maybe 5%, something like that. I worked on film for 16 years before I switched to digital photography, so I dread to think what it would be like for someone 30 years older than me whose entire career is on film. When I contemplate the magnitude of the task, I close my eyes and picture myself standing there, all little, with a dull eyed Charlie Brown look of puzzlement, anxiety and fear on my face. In this imagined tableau, there is, in front of me, the most enormous fucking mountain you’ve ever seen. Far bigger than Everest. In this scenario Everest would fit on to a cereal box.
However, to alleviate this fear of the big task, I should spend more time reminding myself about the forgotten work I trip over and re-discover every time I submit myself to the process. I’m not afraid to admit this but I’m getting to the point where I enjoy the process of looking back as equally as I do the process of looking forward. I suppose it could be considered the opposite of a midlife crisis, in that I have reached a point where I’ve grown into myself and have come to accept what I am with magnanimity and gratitude. I know what my faults are and I know what my strengths are. I know how to deploy one in the suppression of the other. Looking at old work causes me to confront the mistakes I made in arriving at this juncture. After all, wisdom is, I believe, nothing more than the accumulative lessons learned from a lifetime of mistakes.
Elizabeth Jagger & Bodybuilder 2. New York City, 2002
This series of fashion portraits of Elizabeth Jagger I was commissioned to do in 2002 by Steven Baillie for Surface Magazine is a good example of the simple pleasure to be had from rummaging around in the crates of my past. I had utterly forgotten that I had done them until I found a set of 11″x14″ black & white selenium toned fibre prints in a box in the storage unit where I keep it all. The storage unit is a 24 hour, remote access kind of place. It’s cold, it’s desolately eerie and I don’t like going there. There’s always something banging and clanging out of sight. I worry that bad stuff could happen.
Of course as soon as I had spent a few minutes rediscovering the pictures it began to meander back. Milk, the big New York studio, gave me one of their spaces for virtually nothing. There was a casting call for a very old school type of bodybuilder. We really wanted a pre-steroids era kind of guy. I had just bought an iPod, they had only been around for a few months. It was set to random shuffle. Early in the day it threw up ‘Miss You’ by The Rolling Stones. I remember being mortifyingly embarrassed in the presence of the daughter of a Rolling Stone.
As for what I said earlier about confronting the mistakes of the past in the endeavour to build a better future, I’m slightly embarrassed to say that, looking at these images now, there is nothing about them that I would have done differently. There is nothing they can teach me. I just like looking at them, I’m not ashamed of them. Writing about them here is an indulgence. But that’s ok, there’s loads of other crap in my rear view mirror that I can learn from. But it can also be said that it’s possible to turn a good career into a great career merely by employing the services of a brilliant editor.
I searched for all the negatives from the shoot but I couldn’t find them. Maybe they got lost when I moved back to London from New York in 2006. Is that bad? Or does it make me value these 3 perfectly flat and preserved fibre prints even more? I like to think that it really does.
Elizabeth Jagger & Bodybuilder 3. New York City, 2002
The Way I Dress: Mr David McAlmont
Sheila Hancock
Sheila Hancock, London, 2011
A portrait of Sheila Hancock, actress, photographed in London in September 2011. As soon as she walked into the studio I knew. The voice in my head said “Yes, I can do something with her.”
The hard part is getting the subject into a place where they are willing to let go and trust you to a point where you can create the space and the atmosphere to get the thing you’re after. Fortunately for me, Miss Hancock utterly gave herself up to the process, allowing me to pull out of her the portraits that I was looking for. A rare treat.
As always, getting the subject into a place where they open up and trust you was the most important part. I do this by keeping a physical distance at the beginning. I come closer slowly. It’s like music. It’s not enough to just read the notes, you need to feel your way through it with grace and alertness. Get up to the peak efficiently, read the mood and keep reading the mood. Work with it, react to it and guide it. Once you’ve passed the peak get back down to ground level gently, say thank you and let them leave in time for lunch.
The Way I Dress: Mr Sean Avery
The third of five films for Mr Porter, featuring well turned out gents ruminating on how they arrived at their personal style angle. Click here to see it on their site. Also shot in New York, this features Sean Avery, a professional ice hockey player, originally from Toronto, Canada and now playing with the New York Rangers. Watch the way he does a little cleansing rub of his hands after he completes each piece of the dressing ritual. I love that stuff.
The Way I Dress: Mr Douglas Friedman
This is the second of five films for Mr Porter - click here to see how it looks on their site. This was shot on a 99F day in Brooklyn, New York in July 2011. My subject was Douglas Friedman, a New York based photographer. If we allow ourselves the space then the minutes when a man gets dressed can be the most calm and reflective of the day. That’s what I have tried to evoke in these films.
What is England?
'Work': From the series 'What is England?'
Last year I took part in a project entitled ‘What Is England?’, curated by photographer Stuart Pilkington. The idea was that each of England’s 50 counties would be represented by a single photographer and, over the course of one year, through a series of fixed assignments the project would build a pictorial idea of what England is today. I represented Surrey.
'Person': From the series 'What is England?'
When I volunteered to take part I was asked to write something on the county and what it meant to me.
