#18 Richard Baker - PHOTO TALK - WTF-STOP PODCAST - WTF-Stop Podcast - Photo Talk

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hi, I'm Zach Waters, and welcome to another episode of
What They Stop Chattered photographers about their life and connection
to the world through photography. To do his podcasters with

(00:25):
editorial photographer Richard Baker. Some of you may know his
name through his work with the Red Arrows, which we
talk about in depth with our Chatter.

Speaker 2 (00:34):
So I ran to the louver. We know the triangular,
the pyramid shape dome there, and I realized that there
could be a picture in there, because otherwise there ain't
no picture. I've come all this way. They're going to
fly over. Yeah, that's it. That's all I'm going to
get if I miss it. And I'm winding on brain
by frame by frame. There's no motor drive here, there's

(00:54):
no twenty frames per second. It's frame by frame by frame.
I'm going to miss it. And sure enough I realize
that they're due, and I make a phone call. I
make one phone call to Red ten. Here's the ground
operations man. He's the man in the red suit who
stands there with a microphone on the seafront, says, ladies
and gentlemen, get your cameras out ready for the Red Arrows.
And here they come, and they're in such and such

(01:16):
a formation, and next they're going to do that. Then
they're going to be in that or another, and then
they're going to fly past. And it's been lovely having
he is. He's standing as I as I ring him
on the top of the Arc de Triomph and he's
standing next to French generals and I phone him and say, Steve, Steve,
when are they do? I'm in position and he goes,
do not talk to me. I talking to the team.

(01:37):
I'm talking to these generals, but they're doing thirty seconds.

Speaker 1 (01:40):
Following his Red Arrows book, he's worked on a number
of other books, The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work, Religion
for Airtha It's both published by Hamish helmeton a Week
at the Airport, A heath for Diary published by Profile
in collaboration with Alain de Botton, and then he worked
alongside author Polly Moorland on a couple of projects. One
was risk Wise nine Everyday Adventures and that was published

(02:03):
by a Profile, and then a book we went into
in depth was A Fortunate Woman, a country doctor story.

Speaker 2 (02:08):
When Polly, the writer says to the doctor, I don't
suppose you've heard of a book by John Berger that
was about a country doctor in nineteen sixty seven, and
the doctor says, it's why I became a doctor. I
know that book and I've read it four times. Wow,
once twice, two, three times when I was a teenager,
when I was fourteen, once when I finally thought I

(02:30):
might want to study medicine. And then by accident, she
then discovers after she's become a doctor and she's accepted
a new post in a country practice, she then realizes
that the book is in exactly the same practice, the
same landscape as she's been into. Wow, that's when you
think the threads are all the stars are aligning here

(02:51):
the stars say this was meant to be. That's when
you realize you've got something special on your hands.

Speaker 1 (02:57):
We discussed a lot of things in our chat. You're
better be prepared to a two hour chart and so get
your cup of tea, get your slippers on, get on
a good comfy chair. It's really in depth. We covered
these early days at South End Airport and went back
before that and went to his time living in Belgium
with his family. We also looked at his passion to
travel that was coming out before he could make head

(03:17):
nor tail of what being a professional photographer was. So
we looked at the next step, which was his time
at Newport under David Herne.

Speaker 2 (03:25):
Happened. But I went to South End Library asked the
librarian did she know of any photography courses. I remember
this very clearly. She poked in a box and she
pulled out a prospectus and it was She said, it's
in Wales, South Wales, in Newport, and I said, no,
I have no idea where that is. It doesn't sound
very nice. I opened it up, but it was a

(03:46):
kind of concertina pullout and there were pictures by a
man called Roger Hutchings in there. And his pictures were
of a protest that he'd shot for the Telegraph, and
it was probably of a policeman battering a protester over
the head with a truncheon. It was something like that.
It was the most extraordinary news picture. And I just
thought an astral geographic there. I want to be Roger Hutchings.

(04:08):
I want to go to Newport, and I apply. I
was twenty four and I spent two years in Newport
under the tutelage of David Herne and Daniel meadows and
Clive Landon. It was just the most magical time and
I heart back to the first day.

Speaker 1 (04:24):
We chattened about a great deal of stuff, but what
was become really apparent when we chatted was that we
were working in the same area. We knew the same people,
we frequented, the same buildings, the same pub the same camera,
higher places, kit higher places, processing labs. But we never met.

(04:44):
We never directly met. Maybe we did indirectly, But it's
amazing just listening to somebody's experience which I can totally
relate to and take something from and sort of have
the same feelings as he has about that time and
that period and what it took to be a photographer
that period in the nineties and the ze wars. So

(05:07):
hope somebody listening to this can also get that feeling
or just get a sample and a feel of what
it's like to be a professional photographer working in a
professional market which needed one hundred and twenty percent commitment.
It was demanding. Sometimes it was not a lot of return,
but there was definitely a lot of expectation. So I

(05:28):
was delighted when he said, oh yeah, come on, let's
have a chat. So the day came and I give
him a shout and I asked him what he was
up to.

Speaker 2 (05:36):
I'm taking a rest. Actually this week. The week before
I was at the Farmer Air Show. It was the
hottest day, and of course, ironically the hottest day at
an air show, you know, seemed to be quite an
interesting occasion, so I really pushed it. I'm no sprint
chicken anymore, but I made sure that I was there
photographing basically what I want. I mean, no one pays
me to go to these things, and I got a

(05:57):
press pass, been going since nineteen eighty nine, and well
I will explore the world of aviation as it comes
around every two years. Of course this time it was
every four years, so there was a lot of things
to photograph. Quite low key this year, but I really
put a lot of energy into it, and then at
the weekend when it was all over, and then this
week really felt it. So I think the heat and
the footfall that I was putting in at Farmer really

(06:21):
paid its toll. So I have been out this week.
I mean I try and get out every week, every day.
I do see it as part of my role to
keep going to be out there photographing whatever interests me. Really,
and again, no one pays me to do this. I
do it from my own passion and my own motivation
to see what's out there, to explore, and to pace

(06:43):
the streets and decide what I'm going to do day
by day. So I have been out this week, but
I've been raining it in a bit. Just done my
park run, my five k in a local park. So
I feel quite wound down now, fairly, fairly relaxed and
happy to talk about whatever one you talk about.

Speaker 1 (07:00):
With photographers in parks?

Speaker 2 (07:02):
Do many do it? I'm the only one I thought
that was doing them. I tell you what it is
with me. I tell you what when I got to fifty,
I'm sixty two. Now, when I got to fifty, I
realized I was slowing down. My fitness was dropping off,
my stamina wasn't there anymore. And although when you've been
putting in the miles over the years and the decades,
you can't keep it up as one did. I mean
in the old days, when I was doing magazine assignments

(07:24):
and going away and doing big stories for days and
weeks at a time, I was putting on a lot
of effort and I could do it in those days.
Nowadays I can't. So I got to the age of
fifty and I started doing little laps around our park
just outside here and found that it was coming back.
My fitness was not dropping off so quickly. So the
last ten, well actually twelve years now, I've been running

(07:46):
just distances that suited me. And then I started doing
the odd half marathon and got a bit fed up
with those and realized I couldn't do that on a
morning and then go out and go and shoot pictures
on the street during the rest of the day or
the week. So I'm not doing those distances anymore. So
five k on a Saturday morning and maybe one midweek
really suits me. It's just the kind of distance I

(08:08):
need to keep my stamina up. And also actually it's
about mental health as well. I mean, I don't suffer
from poor mental health, but it does pet me up.
Sitting here now talking to you, I feel really calm,
quite relaxed, not tired at the moment. So yeah, I
don't know other photographers that do part runs. Are there many?

Speaker 1 (08:29):
Tom Broadbent does them?

Speaker 2 (08:30):
Who else?

Speaker 1 (08:31):
I've seen other photographers with Tom's talking to the people's
films park one to them, Okay, don't you get end
of Cardial with your photography. You're always stumping the street.

Speaker 2 (08:40):
Actually, no, I don't think it is about Cardiam unless
I'm running up and down steps and escalators. I think
it's fairly even. Actually, when I do go out, I
kind of hit the street running, really, or at least
I try to. I leave the house. Here's a typical day.
I do a bit of admin in the I might

(09:01):
have done some stretches to get a body going again
because I'm stiffening up. I go out and I don't
have any predisposition about where I want to be and
what I want to do. I'd look at the weather
and I decide where I'm going to go from what
I see outside my window, because I can see the
city beyond and see what's going to roll in. Maybe

(09:22):
there's some heavy rain or at some storm. I decide
on the spur of the moment. It's all governed by
weather and my own sense of purpose that day. So
whether I get on a bus, get on the train,
walk out from the front door, and keep on going
on foot, I don't know's It's completely spontaneous. And this
is largely when there is nothing happening in the news. Now,

(09:45):
if there is something happening in the news, Let's say
I've picked up on something on a BBC or I've
had an alert or something. That's when I'll become more
interested and I'll hone in to a place, whether it's Westminster,
or it's the city or west End or even in
this area here. I will decide on the spur of

(10:08):
the moment what I'm going to do based on that
kind of information. So acts of God, yeah, yeah, acts
of God yeah. Is there going to be a storm coming?
Is it going to be the hottest day of the year.
Is it going to be storm whatever it is, storm
Diknease or storm Dorothy. Is that going to be the
talking point of the day. Can I make some pictures

(10:28):
out of it? Will I be able to upload them
with some sense of topicality by the end of the day.
Will they sail overnight? That kind of thing.

Speaker 1 (10:38):
Goes back to my opening statement why I'm sort of
very intrigued by you, and that's very obvious on your
website what you're doing. I'm fascinated by the fact that
you're just out there creating content to get in the
mainstream of picture sales and stuff like that. And I
find that really interesting. That's very obvious on your website.

(10:58):
That's what you're doing, because you do it too Photo Shelter,
don't you.

