Last Tuesday (25th April) I had my first consultation session. I booked the community hall at Cowshill in Weardale for the whole afternoon, and turned up with tea and biscuits, a collection of biker related books (Danny Lyon’s classic The Bikeriders, Andrew Shaylor’s Hells Angels Motorcycle Club, Martin Dixon’s Brooklyn Kings, Maz Harris’ Bikers, Scott Zieher’s Band of Bikers, Robert Frank’s The Americans because that has a couple of biker photos in it, and some old Haynes Manuals), and an edit of around 650 photos (cut out of thirty-three A2 contact sheets printed the day before).
The photographer I asked to act as consultant for me is Julian Germain. Julian was in the year above mine at RCA so I know him from when I did my MA there – we weren’t friends then but have continued to bump into each other occasionally since, plus I’ve followed his work and felt he could be someone whose judgement I can trust. As a bonus, Julian turned up with Malin Norrman, a Swedish photographer currently studying at the HKU University of the Arts in Utrecht – an extra pair of eyes, and some laughter (she found quite a few of my photos funny, which was hugely gratifying for me)!
The 650 image edit I ended up with was drawn just from the analogue material I have because I couldn’t be arsed going through all the digital photos as well. Bringing such a large edit was deliberate – I have a friend who seems to systematically edit out all of their best photos, and I didn’t want to make the same mistake – but going through them all was hard work (sorry Julian and Malin…). By the end of the afternoon we’d trimmed the number down quite radically, but though I still don’t have a final edit some really interesting things came out of the session.
Firstly, there are some gaps in the work: I haven’t photographed after dark as much as I could have, and I don’t have as many strong images of women as I thought I had. I might be able to get away with the former, but the women are important to me, and I have a couple of opportunities over the summer to shoot some more and try to rectify this (which means the project has become live again when I had hoped it was complete, but I’d rather do a bit more work and get it as right as I possibly can). Plus I can go through all the digital stuff as well now…
Secondly, that laughter! It occurred to me that the S-Town storytelling example I mentioned in my previous post might not be a perfect match for this particular project because S-Town lacks humour. One of the things I’ve tapped into in my approach to bikers is how funny the subject can be, by which I mean that I’ve responded to the humour of the people in some of the images, not just made funny photos at their expense. I’ve also deliberately allowed people to smile in my images, giving them a degree of agency, and in hopes that the smiles and humour undermine some of the stereotype – using humour to say the subject is not just what we think it is, as with the S-Town story? Some of pictures I’ve collected can be both amusing and aggressive, depending on the person in the image and how well I’ve photographed them. With this book project I have an opportunity to put together a final edit that, if it combines the right balance of dark or serious images with absurd and humorous ones, might have more complexity and emotional range, and therefore tell a story that is less one-dimensional than expected?
In terms of learning more about editing for books, what I found most specifically useful and interesting about this first consultation session was the way Julian began sequencing some of the images; putting together pictures it would not have occurred to me to pair, setting up runs of photos that surprised me. It blew apart the neat order of things I’d imagined beforehand, allowing me to see the work in new ways – which, without realising it, is exactly what I need at this point.
Finally, as I normally try to avoid showing people stuff I don’t think is up to scratch, allowing two people I’ve not shown any of my work to before to rifle through hundreds of pictures could have seemed quite traumatic… But making this book dummy is partly about letting go. Definitely ready!