“I wasn’t born in Surrey but I was made in Surrey. In the same way that Elvis was made in Memphis. It’s the place that stamped itself on me whether I wished it to or not. I love it and I loathe it. But being a born nostalgic, where the past is always better than any future on offer, I mostly love it now. I love it’s civility, it’s decency, it’s emotional constipation. Nobody in Surrey would dream of burdening you with a need for a solution to a personal problem. It’s a county of Hugh Grants. When people ask me where I’m from I say “Surrey. God’s County.” I leave it to the questioner to decide how that answer is intended or received. Surrey is where I discovered photography, where I bought my first record, where I lost my virginity, where I first got drunk and where London and the future was never more than 20 miles and never less than 20 light years away. It was my home for 9 of my 41 years, less than a quarter of my life and diminishing by the day, but when I think of it I think of Tania Wild in a navy blue v-neck tank top and a half return to Guildford for 55p.”
'Group': From the series 'What is England?'
These pictures don’t reflect the kind of place I grew up in, they are the place I grew up in. As a child I lived in what I can now see was, for me today with children of my own, an existence that is utterly unattainable. The people in the two pictures above now live in the house in which I spent my teenage years. Particularly in these pictures, I have realised that I’m fetishising the 1980′s England that I knew. The village I grew up in was a classic Home Counties English village. There were old school, pre big bang City commuters and locals who were born and bred, with a definite accent that would place them here, with a working life that had been agricultural, although even then you could see that it was dying and the fields were being replaced with ‘Executive’ style estates. The Surrey I grew up in was comfortable, not out and out rich. It had something of John Betjeman about it, something of Agatha Christie, the miners’ strike didn’t come near us. For my Dad, whose childhood was one of wartime evacuation, lonliness and bitter London poverty, this was everything he had dreamed of and worked towards. In one generation our family had moved up from the misery of what had come before. Half my friends went to private schools and half went to ordinary comprehensives. I went to a private school till I was 14. When I begged my parents to take me out of it because I was so unhappy they relented and sent me to a comprehensive. There were idiots and good people in both systems. Any night in one of the five local pubs would have allowed you a view of the social mix. The Public Bar and the Saloon Bar were not so segregated that they couldn’t tolerate cross pollination.
'Rural': From the series 'What is England?'
My trip back to Surrey to take part in this project was a selfish one. I have to admit I made no effort to represent the county in any modern or objective way. Parts of it are a million miles from this part here. No, my sole motivation was to travel back to a time when I felt safe, secure and more certain than I do today. However, as welcoming as the current occupants of my house were, I have to confess that I don’t like what the place has become. The lawn, immaculate in these pictures, seems to represent the massive gulf between the haves and have nots in our country today. It’s the same piece of land on which I spent my formative years, but it doesn’t look anything like the garden I knew, which was a more messy and natural affair. This is an English garden on steroids, the introduction of a banned substance in the form of too much wealth. It seems unhealthy, prone and vulnerable to disease or attack. Looking at these pictures has made me realise that I grew up in an English idyll that doesn’t exist anymore. It was a place where the gap between the top and bottom was not obscene, where the top and bottom mixed in the pub and where the local amateur dramatic society was the place in which they all came together to put on idyllic plays from their own pasts.
'Play': From the series 'What is England?'
Paddy Considine & Peter Mullan Aren’t Dinosaurs
Peter Mullan (L) & Paddy Considine (R)
This was one of those ones where you just want to hang around with them all day and listen in to what they’re talking about. Paddy Considine & Peter Mullan, both fantastic actors and, it seems, human beings too, but wholly uncomfortable when it comes to having to do the kind of thing that they think an encounter with someone like me entails. This was taken for The Daily Telegraph on a junket – a day of publicity in a London hotel suite. Interview after interview. Blah blah blah. Having to promote and talk about the film that they have just made together, in this case it’s ‘Tyrannosaur’, Considine’s first film as a director. He also wrote it. I haven’t seen it yet but I will.
I was the last one of the day which makes it dodecahedrally worse. They were not at all into ‘posing up’ and all that. What kind of pictures did I want? I explained that the way I view a situation of this nature is to regard it as an encounter, a conversation, and the photograph that comes from it is merely the record of the conversation. I told Considine that I learned that from a photographer called Steve Pyke, at which point he said, “Yeah? Steve’s a mate of mine.” I also told him that an image of mine that was used on a single release by The Verve (Lucky Man) had been ripped off and blown up into a huge poster which appeared on the wall of a flat in ‘Dead Man’s Shoes’, the Shane Meadows film in which Considine plays a former soldier returning to reap revenge on those who killed his brother. He asked me if they’d asked my permission and I said no. Then it wasn’t all so bad and I just encouraged both men to stand in front of me and continue the conversation that they had been having as they walked into the room together. I began to take pictures and the frame above is one of them.
For me to get the kind of pictures that I want, I try to create an environment that allows the subject(s) to forget where they are. Fundamentally, I am trying to reveal intimacy and some kind of a truth from a scenario that is innately artificial and demonstrably false. Some people thrive in this situation. I have photographed Hollywood actresses who have no problem doing anything you ask in front of 20 people. With Considine & Mullan though, it was clear that less was once again more. As they talked and seemed to relax into the scene I had no trouble just reaching in and quietly pulling one of them away so I could then concentrate on capturing them individually. By now everything in each of them had relaxed and all was right with the world for the rest of the day.