Speaker 2 (11:01):
I do, so I don't have a website per se,
and I used to in the early days that I
used to build myself absolutely hopeless at it. It looked awful.
And there was a point some years ago and I thought, well,
I'm running an archive from photo Shelter. I'm just going
to transfer my domain name over and that's become my website,
which of course is a selling shop. It's a shot
window for everything I do. Everything I've shot of purpose

(11:25):
in the last thirty something years is up there, at
least the best stuff is. And I guess if you've
been through it, Zach, you'll see a lot. There's a lot.
There's actually too much. I mean, I keep running out
of storage space. I have to keep buying storage space
and deleting substandard work that I don't have any feelings for.
So it's a constant process of when you say generating content,

(11:48):
I mean I love taking pictures in the way that
I did on my very first day of college, which
I'm sure we'll touch on later. I have to do it.
It's in toxic. I find it. I find it compulsive,
I find it needy. I find it. You know, It's
an obsession that has never left me. And I know

(12:10):
a lot of people out there who have been photographing
for many years have said, you know, cause I keep
saying to me, God, how do you keep doing it?
It's always a grind, you know. I don't sell anything.
What I do sell is not worth a job. I
don't worry about what it's going to earn. I just
have to go and make the work and see it
and edit it and be pleased at the end of

(12:31):
the day that I've done my best and I've got
something worthwhile. And if I'm really pleased with it, I'll
drag it into my best of gallery and go from
there and see if I get any reaction. I mean,
you know, I use social media a lot. I just
used Instagram and I like Twitter better actually, and I
like to see what people like. And then I check

(12:51):
on my sales overnight or subsequent nights, and I see
what sales and that spurs me on to I don't
feel as if I'm a machine. I do put some
emotion into this, and sometimes it doesn't suit me, Zach.
Sometimes I don't want to go out for whatever reason,
and I'll sit here and tinker and it gives me

(13:12):
some strength for the next day and I'll hit the
paper the next day.

Speaker 1 (13:15):
So you're putting stuffed on your fort shelter site, ala me, Getty.
Are you putting into all three at the same time,
or you're just sort of maneuvering about.

Speaker 2 (13:24):
Yeah, maneuvering's good good idea. Yes, So everything that is good,
is good enough, good enough to sell, good enough to see,
good enough to view, goes on my photo shelter site.
Really trying hard to cut what conciences I put up there,
because as I said, I'm running up stories. The very
best goes to Getty. And I have an arrangement with
a lovely fellow called Mike Kemp, who runs a little

(13:47):
agency a group of photographers called in Pictures. Mike and
I have known each other for donkeys' years. It was
the first person who phoned me back and who I
contacted after the agency days when I had a project
about the red Arrows to flog. I p g yeah
after that, immediately after that, and we've known each other

(14:07):
since then he acts as my portal, my editor, and
he takes roughly three quarters or two thirds of what
I give him. The rest I give to ALAM, So
there's there's an overlap. You know, I'm kind of a
kind of commercial ven diagram where it's it's it's proportioned out.

Speaker 1 (14:25):
Yeah, do you find this way works then? In terms
of revenue sales? Do you actually attract other clients coming
in and say can you cover this from me? Can
you cover that? How does that work with you?

Speaker 2 (14:37):
No, no one phones me anymore, and I don't mind that.
And to be honest, if they have, I found a
way of maneuvering my way out of fulfilling what they
might be asking me to do. I prefer to be
autonomous and I prefer to be completely liberated, free from

(14:58):
from those constraints. Now, of course, I'm going to lose
money that way, because you know, I'm not being guaranteed
a day rate and I'm not being fed by what
might be offered as a commissioner or as an assignment.
That said, I do have a couple of regular clients.
One's a corporate client. One's a French company that puts

(15:19):
ads on the back of buses and as a result
of what I put up on Photoshelter, one of their
creatives down in Lyon contacted me a few years ago
and said, oh, we've got we've got a new campaign
and bus travels around London. You know, I've seen the
backs of some of the pictures that you've shot, which
are kind of contextual travel pictures, actually amazing ads on

(15:41):
the back of buses that I did a little mini
project about. Once he saw that, as he said, go
out for us. We'll have lots of them because we
do this two or three times a year just in
London New Market for us. And I've been doing them
ever since. And I chase after this bus so that
there are occasions when I've attracted a client or a buyer.
But I don't court people. I don't chase. I just

(16:05):
go out and do what I want to do. When
you say, you know, is it an attractive financial proposition?
Absolutely not. I couldn't be doing this if I was
just starting out. I can only afford to do this
because I have an archive and I can rely on
print sales occasionally and the odds sale that comes through
my sight, but also from my getting income. It doesn't

(16:26):
make any financial sense. You know, I'm not I'm counterintuitive
to my own business practice. I don't understand myself. I
don't know how I do it, but I just carry on, Zach.
And it's not what young people, young students and people
starting out there, or people wanting to maybe bend themselves

(16:46):
in maybe my direction should be hearing. It's not a
good way to make a living. It's not healthy. But
as I've just said to you, I have to do it.
I don't know how many years I've got left doing this.
If I can put one foot in front of another
and be still standing at the end of the day
and having shot several hundred pictures a day, I'm very

(17:07):
happy about that. And if people like them, people want
to buy them lovely.

Speaker 1 (17:11):
Well, you've answered my question. That's why I am intrigued,
because I can see the way you're operating, because I
know your archive, I know your sort of history to
a certain extent. What interested me about your website was
that you don't really celebrate your past work directly. You're
very what you're doing now work, and I find that
quite interesting. And that's when I was like, guys, this

(17:34):
is an intriguing way to do it. So let's look
at that. It doesn't seem like two thousand and four
since the Red Hourural Book came out. It's not scary.

Speaker 2 (17:44):
Yeah, eighteen years ago I did that, and then it
feels if it actually feels like a long, long time ago.
I was a completely different person photographer then. So to
paint a picture about that one project? Can I give
you a bit of insight? Are you ready for the
insight for that?

Speaker 1 (17:58):
For the Red Arrows? No? Because what I want to
do I want to get into that. Tell me about
the Country Doctors sheet. When we think of country Doctor,
we go back to Wugene Smith. Was the fifties portrait
of the American country doctor.

Speaker 2 (18:12):
Bob nineteen forty eight. Actually, was it really really anyway?

Speaker 1 (18:18):
Well? I thought that anyway. I love being corrected. This
new version is a sort of second part of the
series and empowerment of women. Really the female doctor of
the New century based on the Burger and the genl
project of the country Doctor in the sixties, wasn't it so?

Speaker 2 (18:37):
Yeah? In nineteen sixty seven, John Berger, who was living
in a particular part of the borderlands between England and Wales,
teamed up with the Swiss photographal gen More, and they
were both bosom buddies. Anyway, they were great friends, and
they struck up this working relationship and followed around a
country doctor for six weeks and produced a book called

(19:01):
A Fortunate Man, the Story of a Country Doctor, that
was published and to greater claim, it became a seminal
work that photographers and writers celebrated because it was a
great example of the photo book that was becoming very
popular in the sixties, collaborations between artists, photographer and writers.

(19:23):
It also became a hugely successful book and it still
is too. Working doctors and not just rural gps, but
general practice doctors. Anyway, to cut a long story short,
I was asked by collaborator friend of mine called Polly Moorland,
who is a writer who has worked with me on
a previous book, actually five years ago, on a book
about risk takers nine portraits of people who live in

(19:47):
fairly risky environment. Was an okay book. It was a
great thing to work on. We were well paid to
do it. It was part financed by an insurance company
and we were put together by a writer called Alander Botton.
I had a history a collaborative history with him as well. Anyway,
I was asked by Polly to if I was interested
in collaborating on this idea that she had had where

(20:08):
she had found this copy of Berger in her mother's
house as she was clearing it out because her mother
had dementia. She was going into a home and Polly
brought this book back realized that she not only had
never heard of this book. I mean she was a
big reader of John Berger. Anyway, she's a documentary writer
and a journalist experience with TV and BBC. Not only

(20:31):
had she not heard of it, but she was amazed
that when she flicked through, she realized that she knew
where a lot of these pictures were taken. She realized
it was just the bottom of her hill. She lived there.
And then she realized that this was a book about
a country doctor. And she realized also that she knew
the woman who was also a female GP in the
same surgery. And she thought, hang in a minute, is

(20:54):
there an idea here, and contacted me and said, if
we put a pitch together, could I mention your name?
Could you give me some reference pictures for the pitch
and I'll send it to my agent which she did,
and we put together a series of pictures from my archive.
I mean it was old, old work from various magazine
assignments and projects where I'd been involved with a country vet,

(21:19):
or I'd been into a hospital for the anniversary of
the NHS, that kind of thing. We've put together this
little little pocket full of pictures that became the pitch.
That was like a twelve page treatment addressed to her agent,
who punted it around some agencies, some publishers, and before
she knew it, there was a bidding war going on

(21:40):
one Friday, and she did a deal with Picador. Wasn't
so much about the money, but it was about who
would treat this story and this project with some respect.
And she worent with Picador, and we started almost immediately,
and I being in London, South London, I found myself
journeying backwards and forwards through a kind of time portal

(22:03):
into this valley, which in Burger's book is anonymized, as
is the doctor, and we treated the landscape and the
work of our doctor in the same way. Having said that,
of course, it was during this was the latter part
of twenty twenty, so lockdowns and restrictions were made it

(22:24):
really really difficult for me to travel up and down. Now.
Of course, as a self employed freelance photographer, I had
a reason to go away from home, to not stay
within these four walls, and I did so, but it
involved crossing over county lines, and of course that meant
that I had to be very careful which side of
which county line I had to be in, according to

(22:45):
which day the restriction applied to, and it made it
really tricky. It also gave me an opportunity to explore
the landscape, and what we immediately identified was that there
were no community events whatsoever in this little area. There's
a river running through it, there's a valley, and there's

(23:07):
two shoulders of land either side. There was nothing going
on pretty much throughout the time that I was there photographing,
and so we had to think of ways of suggesting
through the pictures what was happening community wise. Now I
figured out a way of contacting local businesses and making
sure I could accompany them outside to do whatever they did,

(23:29):
whether it's a tree surgeon or a man keeping bees,
which of course is an ideal metaphor for the community.
You know, in the hive. We found ways of answering that.
Alongside that, I spent some time with the woman GP
in her surgery inside her surgery room as patients came in,
fully peeped up and asking them whether they mind being

(23:52):
photographed and at the end whether they mind signing a
consent form. So every patient that I photographed or was identifiable,
was conces and that was the arrangement between the doctor,
especially the doctor because of patient confidentiality, and the publisher
and Polly the writer, so we were all covered for permissions.
There was no way that as in Birger in Moore's time,

