Christopher Eccleston, 1999

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 fourth of five films for Mr Porter, men from whose style book we could all take a leaf.  Click here to see it on their site.  This is David McAlmont, one of my favourite singers, a man made from the same vocal DNA as Al Green.

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 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.

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.

'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?'

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.

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.

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

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