The Way I Dress: Mr David Macklovitch
This is the first of five films I’ve made for Mr Porter, the recently launched menswear version of the Net-a-Porter womenswear site.
I’ll post them up here as Mr Porter unleash them, which is going to be on a weekly basis I believe.
There is some blurb that goes with the film on the site. Here it is:
“MR PORTER has collaborated with photographer and film-maker Mr Chris Floyd on a series of films in which well-dressed men explain both the tangible and the intangible elements of their style and their wardrobe. “The time a gentleman spends getting dressed in the morning can be a reflective moment, before he charges forward into the world. I wanted the films to feel contemplative rather than dictatorial,” explains Mr Floyd. “They’re an opportunity for these men to explain how they arrived at their notion of style.” First into the fore is the ever-dapper front man Mr David Macklovitch of the Canadian electro-funk duo Chromeo. Quote to listen out for? “One of the first things I noticed with hip-hop music is that a lot of the clothing that people like Biggie was wearing was the same thing my Jewish grandfather in Florida was wearing.”
I would like to say a big thank you to Jeremy Langmead, Jodie Harrison, Leon St. Amour and all of the good people at Mr Porter who not only gave me a free run at making these films but also were really, really gracious in letting me make the films that I wanted to make. Good people.
The 9/11 Patriotic American Roadtrip
Osama bin Laden Effigy & Guys. New Orleans, Louisiana. Nov 2001
In October 2000 I went to New York for a 3 week visit to take my portfolio to magazines and record companies. It was a heady time and I had been working in London for a great bunch of American mags, including Spin, Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair, New York Magazine, Detour and Flaunt among others. I had the sofa of a friend to sleep on so I could afford to spend some time over there cementing my relationships with these people, as well as make some new connections too. It was an itchy, too short sofa but a trip to New York was never something that would allow a thing like an itchy, too short sofa to get in the way. The meetings went well and in the 3rd week of the trip I started to get calls from people I’d been to see in the first 2 weeks, asking if I was still in New York and was I interested in shooting something for them over there.
My 3 week trip became an open ended one with only Christmas to book end it. In a short time I discovered the joy of the layover on trips to Oklahoma City, Houston, Fargo, Washington DC and Jacksonville. I loved being sent off on assignments that were, by English standards, over huge distances, requiring hotel stays and odd, late night experiences in small town bars where my accent and demeanour were something to point at and ask questions of. I also remember a day spent with Joel Schumacher in Times Square while he was directing some external scenes for the Colin Farrell movie ‘Phone Booth’. Although the entire film is set inside a Times Square phone booth, everything of Farrell inside the phone booth was shot in Hollywood and only the long shots of him from outside the booth were done in NY.
Christmas arrived all too quickly and already I had begun to think of myself as living in New York. I came home determined to go straight back in the new year of 2001.
Charleston, South Carolina, November 2001
It took a while because I had to find a place to stay and the Christmas break had taken some of the momentum out of it all but in March 2001 I sorted a room with a friend of a friend, who was a musician, in a house in Dumbo, Brooklyn. On Sunday 25th I boarded a Virgin Atlantic flight to JFK airport and arrived to an empty house. My new housemate was away on tour in Europe so I went down to the nearest bar and sat there while the Oscars ceremony played out on the TV. I realised that I had never felt so lonely as I did at that moment. When I had been there before Christmas everything that had gone my way had been a bonus. It was only supposed to be a 3 week fishing trip, everything else had been luck. This time I had made an actual commitment, I had rent to pay and a ticket with a return flight that was 3 months away, the maximum stay allowed on a green tourist visa waiver. The main part of my plan was to find an agent. With an agent I could then secure a visa to live and work there properly. Now there was a target to meet it suddenly didn’t seem so free and easy. All this was running through my head as the world’s most glamourous ceremonial celebration of success rolled in front of me on the telly in the bar. The cheeseburger was really good though.
Sarah somewhere in Maryland. Nov 2001
The very next morning, however, I woke to a gorgeous spring day and a phone call from Catriona Ni Aolain, the deputy photo editor at Esquire Magazine. She had an assignment for me down in Florida to do a portrait of the New York Yankees’ closing pitcher, Mariano Rivera, aka ‘The Hammer of God’. I don’t know anything about baseball and my 15 minutes with Rivera didn’t add to that knowledge in any way whatsoever but at least the job allowed me to build up a layer of confidence in this new adventure. By May 2001 I had found an agent and an immigration lawyer. A visa application had been filed and in late June I returned to London to sit out the waiting period that the visa process required. I was not only eager to get back because of work. There was now a girl for me in that port and I wanted to get back there for her as much as the rest of it. In August the application was approved and after a trip to the American embassy for an interview I was finally issued with an O1 visa in my passport. An O1 is valid for 3 years and is issued to those “who possesses extraordinary ability in the sciences, arts, education,business, or athletics, or who has a demonstrated record of extraordinary achievement in the motion picture or television industry and has been recognized nationally or internationally for those achievements.” I can absolutely assure you that with a great lawyer and an armful of letters testifying to this, proof can be achieved for pretty much anybody as long as you place the prism of subjectivity in the right place on the table of evidence. I travelled back to New York in mid August, where things had gone incredibly quiet in the dog days of summer. I was ok for money though and my main memory of those weeks was scuttling like a rat from one air conditioned environment to another in the oppressively humid New York August heat. One big job did come in though, for a record company. A publicity shoot in, of all places, London. On the 9th September 2001 I got back on a plane to Heathrow. In the taxi to the airport I took this picture of the Manhattan skyline from the Williamsburg Bridge.