(24:14):
virtually as we understood, nobody was consented nobody. In fact,
there were people photographed in the surgery in their time
who even knew that the pictures were going to end
up in a book and were rather flabbergasted when this
book landed in the local bookshop and they found themselves
in it. So it was a completely different way of working,
as well as having to safeguard COVID restrictions with people

(24:37):
who were obviously very vulnerable health wise, so that was
the background of it. I didn't spend that long time
photographing with the camera to my eye but she and
I did a lot of background work figuring out how
it was going to be illustrated, even before Polly sat
down for the best part of several months to actually
write the thing. She did know that even before she

(24:58):
started writing, that the pictures wouldn't be so much illustrative,
that they would be little musical moments, little pauses of
thought between passages of what she thought she was going
to be writing. What she ended up with was. In fact,
it was about this time last year that I read
her first draft and I realized for the first time
actually how beautiful her writing was, how visual her passages were. Anyway,

(25:21):
and she writes very visually as a journalist. As a filmmaker,
she thinks and she writes in a series of pictures.
So even though I wasn't photographing alongside her words, her
words became very part of what the pictures were trying
to say, and vice versa. So that if, for example,
there is a passage about patient who has taken their

(25:42):
own life, and the doctor has to deal with this
quite a lot, especially during a pandemic stage, there is
a passage where she comes across someone who's taken their
own life and it's a really hard read. But to
follow that up with an image was really tricky, and
we had several ideas. I was showing her constantly what
I was shooting all along, and there were low reds

(26:04):
going onto my photo shelter site. She had access to that,
so she was drawing upon what I had photographed after
each visit up there, and then figuring out how she
could write around these ideas. So, for example, this thing
about the suicide, we came across one single frame. This
is an example of how, you know, we might have
found a way of finding a visual answer to her

(26:25):
wonderful prose. And we found well, there were two. There
were two pictures. I said, I liked the idea of
a detail of a puddle and it was raining heavily,
and so in the puddle it's the kind of grimy,
it's dark as high contrast. There's circles from the rain,
circles of confusion in the puddle. And I liked that idea.
And she said, yeah, that's great, but it could be

(26:45):
little bit seen as on the nose, it could be
a bit too obvious. She said, I've just seen a
picture of yours and it's one frame and I don't
know why there's only one frame. Usually I would shoot
a sequence of several. She said, I don't know why
there's one picture. But it's a chimney and is some
smoke curling up from the chimney, and in the background
you see the hill rise and there's a line of

(27:06):
trees in the background. It's a full, bleed upright picture
that went in eventually. And actually I saw it just
as smoke curling, as something suggestive of community of home.
But actually she saw in it something completely different. She said, no,
that's Shakespearean, because you know in Macbeth, Macbeth talks about
taking his own life, and he talks about the candle

(27:28):
burning bright, and you know, it's about snuffing out the candle.
And so that really brought home to me just as
that one example how we could be telling the story
in a completely different way to the way Burger and
Moore did so, where it was a lot more illustrative,
where they had access to the community, a lot more
direct access to to patients because there was no pandemic

(27:49):
in those days. So whereas we've treated their book as
a starting point and we've used various points of reference
in the way it's designed, the way the pictures work
on certain pages, double pages, with lovely pet passages of
writing over the double pages. It's a different piece of
work completely. So if people are going to open it
up and go, oh, well, that's not really Eugene Smith,

(28:11):
it's not very John Berger and John Moore, it's for
those reasons only that the rules were different, our constraints
were different. That's how we got round it.

Speaker 1 (28:19):
I was going to ask you about the style of
work you were shooting for the book, because you're very
quirky in a lot of ways with your photography. Was
this something you had to think about? Did you have
an old skilled documentary head on in terms of your
style of work when you were shooting this. This was
something that was going on my head earlier before you
brought all that out.

Speaker 2 (28:39):
A short answer is yes, I did have to think
long and hard. Not only are they not quirky pictures,
although we've put in a couple that you could be
seen as slightly tongue in cheek to lift the mood
slightly after maybe a difficult passage. There's a picture of
some horses. You know how you have stone gates, Well,
there's two horses heads on the gate and above it

(29:01):
says no horses. You know, it's a kind of quirky
and the posts are all leaning. There's everything slightly out
of kilter, and we put that in, for example, to
raise the mood and to make people a little bit
smile before the next heavy passage about the next difficult
job that the doctor came across. So there are pictures
in that set and in the wider edit that didn't
make it in, But largely it became obvious that not

(29:23):
only was this book about doctoring and patience and the community,
but it was also about landscape, because the patient and
landscape are both secondary and third characters in the book.
It's quite landscape heavy. So I'm not a landscape photographer,
and I have said this to Polly. I said, you know,
I'll have a go, and I'll enjoy having a go
because I do love looking at landscapes. I revisited some

(29:46):
old books on my shelf by Fay Godwin and James Revilius,
and so I was drawing upon that work to maybe
inject perhaps some quirkiness into the landscape. There's a picture
also of a l that's half buried in the woods,
I have no idea how it got there. There's no
sense of road or track. This car has been abandoned.

(30:08):
It's overgrown in this foliage, growing across its bonnet. I
have found the quirkiness of the landscape in some shapes
and forms. Otherwise, I've tried to make them beautiful. And
not only that, because they're in black and white, and
as you know looking at the website, the only black
and white I've got in there are two or three
projects that go back thirty years or so ago. I
found it a beautiful challenge to get to grips with

(30:30):
and I don't have any regrets because we wanted the
pictures to echo gen More's in the Burger book, which
are in black and white, and there is no way
it could have been a color book.

Speaker 1 (30:39):
And the book title is A Fortunate Woman, a Country
Doctor's Story. I'll put a link to that in the
information part of the podcast. Take me back right to
the beginning where it all started and how you've gradually
moved into photography.

Speaker 2 (30:53):
There are about three or four different paths that I've taken,
that I've chosen to take, or have accidentally chosen to take.
The first set of circumstances was as a ten year old.
My dad, who was in sales for Europe, was given
a posting to Brussels in nineteen seventy. So I was
ten then and he said, and I remember them saying
very clearly, you could come with us and live in Brussels,

(31:16):
or you could go to boarding school. Which would you prefer?
And I said, I'll come with you, thank you very much.
And it was the best. That was the first choice
I'd made. That was correct. I have no idea how
it would have turned out if I had I gone
to boarding school. God knows what would have happened to me.
I went to Brussels and I spent the best part
of the rest of my childhood and my early adulthood
in Brussels. As the next pat, I went to a

(31:36):
British school. We traveled to lots of European countries by car.
We could cross the borders by showing our passport to
a little man in a hut on a hillside pass
that would glance at their passport, raise the baron. We
would be in Luxembourg or Holland, or Brance or Germany.
And we did that a lot. So I got a
sense of travel and exploration from those days after to

(32:00):
school and I came back to the UK, and I
had no idea what I wanted to do. I had
an inkling that I wanted to go into advertising, and
I don't know why. I just thought this was an
interesting way to deal with creativity and writing. I had
a hankering to write. I wrote poetry when I was
supposed to be studying for my O levels. So I
have had this wadg of poems that are full of

(32:22):
teenage ancs, girls that don't love me and rejection and
all that kind of thing. And so I thought maybe
I could write creatively and thought I thought advertising would
be the thing. So I came back to the UK,
dashed off some letters, got nowhere, and ended up with
a job at South End Airport. Bear in mind I
didn't have a lot of opportunities with education. I didn't

(32:42):
take advantage of my I ended up with two O levels,
one of which was French, the other was English. Friend
of a family who said, there's jobs going for the
summer season at south End Airport, you might as well
apply if you speak French. No one else does there,
and he was quite right. No one else in that
airport spoke another language, or so it seemed. So I
don't know quite how what I said in the interview,

(33:03):
but I think because I said I spoke French and
I had an O level in French, they gave me
the job and I spent six and a half years
working on the ground. But so primarily it was a
cross purpose across discipline. The job was in department called traffic,
where we would sit down with a three copy sheet
and you worked out the weight and balance and central

(33:24):
gravity for the aircraft. So you got all the figures
in from the check in desks. They would give you
a long list of passengers and broken down into males, females, children, infants.
You would have average weights for all those bodies. You
added them together. You added the baggage that was weighed,
You put in hargo, you added the fuel weight in,
and you distributed those loads around the aircraft and worked

(33:44):
out the center gravity. You put it all down on
a sheet with the help of a chinagraph pencil and
an acetate wheel that you plotted and spun around according
to what you're plotting in. And that's what I did
for six and a half years. But as a result
of working for a small airline at a very small
airport wasn't an international airport in those there was just
a gathering of sheds. I was able to get staff

(34:05):
tickets with large airlines that flew across the world, and
so I suddenly cottoned onto the idea that I quite
liked the idea of writing or having an admin person
write out a ticket for me that they would charge
five pounds for and give me a free ticket there
and back to somewhere like Indonesia or Singapore or Borneo.
And that's how I started traveling in my spare time

(34:26):
during my holidays. And that's where I started taking pictures
because I was looking through Amateur Photographer and Camera magazine,
you know, everything that was on the middle shelf at smith.
So I would get all those and read them avidly.
I would buy a brick of twenty or thirty rolls
of coder chrome and I would go off with my
little cannons and go off and take pictures. And that's
how I learned to do it myself. I was self taught.

Speaker 1 (34:47):
What sparked that buying the camera and getting the film
and starting reading photography books.

Speaker 2 (34:52):
Well, I'm going to lead onto that because oh, I'm sorry.
In South End Precinct there was a little bookshop and
in a bin of of discounted books because there were
slightly damaged, was a book by Tony ray Jones and
it was called A Day Off. I opened this up
when I was at home, and it was literally a
jaw dropping moment. Here was a person I didn't know

(35:12):
anything about him, apart from what it said in the
forward and the introduction. Here was a person who was English,
and all he seemed to do was go to events
and photograph the most beautiful, the most perfect moments in heavy,
heavy gloss, heavy dense shadow, black and white photography I'd
ever seen. And I just thought, I want to do this.