New York City, Sept 9th 2001
Two days later I spent the entire afternoon and evening glued to a TV screen as my brand new home appeared to slowly crumble before the world. My flight back was booked for the 15th but there seemed little point in taking it and, besides, there was such a backlog it seemed futile to even try, so I stuck it out in London, relieved to have not been there if I’m really honest. I had been into the Twin Towers on several occasions for portfolio appointments and an agency I had very nearly joined had it’s office right in their shadow across the street. Fortunately all the people that worked there had survived as they began their working day at 10am and the 2nd plane hit just after 9am. I eventually returned to New York sometime around the 20th September and as I made the taxi journey through Manhattan towards King Street I couldn’t believe how quiet the place seemed. Meek would be the word that springs to mind, which is not a word that one would ever have thought of placing in the same sentence as the name of this town. I dumped my bags and went out for a walk. Immediately outside my building as I turned the corner onto 6th Avenue was a FDNY firehouse. I had barely noticed it before and now it was impossible to miss. The home of Engine Company 24/Ladder Company 5 had been turned into a shrine for the guys from the firehouse that had died on September 11th. In the picture below you can see that at least 11 men from that one FDNY post were killed. I continued walking and saw that death was all around. Everywhere there were ‘missing’ posters and flyers. They were stuck on lamp posts and fences, in shop windows and the front of apartment buildings. Anywhere with a flat surface that was exposed to the public space had some kind of piece of paper pleading for people to contact other people.
Firehouse at 6th Ave & W. Houston St. Home of Engine Co. 24, Ladder Co. 5, Battalion 2. Sept 2001
Within 10 days of being back it was clear that the city was going to be depressed and unproductive for a while to come. There was no work coming in, the atmosphere maudlin. Whatsmore, my now girlfriend had been made redundant in the post 9/11 slump and sitting around doing nothing was de rigueur most days. Nobody was hiring. As I wrote in the introduction to a collection of photographs of her from that time that I published earlier this year called “Things May Change But This Will Stay The Same” :
“November 2001. A bleak time, living in New York. Fumes, dust and death hanging in the air, the citizens of the city that never sleeps hiding in, hiding out. Looking back at these photographs now, they are shot with a melancholic and listless drift that at the time was not apparent. A sense that the girl in them has entered a state of inertia, numbed dumbness caused by that cornflower skied morning in the concrete jungle where dreams are made. Is she waiting for the remnants of those events to catch up and finish her off? Or is she passively hanging on for something new to carry her out of it?”
Dry Cleaners Window, Brooklyn, NY. Sept 2001
So we got out and did what Americans have done since day one. We hit the road and made something of it. What follows are more pictures from what I have come to call ‘The 9/11 Patriotic American Roadtrip’ only because that was what I wrote on the big box of negatives that I came back with. These are snapshots of America in shock, just like that girl’s state of numbed dumbness. Passing flashes and snapshots from my memory: having a gun pointed at me in Arkansas by a man whose picture I’d taken; drinking Amaretto all night long in New Orleans and eating beignets the following morning; the family on welfare living in the motel room next door to ours in Oakland; a teenage boy who told me he’d never left Arizona, stating as fact at a Friday night high school football game that President Bush had already ‘eradicated’ 78% of all known terrorists; my friends Miles & Alex meeting up with us in South Carolina; them telling me about the guy in Atlanta who’d asked them if Britain had a lot of Muslims and how did we deal with them; an Indian pilot in Albuqerque being frisked before boarding his own plane; the brothers with the Osama bin Laden effigy hanging from a tree outside their house; the car with these words painted on it’s rear window – “WHEN WE FIND BIN LADEN FUGGETTABOUTIT!”; every telegraph pole in one street of Charleston with a ‘Wanted: Dead or Alive’ poster complete with an image of bin Laden; somebody wearing a t-shirt in New Orleans with an image of bin Laden; the teenage couple living in a formica panelled car in Florida; getting a puncture in a thunderstorm between New Orleans & Galveston, Texas; arriving in Los Angeles and going to see The Strokes.
Saluting the FDNY trucks going down the West Side Highway to Ground Zero
Restaurant. Maryland.
What I remember most as we made our way across the country, from New York down the east coast, through Virginia, Maryland, N.Carolina, S.Carolina, Georgia and Florida before turning west into Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana and Texas and finally on into New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, ending up in California, was the extent to which the greatest tragedy and mass murder ever commited on American soil was being absorbed, to a certain degree, by Calvin Coolidge’s maxim, ‘The business of America is business’. Everywhere we went there was evidence of the commercialisation of 9/11. Flags, stickers, t-shirts, badges, buttons, beefed up security, freedom fries……
I think these pictures, more than anything else, symbolise that but not in the raw, exploitative way that you might think I mean. Instead I came to see it as a manifestation of what Alexis de Tocqueville once referred to as ‘the tyranny of the majority’, whereby the sheer ‘goodness’ of democracy allowed the majority to lord it over the minority, under the guise of due process having been seen to take place. If you were not seen to be publicly expressing grief, empathy and sympathy then there was a high chance your business might suffer. Saccharine sentiment in places of business, from people who hitherto had not expressed much awareness of anything outside of their own narrow definition of the world. In fact, I even detected a sort of undercurrent of animosity towards New York from some of the middle parts of America for being the kind of un-God fearing place that went and got itself attacked in a damned new holy war. Like an errant cousin who has done brought shame on the temperant members of the family, which leads me on to the observation that it was also clear how much of a message push there was in all this for the American church, with it’s ‘well what do you expect if you let Satan into your lives?’ way of selling itself. So much of the return of fundamentalist religion into American politics and the way it has thoroughly corrupted the idea of separation of Church and State can be traced back to what happened on 9/11.