(35:34):
I want to be someone that does whatever he does,
however he does it. I don't know how you do it.
I suppose you go to your local newspaper and you
blagger a position as an apprentice in the dark room,
or you go and do weddings. And I didn't have
a clue, but I suddenly thought, this is a way
of earning a living. And so when I started traveling,

(35:55):
I had in my head that I would be Tony
ray Jones with some color filming and I think at
the same time, I was looking at national geographics because
an old aunt of mine had donated some old copies
from the sixties and I still have them. I have
broken chronology from the nineteen sixties of national geographics. So
I was looking at pictures by people like Bill Allard

(36:16):
and James Stansfield, ultimately by people like Patrick Ward, who
was showing me the world that as could be seen
through the eyes of a national geographic photographer. Of course,
what I didn't realize is that all these pictures were
largely set up. You know, they didn't happen as naturally
as I was experiencing them, And so that dawned on
me later. Because I was traveling and I was working,

(36:36):
I was doing night shifts, I was doing day shifts,
doing double double shifts when other people were to earn
the money to go and travel to buy the Codachrome.
And I was finding myself in the most extraordinary places.
I mean, I was in Beirute in the early eighties
during a ceasefire. In my complete ignorance, I thought, well,
I'll stop off in Beyroute because I want to go
to Jordan. So I found myself in Jordan just stopped

(37:00):
off during a ceasefire when I wandered out of the
airport building in Beirute Airport and there were bullet holes
and explosion marks along the wall, and I thought, this
is very strange. In my ignorance, I had no idea
what was going on. So I was learning, but and
yet I was really really wet behind the ears. But
that was my training ground. And it wasn't until some
years later, as I said, I was there six and
a half years at South End Airport that I went

(37:22):
to my local library because someone has said, Richard, what
the hell are you doing here coming back to this
same desk doing these same shifts. You should be doing
this for a living. And I still didn't really have
any clue as to how that might happen. But I
went to South End Library asked the librarian did she
know of any photography courses. I remember this very clearly.
She poked in a box and she pulled out a

(37:43):
prospectus and it was she said, it's in Wales, South Wales,
in Newport, and I said, oh, I have no idea
where that is. It doesn't sound very nice. I opened
it up and it was a kind of constantina pullout
and there were pictures by a man called Roger Hutchings
in there, and his pictures were of a protest that
he'd shot for the Telegraph, and it was probably of

(38:05):
a policeman battering a protester over the head with a truncheon.
It was something like that. It was the most extraordinary news picture.
And I just thought an astral geographic naw, I want
to be Roger Hutchings. I want to go to Newport,
and I apply. I was twenty four and I spent
two years in Newport under the tutelage of David Herne
and Daniel Meadows and Clive Landon. It was just the

(38:28):
most magical time. And I heart back to the first day.
In fact, I put up on Instagram where I found
my original contact sheet, the very first contact sheet of
man at work, which was an assignment that we were given.
And Roger talks about this at length in the talk
that He's just done for you, which reminded me of it.
Where you go out, you talk to you approach a
stranger and you say can I photograph you doing whatever

(38:51):
you do your job? And it could have been a watchmaker,
It could be a man standing down the hull of
a ship in the docks. It could have been a
man carrying a slab of meat. Well that day with
a man carrying a slab of meat. And you go
out and you photograph one roll of black and white
film which you've come back, you've processed, and you've produced
a contact sheet, and you shove it in front of
Daniel Meadows or David Hern or any of the other lectures.

(39:13):
Ron McCormack and he says, well, I like the way
you've worked. You've not found essence of what it is
to be that shipbuilder, that watchmaker, that butcher carrying around
the slab of meat. Go back, do it again, come
back with another contact sheet, Come back by five, because
that's when I'm going home. And you do that, And
we did that for a whole term, and I don't
know how many hundreds of film rolls of film I

(39:35):
shot myself doing that before we moved on to the
next assignment, which was relationships. But I went out for
the first day pretty much with a spring in my
step because I thought, this is absolutely brilliant. I can
go and take pictures of people, process them and show
them to someone. For the first time ever, I don't
have to go back, go back to South End Airport
and fill out another load sheet for another sodding airplane

(39:57):
that may or may not take off safely. Extraordinary And
every time it might sound a bit over romantic to
say this, but when I leave the house these days,
I still remember that first day where I think I
don't have to go out for working for a living.
I can still go out and take pictures all day
or as long as my legs allow me to, to

(40:18):
my heart's content, and I can come back, look at
them on my computer, send them off to Mike and
hey prest though they might even be published within twenty
four hours or two weeks, And that for me is
as magical as when I first walked out in heavy
rain to go and photograph a man carrying a slab
of meat. And that, for me is the magic and

(40:39):
the intoxication that I still find when I look forward
to doing it. And even if I don't look forward
to it, and if I forced myself out, I still
know that I don't have to do a proper job.
It's not a proper way of earning a living, it's
not really way of earning a living at all. But
it's what it's what gets me out of bed and
fires me up.

Speaker 1 (41:00):
You were part of a really great flow of photographers
which came out of Newport, Paul law, Roger and David
Herners just for me, so I would say underrated somewhat.
He's alsort of been the silent voice of British photographers
And that might sound stupid in a way, but I
just feel you were very lucky. I wish if I
could have rewound my time around the same time, I

(41:23):
would have definitely gone to Newport. But I was in
Newcastle with John Kippen, who for me give me a
lot of self belief, and the words he used to
give me resonate with me to this day, and I
just sort of get that what you're saying, it's them
early days are really important when you're starting out. All
of a sudden, you were a world press six or

(41:43):
seven years coming out of university. That must have been
a real joyous moment. Because the nineteen ninety four World
Pressure come third in the stories section. There were some
heavyweight photographers in that group.

Speaker 2 (41:57):
I would say that there was white a journey that
I'd made after Newport to going and getting that or
to winning that to being presented with that piece of
news that was it was pretty pretty astonishing. So my
journey between that, if I can slightly fast forward through that,
I came to London and I shared a flat with

(42:20):
a lad called Michael Steele who was in my year
at college and we both so Michael Steele was a
sports photographer. He he, within seemingly weeks of starting the
course that we were all on, was working for the Guardian,
for Amond McKay and The Guardian and then The Observer.
He ended up photographing major sporting events that formed part
of his folio, and he was working constantly and that

(42:43):
was his education. I mean, he became a documentary photographer,
but through sport. So he and I shared a flat
in Tulse Hill in South London. It was a bit
like an Elton John and Bernie torpyin moment, you know.
We were both put together and he was working constantly,
he was working every day and I was sat there
watching TV during the daytime, wondering how the hell am

(43:06):
I going to make an in road And it took
me some months of figuring it out and I found
a way of doing it through women's magazines. It was
a bower title called Best Magazine. It was new, and
someone who knew the picture editor said, listen, she needs

(43:26):
three or four set up pictures a week to slot
in single columns, little pictures to describe the article. And
typical article was why you should always get a quote
from your plumber before you he fixes your taps. So
for two hundred pounds, I mean, in nineteen eighty six seven,

(43:47):
that was quite was all right, that was good rent money.
That if I did three of those a week, I
was made. I would do three of those at a time,
and they would pay expenses plus processing. We would take
it down to Joe's basement, get a couple of contact sheets, process,
and I would set up these pictures with anyone and
anybody that I knew. I wrote in family members, friends,

(44:09):
my in laws. I mean they were they were the
elderly couple who would be looking over the man dressed
with a boiler suit looking at a piece of paper
that was supposed to be the quote. All that kind
of stuff. Boom boom, boom, back down the motorway in
for processing. Day's work done. It was so easy, And
I did, I did. I did a lot of those,
and at some point. Somebody then said to me, you're

(44:29):
free on Saturday. I meant to say I was trying
to make in roads with the Observer, and I think,
like Roger described, I had tried countless times to get
an appointment to show what essentially were college pictures. I
certainly wasn't showing them best magazine pictures to the gatekeepers
of the picture editor. And now these were people who
aren'swered the phone on the picture desk at the Observer.

(44:51):
Roger's quite right. You phoned on a Tuesday or Wednesday,
before the week got going, before they were busy, and
I could not make any with them. There was no
chance in hell that I was going to get an
appointment to show the picture editor, whose name was Tony
McGrath my work. I must have taken me a year
or so of no, no, we're not free, or yeah,

(45:12):
come in. And I went in and never got to
see the picture editor. Saw a deputy, another gatekeeper, who said, yeah,
well see a lot of this stuff, but you know,
keep at it, young man, and I'm sure you'll make
it good someday. But somewhile later, a friend of mine
called Bill Robinson, who was a regular freelancer for the
observer said are you busy? Are you busy Saturday? Because

(45:35):
I tell you what, the OBS needs someone to cover
an event and I mentioned you, and they don't know
who the hell you are, but if you want to
do the job, then give them a ring. And I
rang and said, this is Richard Baker. I hear through Bill.
You remember Bill, you know your regular freelance, that you're
looking for someone for Saturday. And the man I was
talking to was Tony McGrath and he said, yeah, yeah, right, whatever, Yeah,

(46:02):
I want you to go and photograph a tortoise way
in competition Saturday morning. Be back by two. I need
the film DevD and I need to see the contact
sheet by half three at the latest or whatever. And
I did it and I showed him the contact and
he said, ah, these are really nice and I said, oh,
it's really nice of you. He said, we're not going

(46:22):
to run it, but have I got your number? And
he rang me the Monday or the Tuesday morning next
week and he said, if you want work, you can
work for me like what you did on the Saturday. Sorry,
we couldn't use it. And I worked for them solidly
for the next I guess it was eighteen months, if
certainly not under two it was under two years, maybe

(46:43):
eighteen months. And I worked as a regular freelance for
the Obs alongside and get this, I was alongside people
like Neil Libbert, Sue Adler, Jane Bone, Amon McKay, Roger
John Reordan. They were people whose pictures I'd been looking
at in the Observer when I was at college for
you know, with huge amount of admiration. Here was I

(47:05):
sharing a dark room. I would go in with some
really dodgy negatives that I had to process, and I
was no I had no idea how much how much
shadow detail I'd have in these negatives. So Jane Bown
would typically come up to me and she say, are
you you okay? She said, I like what you did
on you know, last Saturday. It was a nice picture
of whoever it was, David Attenborough, whatever it was. She said,

(47:27):
can I show you something? She said, I want you
to get the film out of the tank and look
at it under the red light. So halfway through the
dev she would show me how to get the neck
out of the tank unfurly in the in the off
the spiral and look at it. So it was half
developed half an image that I had no idea what
I was looking at. She said, give it an extra