The ultimate display of the way in which public sentiment has been tyrannised into a required form of acceptable, default behaviour is the mandatory expectation for all public officials, from the President on down, to always be seen to be wearing an American flag pin on their lapel. Appear in public without one at your peril and in ten short years this has come to be regarded as not even up for discussion. On the other hand, when the wearing of a poppy on Armistice Day was first mooted there were many First World War veterans, still young men, who regarded it as cheapening the memories of those who died in the trenches and who refused to wear one. Time and perception always evolve, individuals sometimes don’t.
Somewhere in California
American Linen, California
Louisiana
Georgia
New Orleans
North Carolina
McDonalds near the entrance to NASA, Houston
Ex US Marine, Oakland
New Orleans
Teenage Car Couple, Florida
Halfway through the roadtrip, during a five day stay in New Orleans in mid November, the public’s and government’s thirst for some revenge was at last unleashed as the full military might of the United States was brought to bear on the despotic and comedically backwards Taliban government of Afghanistan. The long, never ending ‘war on terror’ was declared. The second half of our journey, from there to Los Angeles began to take on the feel of a voyage into a new and often forbidding world. The Nineties, whatever they were, were already long gone. How I miss them sometimes, how naive they now seem, how free and how optimistic.
New Orleans
TGI Friday
Digging In The Crates: PJ Harvey
PJ Harvey, 2000
Congratulations to PJ Harvey on winning the 2011 Mercury Music Prize. This portrait was taken 11 years ago somewhere in the west country. I can’t remember exactly where other than it was the lounge of a very quiet hotel near to her house.
The End.
Agent Provocateur – “In Praise Of My Bed”
Here is the front and back cover of a project I’ve just completed for Agent Provocateur. It’s for their first range of homeware (bedding is not a sexy word). We toyed for a while with the idea of calling it ‘beaux draps’, which, apparently, is a French phrase for sheets, literally translating as ‘beautiful drapes’, but it never stuck and so we ended up back at “Agent Provocateur – Home’.
This began sometime before last Christmas when Sarah Shotton, AP’s creative director, raised the prospect of working with me on something. Her words, “I know you could totally do something good for us.” got my pulse right up in the late afternoon December gloom. She said she was a fan of my lighting and the way that I photographed women, in her eyes, struck a balance of outright sexiness and dignified celebration, rather than a demeaning objectification. I was flattered that she had noticed because when I photograph a woman I try to take a picture that she will hold on to forever as a celebration of herself in a sort of peak state, literally humming with oestrogen, the defining chemical of femininity. As a husband and a father of two girls, this is the stuff that surrounds me, which I love. This aim is my way of trying to make them fall in love with me and, in a funny way, it’s possible because if you take an amazing picture of a woman there’s a little part of her that will love you forever.
Sarah, several of the other AP girls and I spent about six weeks throwing ideas back and forth at each other. What kind of mood did we want? What kind of girl? What kind of tone? Light? Or dark? Eventually we felt that an art deco vibe might be the right way to take this and, once that theme fell into place, it became a question of finding a location that would frame it. As soon as we were confronted with the formidable and glorious beauty of the art deco room at Eltham Palace in south east London we knew we had it. Originally a manor house, it was acquired by Edward 2nd in 1305 and it was also where Henry 8th spent much of his childhood. In the 1930′s the house was bought by Stephen Courtauld of the textile dynasty and he and his wife, Virginia, built the room that we shot these pictures in. Perfectly round, with a pair of symmetrical staircases, it was modelled on an ocean liner, the height of luxury motion in a pre-air travel age. Our final major discussion was on what the bed should look like and Sarah came up with the idea of the semi-circular, 8 foot high, mirrored bed head, which we had made for the shoot and which is now on display in Agent Provocateur’s New York store at 675 Madison Avenue.
As well as a full day of stills photography I had also committed to directing a short film for the AP website. As well as the kind of girl who could turn herself into a 21st century facsimile of Monica Vitti, the original script involved a trip to Rome, a cobbled street, a hotel room of the right size, a stylised Super 8 film within the actual film, a 1965 green Citroen DS and two men playing the role of French detectives. However, we would have needed about half a million pounds to make it happen so I had to scale the whole thing right back. Well, actually I had to scrap it completely and think of something else.
It was clear on the day that I had to allow the film to become a completely free form exercise in movement, texture and light and in this, the biggest contributor was the fantastic model, Natalia Z, all the way from Siberia and in London for just a week. Just like the movies, she was the last girl we saw at the end of a long, hot day of casting at the AP offices. Having seen all the girls we thought there were to see, Natalia walked in as we were all standing up to leave and as soon as we looked at her, the way she walked, the way she talked, the way she was, we all knew she was the one.