(47:49):
rub with your finger and you'll get out more detail
in the in the shadow areas. So that's how I
learned to, you know, almost relearn the art of de
upping a neg and then having someone printed afterwards. You
didn't make the prince yourself. They had a dark room
technician who would produce big twelve sixteen's that would be

(48:09):
used to reproduce for the paper. So I was absolutely
gobsmacked that these literally these icons of British photography were
alongside me showing me how to do it. And I
was two years out of college at that point. So
at that point I said, after two years, I was
saying to Tony McGrath, I'd like to go and photograph

(48:30):
in Poland. So this is nineteen ninety, so the ball
had come down. I would like to do a trip
round eastern Europe. Would you help me with some money
and that would guarantee you the first look at the
black and white pictures, I said, but on the basis
that I should shoot some color along while alongside I
was thinking in terms of color stories again, because I

(48:50):
was looking in the color magazines and looking at the
work of Barry Lewis and Steve Bembo and Chris Pilletts,
Ernst Haas, Harry Gruyer, this beautiful color landscape and reportage
work that was in the color supplements. I wanted to
progress onto that. I kind of saw that. I didn't
want to part ways with the Observer, but I wanted

(49:10):
to work alongside them. McGrath said, forget it, forget it.
If you want to work for me, you will work
solely for me. I don't want to have you saying no,
you can't work and going off and doing a color
story now. So I choose, and I chose the color route,
and I went to Well, I did the Poland trip
and I shot color alongside it. Anyway, I think they

(49:33):
used some pictures anyway, because it proved what was going
on in small town Polish towns in post communism. That
worked out okay. But I went and did a story
in Florence. And it's a medieval football match called the Calcio.
And it goes back to the traditions of the fourteen
hundreds when rival churches would have their own I say,

(49:54):
football teams. It was a sporting team that involved around ball.
They kicked around, but they also, Kington kicked and punched
the living daylights out of each other. So all four
churches in Florence had their own teams, and they repeat
the tradition today of having playoffs in the middle of Florence.
And I love this idea. So I went back and
photographed this and took it back to a picture editor

(50:15):
who had seen my work at Newport. And he was
a man called Christopher Angela Gloo. He was the picture
editor of the Sun Express magazine who people like Steve
Bembo and Barry Lewis were regularly being commissioned for. And
I went back to Christopher and I said, hey, do
you remember me. You saw me at Newport. I've just
shot these pictures in Florence. And he said, oh these

(50:36):
are these are really nice. I'm not going to publish them,
but again, if you want to work for me, I'd
love to give you jobs. And I worked for him
for another two years or so, where he would commission
me to do similar things that he was giving Barry
to do. I think Barry had the he had the cherries.
He had the nicer ones got the I got the

(50:57):
second and third draw down stories, but I didn't mind,
and I was doing regular work for him. His successor
was a man called John Live. John Live used me
as well, and he on one occasion in the early
spring of nineteen ninety three, I think it was said,
I'd like you to go and photograph seaside towns for me.
I want to see the best hotel. I want see

(51:19):
the best plate of prawns with the beach in the background.
I want to see seaside pictures, the picture of the pier.
I want to see the hotels. So do that for me.
There will be some copy for you to illustrate that
will come to you every Thursday or Friday. Go off
for the long weekend, come back and we'll publish them
three or four weeks later. And that's yeah, yeah, yeah,

(51:41):
Colaaklaka and I did that, And after the first couple
I realized that I was taking pictures that he wouldn't
have been interested in whatsoever. They were personal pictures. They
were pictures that might have been paid for by him,
but I knew that he it was way outside of
his esthetic for the Sunday It's Best magazine. They were
worky pictures of people enjoying their lives at the seaside

(52:03):
town and then and they were essentially street pictures. They
were they were funny, they were off the wall, they
were quite Martin pars and there was a bit of
fill in flash there. And those were the pictures that
that someone said at the agency that I then joined
Cat's Pictures from the very beginning. He said, why don't
you put those into Well Pressed? You never know? And

(52:26):
I did, and I let twelve pictures. We I think
we spent an afternoon shuffling them around on the light
boxers transparencies, put them in forgot about them. And then
that same person phoned me weeks months later and said,
have you seen have you seen the news? Have you
got an email from Well Pressed? And I said no?
Why He said, you just you just want a prize

(52:46):
and was absolutely gob much. So that was the journey
between Newport and winning that. So if I you know,
that's come full circle.

Speaker 1 (52:56):
And you really summed up how difficult the nineties were
to be a photographer who wanted to do something. The
roots were there, but the journey to get that the
roads were congested in terms of getting to picture editors,
getting your work out. Yeah, and you still do a
lot of work off your own back, purely I think
because you had your apprenticeship then as well.

Speaker 2 (53:16):
Exactly, you've always done that, Exactly.

Speaker 1 (53:18):
I was sort of laughing when you were talking about
you not being able to see the picture editor, and
I spent years doing that being rejected. Now, that's why
I went down the corporate rout because it was easier,
was it.

Speaker 2 (53:29):
Oh you found that easier?

Speaker 1 (53:30):
Oh okay, corporate work in the nineties, Yeah.

Speaker 2 (53:33):
Okay, interesting you say that. Okay, So in the mid
to late nineties a lot of us at the agency
found that. Okay, someone like the agents. It took on
a corporate rep. So all of a sudden that rep
came to us and said, Okay, all these beautiful pictures
that you take of the magazines, I want you to
put those into a folio, a special corporate folio, because

(53:54):
I reckon that I can get you corporate jobs. And
we went, you got to be joking, what I mean
working for companies and and and your reports and ads.
And they went, absolutely, you're up for it. And we went, well,
how much how much do we make? Well, we'll pay
a lot. You'll get three or four times as much okay,

(54:15):
so there was a lot of reductionnce about it. But
the first folio I sweated over. It took me bloody
months to get right. It was the early days of
photoshop and in design and epsent printers. I couldn't get
my color profiles right. I was all over the place.
I was using burning up a lot of income paper.
It was a disaster. I got some help eventually, and
I got a friend, a designer, who laid out the

(54:36):
pictures for me, and we made a little design job
of it, made three or four copies, gave them to
the corporate rep and ended up within weeks or months
of corporate and your reports to do for companies in
lots of different countries and traveling the world economy, you know,
high pressure, as you know, you know, there's these things
are no holiday. You might be put up in a

(54:57):
really nice hotel with a decent dinner at the end
of it, but boy did they get their pound of
flesh out of you. And that then, actually for a
while shunted away the commissions for magazines, because before that
I was doing I was working for lots of really
good magazines. I was getting pages in big French and
German and American magazines. I was covering news events, Time, Newsweek, den,

(55:20):
you name it. But when I started the corporate work,
they all got shunted to one side, and I lost
touch with that very quickly, and I suddenly realized, actually,
I don't want to be doing this forever. But coincidentally,
maybe where as you persevered with it. I found it
really difficult not to deal with the relationship I had

(55:40):
with these designers who commissioned me to do these and
they were really professional people. I really liked them and
I love traveling around with them. Found it more difficult
to deal with them than with actually with picture editors
and writers and journalists who would traditionally commission me to
do really interesting stories in different countries. So I was
really torn.

Speaker 1 (56:00):
Yeah, well, I think with somewhere like kat and getting
the corporate section in the office, I think that was
a lot of that is GigE to high end corporate work,
which is which used to pay thousands a day, I mean,
massive assignments all over the world. Yet what I did
was I went below that and uncovered this vast this
is a sort of amazing amount of corporate Britain which

(56:23):
was underneath the annual reports and because it was a
time for there was budgets, people wanted to spend money,
people wanted to promote their businesses, and me and Jess
Culson really sort of got into that and we worked
hard at that. I did do a for you any reports.
But I remember being in the flash center once and
I was getting some flash get out as everything the

(56:43):
photographer did there. I was sitting next to I knew
sort of poor Low at the time, and he was
standing mourning and I hope he listen to this, and
he was grumping and groaning about a big sheet he's
got to do, and I'm grumping and groaning about my sheet,
and I'm because I've when he got two days in
sort of Heart of the Pool or somewhere like that,

(57:05):
and Paul's groan in that he's just got twenty five
days around the world shooting for like four grand a day,
and I'm like, do you want to swap? But that
was the nature of the beast, and Paul was very established.
It's a really interesting, interesting period. And then you were
through Cat and then you obviously knew a mutual friend
of mine, John used to be and nothing did that
lead on to IPG.

Speaker 2 (57:26):
They were strange times. I love who were I loved
the Cat's Pictures era. It started by literally it was
Christopher Angela Glue again at the Sundy Express magazine. He said,
you really need to put old Boy. He said, you
need to put these pictures from your medieval football into
an agency. And I said, oh, well, I know who
I'd like to join. I'd love to join Colorific because

(57:47):
they shoot, they have some wonderful well he said, you
won't get a look in there, but run by Shirley.
Who was Shirley and it was the Lagubins, So I
thought she was saying, no, Shirley Berry ran It wasn't
the other one, wasn't it. Yeah, someone will put me
right on this, but not on this. So the Lagubins,

(58:09):
who were husband and wife partnership, they ran Colorific. They
were the in my mind, the best color agency in London.
But they were a whole host of others. If you
just touched on there was Impact, there was Network, of course,
there was Network, There was Format, the Women's agency, there
was cats Striker. Yeah, there were a lot of very

(58:31):
small agencies who, of course have all disappeared because they
were swallowed up. It was a golden but funny time Cats.
When I first joined, Jeff Katz was from Colorific. He
had left Colorific to start his own agency, and he
was running Cats pictures from his front room. And when
I first phoned him, he said, well, I've got one
filing cabinet and one draw of pictures if you want

(58:53):
to start contributing, because I can see that you've that
you've got some passion there and I like your color.
If you want to start adding, he said, I will
get sales for you straight away, and he did so.
I was the second photographer through the door at Cats.
All those years later after it was sold to Hashet,
I was almost the last out of the door because

(59:14):
all the photographers that came and went, and I drew
up a list here of photographers who was at Cats,
and then it's spin off IPG and I've got here,
Tom stodd Up, David Medell, zed Nelson, Harry Borden, Keith Bernstein,
John red and Roger Hutchings, Alistair Thane, Derrick Hudson, and
there were more. Peter Peter Dench. How could I forget