On the day of the shoot I worked in the way I feel most comfortable, which is to build the shot, step by step, creating the mood I’m trying to achieve by adding and placing one light at a time. I had wanted to light the whole thing with continuous lights – HMI’s, Kino Flos and 2K Blondes. In this way I could have easily switched from stills to film whenever I liked but we would have needed a huge generator truck to power them all. The power available at Eltham Palace wasn’t enough for 60kw of lamps and there wasn’t enough in the budget for the generator, so instead I lit the stills with about 12 flash heads and then used a combination of 3 HMI 2.5kw, some Kinos and the flash head modelling bulbs for lighting the times when I wanted to stop doing stills and shoot some motion. Fortunately, the Red camera can shoot at quite high ISO settings and with thoughtful framing and use of gels I managed to create a look for the film that compliments the stills. In this I was helped by having an incredibly talented cinematographer in Cordelia Beresford. This collaborative element was the most enjoyable part of the day. A portrait photographer ploughs a solitary furrow, so to have a partner in Cordelia was a proper little treat, like a full plate of Mr Kipling’s Bramley Apple Pies. And if you want to see for yourself then check out the film below. The voiceover you hear is a poem by Meredith Holmes and is called ‘In Praise Of My Bed’.
At last I can be with you!
The grinding hours
since I left your side!
The labor of being fully human,
working my opposable thumb,
talking, and walking upright.
Now I have unclasped
unzipped, stepped out of.
Husked, soft, a be-er only,
I do nothing, but point
my bare feet into your
clean smoothness
feel your quiet strength
the whole length of my body.
I close my eyes, hear myself
moan, so grateful to be held this way.
To see the full shoot then please check it out on my website www.chrisfloyd.com
The Result Of Time Spent With Caitlin Moran And How It Ended Up in The National Portrait Gallery
Caitlin Moran - London, 2010
I was thrilled to be asked by the National Portrait Gallery a couple of months ago, if they could acquire my October 2010 portrait of writer Caitlin Moran, who despite being born in 1975 has had a column in The Times since 1958. She is, indeed, a prolific woman. I have a few things in the bowels of the nation’s collection and on a handful of occasions they have managed to crawl out of the sub-ground level darkness to make it on to the walls of the gallery itself. This time, however, the gallery wanted to fast track the photograph straight into the “Picture of the Month” slot for August. I’m looking forward to seeing it on the wall of Room 39 at the NPG later this week.
The story behind how the picture came to exist is a great example of the unforseen bonuses that can derive from getting off your arse in times when the Black Dog is upon your shoulder. Regular readers of this blog will know about the ‘140 Characters‘ project, in which I spent the best part of a year photographing 140 people that I follow on Twitter. What I haven’t really mentioned before is that I started the project at a time when work had been very quiet for several weeks. I had barely seen or spoken to anybody. In times like those your reserves of confidence can literally eat themselves up in minutes. Since the demise of analogue/film in my world, the opportunities to meet and spend time with other like minded types have been heavily diminished. Frankly, I miss it. In the days of going to labs it meant that you were meeting your contemporaries, getting to know them and even, in some cases, actually becoming friends with them. Those people know what it’s like and we would each draw comfort, support and fuel from each other during the dodgy periods. Since that’s all over, I don’t know what anybody looks like anymore. I feel like Ray Liotta at the end of ‘Goodfellas’ stuck in the witness protection programme. ”There’s no action anymore. Just the other day I ordered spaghetti with marinara sauce in a restaurant. You know what they brought me? Egg noodles and ketchup. I get to live the rest of my life like a schmuck.”
Other photographers are just names now, not faces. The ’140 Characters’ thing was my attempt to meet people, as well as ‘self assign’ a project that would fill up some time, inspire me and also serve as a big, barbed stick with which to keep the Black Dog away. I don’t like spending days at a time on my own. The mental lanes my mind tends to wander down always lead to gloom, pessimism and an assumption that all the future has to offer is an unpleasant ending. It’s boring and lonely. Twitter was/is the closest I have come to filling the hole that has been left by the eradication of house leaving opportunities.
The portrait of Caitlin that is now in the NPG was a byproduct of the Twitter project. I had been following her for a while on Twitter and loved watching the way she would interact with other people on there, particularly Alexis Petridis, the Guardian’s music critic, who is someone I know as an acquaintance, having worked with him a couple of times on stories for The Guardian Weekend. Watching them, and others, was the virtual version of sitting in an office with very funny workmates. As I developed the idea for the project in my head, I wanted it to be a place where I could bring people together in a photograph who were clearly doing things together in a medium like Twitter. Equally, I also wanted it to serve as a platform in which people who previously had had no contact could come together and the white space of the frame would be the canvas in which they could form something unique amongst themselves. So it was with this theory in mind that I persuaded and managed to co-ordinate a visit to my studio from Caitlin and Alexis at the same time and on the same day. What I love about these pictures is that they are a clear visual manifestation of how their relationship regularly plays out on Twitter.