(59:34):
Peter de don't share this with them? Of course, Peter Dench,
they were big names and I was rubbing shoulders and
we were all looking over each other's shoulders at the
light boxes when we came back from whatever it was
we were doing, and it was a golden time for feedback.
I mean, you know, there was one night when I

(59:55):
got word on the TV. There was a news break
where they said jet has fallen out of the sky
and hit a town in Scotland. I think we swapped
phone calls and Tom said, well, I'm halfway up there,
already a little beaten up old Persia. And he was
literally already on the road, I think, and he went
up there and I said, oh, it's a long way

(01:00:17):
to go. Maybe not. And I didn't go. And that's
one of the big mistakes of my life that I
didn't go up to locker beer, but just about everyone
else I knew did. But what I did do was
help Steve Blog, who was then one of the editors
and co founders of the agency alongside Jeff. He said, well,
we're going to have Tom's film coming back, you know.
I think it was the next night. Someone had run

(01:00:38):
it back down for him down the motorway as a favor,
and I saw Tom's work coming in raw film spread
across the light box, and I helped edit and cut
it up and capture it. You couldn't make those those
little incidents up because as Tom then went on to
do more important black and white project that became his

(01:00:59):
lifelong work. That was outside, you know, the work that
he did for seven days and the Telegraph magazine and
news magazine. I could see his work coming in his
prints and his work print, his contact sheets that he
would show me. It was like being at Magnum. It
was a bit like seeing you know, Eugene Smith's work
coming in raw. It was. It was priceless. So I
learned an awful lot from those people, all of them,

(01:01:21):
and I have a great deal of gratitude for them.
And they're still friends today. And I'm sadly, you know,
Tom's gone, John Reardan's gone, and I've lost touch with
the others.

Speaker 1 (01:01:30):
But yeah, what was the pup we used to go
down to in short Ice. I forgot the name because
I used to go down and have a beer with John.

Speaker 2 (01:01:37):
On vine Hill, oh en shored It was the Fox.

Speaker 1 (01:01:41):
That's right. Yeah, did you used to go down there?
We probably drank at the same time and there.

Speaker 2 (01:01:45):
Zech I'm not a big drinker, but you know, there
were occasions to go and celebrate one thing or another.
There was a heavy lunchtime drinking culture, I have to say,
and I couldn't stand that. I mean, I don't have
the disposition to drink pints and then edit or go
out and shoot pictures and afternoon, so we'd go and
have lunch sometimes, but a lot of deals were done
on the phone at that time, you know, from the Fox.

(01:02:07):
You know it was classic, it's classic Magnum stuff. That
was a network as well. Network. We're in the same building.
Network could have been in two same buildings as us
in Kirby Street, first of all in Hatton Garden and
then in Zeeland House in Shoreditch. So we were rubbing
shoulders with them too and going covering the same things.
I mean on nine to eleven. That was on occasion

(01:02:29):
when I did go and Tom and I shared a flight,
we shared a hotel room, and we walked the streets
together and sometimes split up, but came together with John
Reardon and Zed who was there as well. We met
up in the evenings to compare notes and to see
what the hell was going on. David Medell was there
as well, we were all covering it for different people.

(01:02:49):
It was a great learning curve to go out and
learn alongside these people, and I kind of missed that.
There was a lot to do and great personalities and
great friends.

Speaker 1 (01:02:59):
Who else was there the time as well? In terms
of the admin staff, Tara was Tara. I went. I
went to university with Tara, did you I did? And
I know Lisa as well.

Speaker 2 (01:03:10):
Oh yeah, yeah Lisa. Lisa was one of our corporate reps.
Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:03:15):
Now she's got our own agency. Right when she left IPG,
she came into our building. We had Insight, which is
Lab's contucit passage. So she moved upstairs and set up
the corporate side and Insight where we with the editorial
side a corporate side.

Speaker 2 (01:03:33):
Yeah so yeah, of course I should have mentioned Insights
along with that whole cast list of great agencies at
the time.

Speaker 1 (01:03:41):
I mean, Jesus is an outstanding photographer and I loved
the man to death. Here was my sore of rock.
We were sort of agency where other people would wring
us because jobs had been messed up elsewhere and there
were jobs beings can you go and do this? And
we would do anything, anything, will come in. We would
just do it, Just send us the postcard and we're
going through the pictures. That's what it was about then,

(01:04:04):
Because going back to your initial discussions about knocking at
doors and trying to get established, it was a beautiful period.
There was lots of money about, and it was hard work.
It was hard to maintain and you just had to
be ready for it, and that I don't think that
period you're ever going to. You never get that again.
It was such a beautiful period to be a photographer in,
but god, it was hard work.

Speaker 2 (01:04:24):
It was I just think if you were young and
you had energy and you just wanted to succeed, it
was a bit like being a dancer, you know, if
you turned up to the auditions and you danced well
and you were nice, you were civil, and you weren't
an asshole, and you would get there eventually. And if
you were even if you were half competent, you would
get there eventually. It just took a lot of commitment

(01:04:47):
and everyone around one, you know, shared it. You fed
off each other, and you looked at the magazines on
a Saturday or Sunday and there was someone else who's
work and you go, God, i'ld like to have done
that one, you know, and maybe on the Monday or
the Tuesday, maybe the phone rang and you were offered
something similar. Maybe it wasn't, you weren't, and you still
went outside and did anything. But you're right in the

(01:05:09):
practice I have today by going out and chasing and
looking my own without any without the phone ringing, It's
nothing unusual. Some people have never been able to work
like that, and I've always found that quite intuitive.

Speaker 1 (01:05:22):
That's an amazing time. Now let's talk about the Red Hours,
phenomenal book. It was a book. What needed to be
done to the Red Hours, wasn't there mine? It must
to be an amazing flying in them jet.

Speaker 2 (01:05:32):
Yes, here's the story. Someone at the agency live next
door to someone who was This is up in Gloucestershire.
So Stephan Ericson was one of the directors of cats
in the later years. He lived next door to someone
in Gloucestershire who was someone who worked in public relations
at the mod with a special responsibility to the RAA,

(01:05:53):
but with a passion for the Red Arrow. So I'd
seen those red jets flying through the blue sky at
South End Seafront for on occasions because I'd worked in aviation.
I knew what they were about. I knew that they
turned up at air shows, and I knew that they
were loved by millions of people, and the seafronts and
the maul was always cram for when they flew over

(01:06:14):
with their red, white and blue smoke. But that's really
all I knew. A British tradition, hugely, hugely. I had
no idea what they were about. I didn't even realize
as a specter A lot of other people don't realize
is that they all have a heritage of being frontline
fighter pilots. They've seen action. And so when Stefan came
to me and said, so, Glinn, this lives next door

(01:06:36):
to me. I've shown her some of your aviation work,
and I'd done a project about aviation in the context
of it being almost one hundredth anniversary of the first
Wright Brothers flight in two thousand and three, So this
was about nineteen ninety nine, two thousand, No, it was
two thousand and one anyway, but I was in the
midst of that project and she had seen some of
these pictures and they were shot on color neeg on

(01:06:58):
six six and six seven me arrange finder cameras. That's
what I was using at the time. I'd sort of
shunned thirty five meal, and I would I'd gone off
on a tangent that no one quite understood, and perhaps
neither did I. But that's what I was using.

Speaker 1 (01:07:11):
We've not talked about camera but we'll do.

Speaker 2 (01:07:13):
That if you insist. So clong story short, she said,
Richard like to do something with the rare? She said,
I would arrange it. I would. I would make it
happen for him. I would open the doors. I would
basically sanction it because ultimately, if a request is made
to the MOD and it's to do with the RAF
and it's to do with journalism or an arts project,

(01:07:34):
it would have to come across my desk and I
would either stamp it yes or no. So she was
quite a good person to know. We went to see
her and I and she presented us within a whole
ide of DEAs and it was you know, spend a
week with a tornadoes squadron, an arif lossy mouse. Well
that sounds nice. Will I get to fly with them? Well? Possibly? All, okay,
what else have you got? Well, you could fly with

(01:07:56):
another squadron and they have different aircraft. You could do
it other week, and I said, And then she ran
through these options, and then last thing she mentioned. She said, oh,
by the way, she said, the Red Arrows are celebrating
their fortieth anniversary next year, within eighteen months or so.
You could go up for a couple of days and
do the thing on the Red Arrows. And they went, oh,
that sounds interesting. And I went up there within a

(01:08:18):
couple of weeks and walked in to their base in
raf Scampton and just walks into this inner sanctum. They
weren't wearing red suits because this was winter. So this
is just as they're starting their winter training. This is
like a September October two thousand and three preseason. Yeah, preseason.
They're not wearing red suits because they're a new team.

(01:08:39):
They take on a number of new crew and new
engineers every year and they have to train them up.
They have to learn a new routine. So the winter months,
as you know, because you've maybe seen the book, they
have to learn a new routine and learn what it
is to be a Red Arrow and start from scratch.
And so I came in when the new team members
were new themselves. There were newbies, and everyone didn't know

(01:09:02):
each other, and they treated me with a huge amount
of suspicion because the last photographer that they had allowed
in had done a book. As it was told to me,
he had half inched a red flying suit, put it on,
walked out to the aircraft and held his cameras up
and got someone to snap a picture of him by

(01:09:22):
the tail. When the team found out that someone had
knit a red arrow suit and put it on and
ostensibly become an impostor in their eyes, they kicked him out.
They said, you're not coming in here ever again. So
on that basis, I was the guy that fell into
his footsteps, and so they didn't like the idea of
me either. But bit by bit my approach was, I suppose,

(01:09:45):
in all senses, when you're faced with a strange audience,
or you've been allowed access into a private world as
this was, you have to tread very carefully. I trod
on eggshells really for the first couple of weeks.

Speaker 1 (01:09:58):
Yeah, but you used to that.