140 Characters: Alexis Petridis & Caitlin Moran
140 Characters: Caitlin Moran
After photographing the pair of them together I then spent some time on each of them as individuals and it was here that the headline image was made. I knew that I had the time of someone special, even magical, so I thought it best to exploit it while I had the chance. So, as well as doing some of the white background stuff, I also decided to do something different. When I say ‘different’, what I really mean is that I just wanted to do a classic Penn/Avedon style of 1950′s black and white character led portrait. I felt that I didn’t even need to wind her up and let her go because she winds herself up and lets herself go. It was me but it could equally have been her bedroom mirror or an audience of legal executives. What ensued was a 15 minute period where I documented, in real time, certain elements of a mesmerising, clever and very funny woman. One image doesn’t do her justice, so here ‘s a selection of the outtakes – the ‘rejects’. What comes over, looking at them now, is that fundamentally Caitlin is a performer, except she does it for a mass audience with a pen. I’m quite convinced that, given the opportunity, she could have done it with comedy, radio, telly or even films. Singing, I’m not sure about.
Nine unpublished pictures of Caitlin Moran
In all probability these pictures would have then languished for eternity on one of the gazillion hard drives that my work, post analogue, now lives inside. No one would have seen them and they’d have drifted further from my frontal lobes with each new subject that came my way. However, in an idle moment a couple of days after our time together I sent her a selection of them via email. Here’s her reply:
So, the pictures went from Caitlin to her publishers, who after much umming and a lot of aahing picked the one they wanted, which then went on the cover of her book ‘How To Be A Woman’, and which now, 6 weeks after it was published is right up there in the top ten of Amazon’s UK sales chart. They put a silly red/pink tint on her polka dot top in the photo, for no discernible reason whatsoever, and because as someone once said about Martha Stewart, “She can never let a pine cone just be a pine cone”, but this is what happens when you let ‘wordy’ people loose on imagery. They always think they can improve it. It’s my ambition to one day stand behind a literary person and, every few minutes, lean over their shoulder and randomly change a sentence they just wrote. In return I will allow them to come on a photo shoot with me and point at things they’d like me to photograph, for the purposes of providing some sort of visual affadavit to the words they think they will later write.
Luckily this didn’t put off the nice people at the NPG who saw it and asked if they could buy it ‘for the nation’ and print it in it’s full monochromatic glory, with Caitlin’s polka dot top rendered in a fine shade of greys.
As I said at the beginning, what I am most thrilled about in all this is the way that what began as an idea motivated by the realisation that I was feeling unmotivated and in need of creative stimulation has, in hindsight, led all the way to the walls of the place that any portrait photographer yearns to have their work. So, thank you to Caitlin for turning up and thank you to Alexis Petridis for forcing her to turn up.
See the picture and viewing information on the National Portrait Gallery website.
The Consequences of Vengeance In The Manzine
Crystal Palace Park Road. Struck 01.03 on 15.03.45
The Manzine have published this piece by me on my ‘Consequences of Vengeance’ project. Read the backstory here and if you’d like to buy a copy of the magazine then visit their site and order yourself one. The Manzine features work by many of the best writers working in Britain today and it allows them to write pieces that stretch them in a far more creative way than the mainstream publications they work for will allow.
“Chris Floyd exists partly because his mother was not blown up by V2 rockets launched from The Hague during the Second World War. Here are some pictures he took and a story he wrote about the subject.
The photographer David Bailey told me recently that when he was a kid, a German V2 Vergeltungswaffen (Vengeance Weapon) rocket, landed on his local cinema. After that, rage and sadness were with him constantly. He believed Hitler had killed Mickey Mouse.
I am 42 years old and I have two children of my own. Girls. They are six & two. The older I get, the more prone I am to dwelling on the feints, swerves and potholes of this life, as well as the gifthorses and cupcakes.
At 7.21am on Tuesday 27th March 1945 a V2 struck Hughes Mansions, a series of tenement buildings in Vallance Road, Stepney, London E2. It killed 134 people, most of them still in their beds. Most of population of the building were Jewish, of eastern European extraction. Two of those were my great grandparents, Abraham & Annie Mordsky, who lived at number 83.
This particular V2 also has its own little place in history. It was the final enemy attack of World War II to result in the death of London civilians. If Hitler, with his 1,000-year Reich collapsing around him, wanted to have one last go at exterminating the Jews, then what a sweet shudder must have run through him as the 1,401st of his beloved vengeance weapons to land on London took out 120 of them in the one place in Europe where they were guaranteed life and liberty.
Another relative, living nearby in Underwood Road, came running over to Hughes Mansions when he heard the explosion. In the rubble he found the bodies of Abraham & Annie, entirely physically intact, with not a mark on them. The colossal vacuum created by the V2 blast had asphyxiated them. It had sucked the life right out of them. They never knew what hit them.
My mother was two years old, a regular Monday night guest at her grandparents, while her mother went to work. Her father (my grandfather) was at sea in the Royal Navy. Abraham & Annie were his parents. My grandmother decided to change things around on the night of the 26th March and did not send my mother to stay with the Mordskys. Consequently, she was not killed at 7.21am the following morning. As a further consequence, you are now reading this.
left page: Launched from Hague Wassenaar & struck Staveley Rd, London W4. 18.34 on 08.09.44 - right page: Launched from Haagse Bos & struck Hughes Mansions, Vallance Rd, London E2. 07.21 on 27.03.45
I do not remember a time when this piece of family history was not in me. As I get older I think about the V2 more than I probably should. How could I not? It defines the reason for my existence on this earth. Are there other things like this that I don’t know about? A decision made by a woman to have the night off. No, don’t fancy it tonight, I want to stay in… I’ll swap my shift. I’ll keep the kiddy with me, we’ll see the in-laws later in the week…
I’ve dreamed about being there five minutes before it came and yelling at all those in its path to get out. Wake up! When I open my mouth in the dream, well, I’m sure you can guess: nothing comes out. They all die and I’m paralysed.