Speaker 2 (01:10:00):
Yeah. What I'm trying to say is if I'd bowled
in there and shot and shot and shot with these
quiet cameras, I think my days would have been numbered.
What I decided to do was actually not to go
anywhere near the pilots for the first couple of weeks. Actually,
for the first month, I spent time downstairs with the engineers,
with the blokes in their boilersuits, who were crawling underneath

(01:10:21):
in and out of these aircraft, sticking their heads in
shining lights, finding stressfults, tightening bolts, mending, repairing, maintaining, and
I got to know how the hell this team worked
through them, not through the pilots. And it wasn't until
I realized that actually they were starting to ask, well,
where's the bloody photographer. God, he's never here. There's things

(01:10:43):
starting to happen. The team is taking shape, and I
suddenly found that actually I was being asked upstairs to
share their flying world. And that's how I pieced it
together very quickly to cut long stories short. I didn't
stay just days or weeks, but I stayed about nine months.
In that I would typically photograph for a week up there,

(01:11:04):
and I was shooting you know, six six and sixty
seven color neg that needed very careful processing down metro
down in Clarkenwell, just around the corner from the agency
so I would come and photograph for a week and
then come back for another week process look at the work.
I would copy some of the work and take up
some of the contacts back up to the team to
show them what I was doing. There was a kind

(01:11:25):
of constant you know, show and tell and can you
let me do a little bit more week by week,
not even assuming they were to let me stay for
another period, And then at that time back in London,
I would do little other jobs, so you know, the
income was still flowing in. So after nine months during
winter training, I went to I joined them to their

(01:11:46):
training schedule in Cyprus twice. When they were given their
permission to fly to their PDA, their permission to display authority,
which is when they earned their red suits. It's like
earning their badge. They are then allowed by the mod
to display in front of the crowd. They passed a
very special test that they build up to so I
was able to photograph the whole of that build up

(01:12:07):
and I got quite emotional, you know, the day that
they were given it. You know, there's a lot of stress,
a lot of tension because failing in their eyes is
really not an option. They're allowed to take the test again.
It's taking a driving test twice, but you don't want to.
You want to you want to succeed first time around,
because that's the psychology that these people who have become

(01:12:28):
top of their tree anyway, regardless to whether they're the
red arrows, they are the top of their top gun tree,
and although they don't like that label, that's the way
they like to do it. We passed together, we pass
first time, but the build up to that is quite extraordinary,
and I saw this happening in front of me, and
I tried to make the pictures reflect that. Thereafter, I
followed them around the country, another to some air shows

(01:12:51):
in Europe to illustrate their flying season. There was one
occasion when I decided I wanted to go and see
the Bastille fly passed. They were invited by the French
Air Force and the French military to close the Bastille
Day with their fly pass over the after trionp So
I thought, well, that's why I can't miss. I'll get
on the first Eurostar, which was at Waterloo. Then at

(01:13:14):
five something I got on the train, got to Paris
and thought, right, we'll get a cab to take me
as close to the after treeomph on the Charz of
Liza as possible, got there and found that there was
a taxi strike. All the taxi drivers were out on strike.
There was no cars to be got. I either had
to walk or run from the Guardo nor which was
a bloody long way and it was hot, or I

(01:13:36):
had to get the metro and then get out near
near the louver. I got out near the louver where
I was faced with barriers and they were you know,
that was high security because of the French military parade
that would come down for I found myself. I realized
I couldn't get to the Chaz of Lise, and I
realized that their fly past time was within minutes. So
I ran to the louver. We know the triangular, the

(01:13:59):
pyramid shaped dome there, and I realized that there could
be a picture in there, because otherwise there ain't no picture.
I've come all this way. They're going to fly over.
That's it. That's all I'm going to get if I
miss it, and I'm winding on frame by frame by frames.
There's no motor drive here, there's no twenty frames per second.
It's frame by frame by frame. I'm going to miss it,

(01:14:20):
and sure enough I realize that they're due and I
make a phone call. I make one phone call to
Red ten. Here's the ground operations man. Here's the man
in the red suit who stands there with a microphone
on the seafront says, ladies and gentlemen, get your cameras
out ready for the Red Arrows. And here they come,
and they're in such and such a formation, and next
they're going to do that, then they're going to be

(01:14:41):
in that or another, and then they're going to fly past.
And it's been lovely having he is. He's standing as
I as I ring him on the top of the
Arc de Triomph, and he's standing next to French generals.
And I phone him and say, Steve, Steve, when are
they do? I'm in position and he goes, do not
talk to me. I talking to the team. I'm talking
to these generals. But they're doing thirty seconds and I think, Christ,

(01:15:04):
this is going to be such a disasters. But they
come over in a position, in a formation which is
a V and it's called Big Battle. I don't know
if they do it anymore, but their arrival, their fly
past position is when you've got red one, the very
front jet at the front of the as the apex
of the V and the rest all tail off either
side behind him, perfect perfect formation, double strengths, red white

(01:15:30):
and blue extra dye in the tanks. They come over,
I get I don't know, three frames as it comes over,
and just as they're coming past, I see that their
smoke is reflected in the side of the pyramid that's
highly reflective, and I shoot, I don't know. I think
it's two or three frames. And there's a person, there's

(01:15:51):
a lady in red that's just underneath with the crowd,
and she's where she echoes the red jets, the shape
of the pyramid, echoes the shape of the big battle,
and I think, well, you know, I can't see on
the back of the screen. You know, I have to
wait till the Monday to see if I've got it
or not. And I go back to the hotel where

(01:16:12):
the team have collected, they've landed, got their own transport,
back to the hotel where they're staying, and the wives
are there, and I'm taking pictures of them, and I think,
at least, I think, well, if I've got nothing else,
I've got some pictures of the many in their red
suits under pictures of paintings of Napoleon. That'll make a
picture perhaps. Of course, that picture that where they're coming
across is my best selling picture of them. It worked

(01:16:33):
so nicely that it's what people want because there's a
metaphor about Anglo French relationships, of course, which is big
now as I suppose it was then, but it was
so symbolic that the raf were closing the French military parade,
and French people love that, and they still look at
it and comment on it occasionally buy a nice print.

(01:16:53):
Because it's a long distance picture on a sharp neg
it's only five hundredth of a second, that's all the
camera goes up to. If it was any closer, they
wouldn't be sharp. But because the smoke and the sky
and everything works so nicely, it's one of the nicest
pictures that I took. But to answer your question about
flying with them, at some point I said to them, Okay, look,
I've done an awful lot of stuff on the ground,

(01:17:15):
and I said, I would like to see what you
look like looking down on I want to see what
it's like from the cockpit. And they said, well, that
camera you're using isn't cleared by the Ministry of Defense.
And I said, what do you mean, well, not cleared?
I said, there's nothing wrong with it. It's not using
you know, I'm not using flash. You know there's no
there's no chance of explosion. And they said, yeah, well

(01:17:37):
we'll have to get it cleared. What I didn't realize
is that actually that's their way of saying, just behave yourself.
We'll let you in to the cockpit. You will fly
with us, you will get some training on the ejection seat.
You will have a medical each time you fly to
check your blood pressure and to make sure that you
know that your pupils dilate when they're supposed to. There's
not going to be a medical emergency in the air

(01:17:59):
because when when we do tight turns, you will be
experiencing high g forcesn't I And we will train you
to do that. And that's what they did. They sit
you in the seat, they strap you into this this
ejection seat that's on a trolley in one of their rooms,
and they show you what happens when you pull the
pin that when one of them says eject, deject, eject,

(01:18:22):
because there's an emergency you must do it, and if
you don't, you will be in the ground within a
few seconds. That kind of thing. So they scare the
life out of you. They say, here's a sick bag.
We call it a pick and mix, after the bag
that you get from Walworths when you choose your own suites.
You will have that in your pocket. If you feel sick,
you will not throw up in the cockpit. You will

(01:18:44):
throw up in the in the in the bag. Okay,
got that. I know when to pull the pin. I
know how to hold my breath now and grunt and
hold all the blood down in my stomach so it
doesn't rush to your head. That's when you pass out.
All those kind of things. And they said, okay, you're clear,
and I went eventually on six flights with them. I

(01:19:04):
flew on lots of different positions where the air display
that they're doing looks different from each position. So for example,
if I'm with Red one in the back of Red one,
because they're two seater jets, the formation is different as
opposed to when I'm at the aircraft at the very back,
where I can see through the perspecs at the others
above me around me. So I would plan each picture

(01:19:27):
I want to do on each flight, So bearing in
mind that i've got the six seven Mama.

Speaker 1 (01:19:32):
Yeah, I've taken manual focus.

Speaker 2 (01:19:34):
Manual focus. It's focused on pre focused and taped to infinity.
I've removed the strap because they don't want the strap
snagging on the stick that's in front of you. So
the stick that is waggling around in front of you
is echoing the inputs that he's putting in the front cockpit,
so it's waggling around in front of you. They do
not want any strap snagging on that stick because that's

(01:19:56):
going to echo his input he will then lose control
the aircraft. And bearing in mind in some display formations
we are seven feet from another wing tip, he doesn't
want that. So I'm very conscious that i had to
take off the strap, and also that I've taped up
any sharp edges, like so the lugs of the straps,

(01:20:18):
there's sharp lugs that are on either side. There's still
the things. They're all taped up with gaffer tape. I've
also gaffer taped up the film back, so I don't
want any accidents where the film backs opening up. I've
got twenty pictures to photograph each display. That's it. So
I will do one flight, I will shoot twenty pictures,
twenty frames. I will at the end of my week

(01:20:38):
go back home and I will see that film, those
pictures for the first time on the Monday morning when
Metro have processed my contact sheet. So there's a lot
of wastage there. And each flight I make the same mistakes.
You know, I'm not judging the moment because there's one
press of the button each time I want to shoot
the picture. I'm worked out with the pilot. And sometimes
it's within the formation, and sometimes we've flown in an

(01:21:01):
extra jet where we're what's called photo chasing. We're flying
above the whole formation. I'm looking down on them, where
is tilting the wing ninety degrees and I'm looking down
on them, and I'm seeing in glorious detail the fields
of England. This is England's pleasant pastures. This is the
iconic red arrows with England in the background. We've got

(01:21:23):
farmer's fields, We've got roads running through. We've got the
A fifteen, which is a large diagonal road that I use.
That's a Roman road, and the Roman road has only
been diverted to allow for the lengthening of their runway
back in the seventies or eighties. So there's history here,
and there's something I want to say about looking down
on these red aeroplanes with green fields in the background,

(01:21:45):
and because it's shot at in infinity at a five
hundred of per second, everything is really sharp. I think
they then realize that actually, because this is in the early,
very early days of digital, their own photographers are using
early digital cameras. I've never used the to a camera
in my life. I'm using the film and the cameras
that I only ei ever used for some years before,

(01:22:06):
and I know what they're going to do for me.
So they're very unique pictures and I don't believe anyone's
done it before and certainly not since. That These pictures
are very non aviation aesthetic. They're not plain spotter pictures.
And actually I got strange reaction from when eventually I
found a publisher for a book by complete accident. I

(01:22:28):
finished the project, I had the pictures, they were scans
on CDs and on hard drives, but I had no publisher. Ultimately,
when I found a publisher by a complete accident, by
someone I met on a job for Stern Magazine at
a car event. Actually it was must not Mercedes. Who's
Sir Lewis Hamilton's other team Dan in Woking McLaren. It

(01:22:50):
was a job at McLaren I did for Stern Magazine.
I met a writer who said, I know a person
that would publish this. He's an accountant, but he's got
his own publishing company. And everyone else turned me down.
Can you believe it? Ultimately I found a publisher, but
by that time Cat's IPG had folded. I had no agencies.
I had a project and a publisher, but I had
no support crew. I had no terrible actors. I had

(01:23:13):
no shame of so clear as I had no Tom's
or or David Medel's or Z's to show this work.
So I was completely on my own, very isolated. But
I had a feeling that a man who I knew
design books would help me, and that was a man
called Smith. His name is Do you know him?