I am a photographer and taking photographs is the thing I do. It’s how I see, feel and touch. So I decided to go to the corner of The Continent from where my fate was determined and see it for myself. Maybe I can stop it there.
I spent a lot of time on the internet looking for information and I found a website called v2rocket.com. It’s a bottomless mine of V2-related facts and people. I discovered that the launch sites of many V2s are well known among those who like to know. Included in that list is the launch information for a rocket that originated in The Hague at 07.12am on March 27 1945. Alongside it is the known impact site: Vallance Road, Stepney, London. There even exists an RAF reconnaissance photograph of the site that was taken earlier in the same month. It shows a heavily wooded park/forest in the centre of the city – Haagse Bos. In the picture are five V2s lying on their sides in a line. The RAF returned later to bomb them. Unfortunately, the leading bomber dropped its load too early and all those planes behind followed its lead by doing the same thing. The bombs landed at the south east corner of the park instead of the intended spot, the north west. I look at that picture now and one of those five is what I can’t stop in my dream.
I went to see the consequences that were visited on that little piece of Stepney and we packed the car with large-format camera equipment. A 5”x4” cherrywood Zone V1 field camera. Or a “blanket over the head wedding photographer camera”, as a passerby once commented. Eighty sheets of large-format colour film were loaded in a darkroom. We were bristling with Victorian technology, and when we unpacked and set up the shot of the Hughes Mansions site as it is today, from under the blanket I was bringing into focus an upside down and back to front image of a tarmac carpark. Of course. What else would it be?
Also launched from Haagse Bos & struck Kynaston rd, Orpington. 16.54 on 27.03.45
Also upside down and back to front in the viewfinder was the outline of a woman carrying a Tesco bag. She opened her mouth to speak and what came out, from across the other side of the car park, was absolutely the right way up and not back to front:
“What you fuckin’ doing that for? I live ’ere. I got right to know innit.”
“There was a German rocket that landed here in the war and killed 134 people. My grandparents were two of those. I’m a photographer and am doing a proj…”
“Oh right. Yeah. The war. Fuckin’ killed loads innit.”
She then turned to an as-yet unseen
co-inquisitor, above us in the flats, and bellowed:
“BOMB COME. THE WAR. KILLED ’IS FUCKIN’ NAN & GRANDAD INNIT. ’E’S TAKIN’ A PHOTO OF IT OR SUMMINK.”
And then she disappeared up the stairs with her Tesco bag and whatever.
Then we’re being eyed up by four young guys. Just watching us. Not speaking, to us or to each other. Some more appear across from where they are standing. I’ve been in a lot of places where a camera is not welcome and I can sense when its presence is causing ripples. Now is that time. Even the sky seems to go darker. Malice is radiating and it starts to gently rain. A warning. Stay here and bad things might happen. The difference between then and now is that I know I’ve been warned. I’ve been given the luxury of time.
There is history here. In 2005 a small memorial plaque was unveiled on the site. There was a high turnout of old Jewish people, some who survived the V2. But as we drove out of there it occured to me that the V2 didn’t just suck the life out of my great grandparents in that place. The tarmac carpark feels like a memorial, and there seemed to be mistrust, suspicion and paranoia all around. I don’t need to go back there again.
The distance that the V2 flew in nine minutes in 1945, we drove (in the opposite direction) in 13 hours this year. From Hughes Mansions to Harwich in Essex, an overnight ferry to The Hook of Holland and then another drive to The Hague.
The launch site. This was it, the place I dream about and the muddy patch of woodland that the RAF missed. Standing there I felt more kinship and meaning in this, the patch of crappy municipal ground from which my grandad’s mum & dad’s death was certified, stamped, signed, sealed, delivered, nine minutes before they knew it. There is more grace, peace and beauty in this bare patch of Dutch mud and leaves that gave of itself to allow death to be delivered remotely to others, than there is in all of that blob of grim, dark blight of east London that seems to bear only ill will to those within as well as to those from without.
And now I know why. From here, the path that led to my place on this ball of rock in space was sealed too. This terrible incident was the first step in a chain of events that led to my mum meeting my dad. Had there been no rocket that day, then, well, who knows what it might have been. I know there’s no point in asking these questions, but what point also is there in the Fantasy Football League?
We choose the fantasies we like to take part in. Some people like football, I like to wonder about rocket trajectories. No rocket? No deaths, no mourning, no this, no that, no who knows what and on and on for another 25 years, deviating from the trajectory of me. No mum meeting no dad. No me. Nor my children too. I see their little faces in in the deaths of Abraham and Annie. I thank them for it and realize that this isn’t just about the consequences of vengeance. It’s also about the consequences of trajectory, the defining characteristic not only of projectiles but also lives. Cupid, above all, can tell you about that. “
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