Speaker 1 (01:23:31):
No, Stuart Smith, No, I've never met. No.

Speaker 2 (01:23:34):
Stuart Smith was did fine art at the same time
as me at Newport. Not fine art, he did graphic design.
He was a graphic designer. He was publishing books for Magnum.
He is the book designer for Elliott Urwitz and lots
of Magnum books.

Speaker 1 (01:23:48):
He was just best in London.

Speaker 2 (01:23:51):
He was the best book designer in London. I still
believe he is. He just specializes in photography books. And
I said to him, Hey, Steve, it's me Richard. I've
just done this thing. Would you take a look at it? Ah, well, okay.
Then I took him some work prints and some yeah
I think there were prints, and he said, well, I'll
do a dummy for you, but until you find a publisher,

(01:24:14):
I ain't interested. You need to find someone to publish
this for you. So it all fell together in sequence.
Once I found the publisher, I knew that ste would
help me. We worked on this together in two thousand
and four, the summer of two thousand and four at
his studio in Clerkenwell, and so we spent some months

(01:24:35):
putting this book together painstakingly. I suppose what I would
do differently now is if I had my time again
with the same material, and let's say this is still
two thousand and four, I wouldn't have made it a
wordy book, because I would in the lass of stages
of going back was on forward to the agency. On
the bus, I would sit at the back and I'd
write up my notes and I was essentially write book

(01:24:58):
and transpose what I was writing down at the time,
my feelings, my experiences, the technical stuff which I ultimately
put into the book. A lot of our time ultimately
was spent in editing the words and the text for
the book rather than the picture. If we just made
it a picture only book with a brief intro by

(01:25:19):
one of the Red Arrow's team or something that would
have been quite feasible to do, it would have taken
us a lot lot less time as it was. The
writing and the editing of the writing, because I hired
an editor to do just that, turn into a real
nightmare and we fell out. Stu and I were having
to deal with this person who I'm not sure what
was going on in her life, but it wasn't a

(01:25:41):
happy time. Ultimately, we got it published and it was printed.
The publisher allowed me to go to Singapore, he paid
for my air flight to go down to Singapore for
me to go on press and it was it was
a great time.

Speaker 1 (01:25:54):
And wow, Ultimately, imagine if you had them then, if.

Speaker 2 (01:26:02):
I had Instagram, there was no Twitter, there was no
Instagram I could have.

Speaker 1 (01:26:06):
I've published a couple of books, but the thing I
have never done is being on press, and that's just
something I may never experience.

Speaker 2 (01:26:13):
It was a lovely thing. And you know what, you
walk into the small printing press and an industrial estate
in Singapore and they've got they've got their little dot
matrix board out, you know, their little stick on letters.
They're saying welcome, mister Richard Baker Red Arrows. And it
was And they took me to lunch to Singapore street food,
and then we'd come back and then they'd wake me

(01:26:33):
up in the middle of the night to check on
another sheet and I sleep on a camp bed in
the romantic camp bed in there in their VIP you know,
their executive boardroom.

Speaker 1 (01:26:45):
You've made it then, I mean, that's that's just that's
what it's about.

Speaker 2 (01:26:49):
You know. It's brilliant. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it was wonderful.

Speaker 1 (01:26:56):
I disagree with you on the had you had it
done it again, you would have made it just to
for a book. I think it's a great book. I
think it needed that personal end to it needed the text,
the diagrams that needed all of that.

Speaker 2 (01:27:11):
I had. I felt that I had to tell their story,
because they gave up so much of their time and
resources to helping me, not only during it, but afterwards
as well. They fact checked every sheet and they came
back with corrections and wording and terminology that wasn't quite right.
And so I felt that I owed it to them.
That's great, tell their story. And you know what, Zach,

(01:27:31):
the ultimate accolade, the ultimate honor I had was for
them to buy. I mean, I gave them a free
copy each every member of the team, one hundred one
hundred or so they got a free copy of the
book that was allowed for in the printing print run,
but they not. And so they not only did that,
and we all signed each other's books, and they wrote

(01:27:52):
some lovely things in my book, and they smeared red
and blue dye all across the signature page, which was
which was lovely. Yeah, and completely vandalized it, which is great.
But they all bought copies for their own families because
they said, this is our time, this is the time
when we're young men doing an extraordinary thing. And even
now I'm in touch with them, and we hark back

(01:28:15):
because that the hierarchy doesn't exist anymore. They're not Red
Arrows pilots, and I'm not just some other photographer who
happened to visit them for sometimes the last year of
their RAF careers. Nowadays, we're friends who exchange banter on
LinkedIn or whatever, and they're in, they're off. They're now
commercial pilots flying seven seven's on for BA or they're

(01:28:39):
in defense, you know, doing all that kind of thing.
But there's still there's still that camaraderie there, and we
talk about that time that was nearly twenty years ago
and where it was. It was their special time as
well as my special time. And actually, if I can
go back to or fast forward to a fortunate Woman
where I said to the doctor who I rode in

(01:29:02):
her car to an appointment a home visit where she
visited an elderly gentleman. And it's in the book where
she's bending down and she touches his hand because her
doctoring technique is to touch and to feel, especially if
there's masks involved. You know that the human touch cannot
be replicated. And I said to her, I remember clearly

(01:29:23):
on one of our last journeys back to the surgery,
I said, you know, this is our time when we
look back on whatever happens with this book. We know
it's going to be published, because as a publishing deal,
it will be printed. But when we speak to each other,
hopefully in years and maybe decades to come, I hope
that you and I are still friends, that we can

(01:29:44):
see how this partly changed our own lives. And I
think that's a lovely thing where you can speak to
your subject and empathize on a level where you've both
shared the same experience but from different angle. She or
the Red Arrows as the subject and me as an
author or an artist to report on their story. And

(01:30:09):
she said, a lovely thing as well as they have.
You know, thank you for telling my story. It's a
remarkable thing, she said, to have one story told in
such vivid detail, not just in beautiful writing and the
way Polly has written about me, but in the way
that you've summed up my career at the time I

(01:30:31):
am in my career, in her late forties, and so
that for me makes it so so worthwhile. And I
think about that often. It's not just about looking at
the pages that are printed in the book and reading
passages back through it, and you know, it all floods
back to you, and you or you look at the
book in a bookshop in waterstones and foils and hatchards,

(01:30:55):
which I do while it's there because I can and
always be there. I go back to it and look
at it and go, oh, that's a really special thing
to do, regardless of what people think of it. And
I know perhaps some people in the photo community don't
perhaps get it because all they do is flick through

(01:31:16):
right way round backwards. I don't care, and they just
look at the pictures and they go perhaps pictures are
on text paper, they're not on fine glossy matte paper.
Look at the repro But I would say to them,
don't judge me or them on the basis of just
flicking through. You need to read this and to understand

(01:31:37):
what the pictures say in context with the writing. I'm
slightly blue in the face because I've said it to
so many people. But I'm learning that because a it's
not a photography book. It's a book containing pictures, and
I think that slight. There's a lot of noses that
have gone in the air, and it's slight. It's more

(01:31:57):
than slightly irksome to me. Yeah, but you know what
I'm getting past caring. So that's our message.

Speaker 1 (01:32:05):
We all read it different ways, and I think, yeah,
I think it's fine for a photographer to maybe skip
to it because that's what they're looking at. But it's
interesting how it's how it's passed on, and especially like
to say, we look at the John Moore pictures, how
they were passed on to this contemporary piece. It was
passed on to a new way of looking at stuff.
This book's come out of that process. And lck Hedges

(01:32:28):
did Summer Hill in the sixties and that was done
in a sort of Penguin shaped book. It wasn't about
the photographs where people might look at it and go, well,
you know, like is this a photography book or is
this a book about education and children and stuff like that.
What's interesting about The Red Arrows as well, and this
book is what and how it will be passed on

(01:32:50):
in twenty thirty years and that's what's important. You know,
I have so as the Red Arrows book as well.
You know who's going to look at that in twenty
thirty years time and think what can I do now?

Speaker 2 (01:33:02):
You made a point earlier that actually the Red Eyes
deserved a book to be done. There have been loads
of books done about them, but none like this, where
a story is told with a little bit more empathy
than exactly. So there's value in that. Absolutely, they are
absolutely historical, little historical documents. And I don't try and

(01:33:23):
say that conceitedly, because I think you have when you
take on a project, any project, I think you have
to look on how historical it should or might be,
because you know through experience that pictures date very very quickly,
don't we know it? Especially since two thousand and four?
And slightly behind that, don't we know that haircuts fashion?

(01:33:45):
I mean, I've been photographing in the city of London
for many, many years. I first went there in the well.
I did a story actually about the city of London
for the Sunday Express magazine for John lith Again he
said I want a year in the life of the
city of London, and it set me on a course
that set me up for lots of different situations and

(01:34:07):
piece of work that grew and grew and grew way
larger than the Express would use. But it still sells
that work today Portantly. There are still pictures of outside
the Bank of England. There is still a little stand
where you can pick up your free copy of the
Evening Standing. Back in nineteen ninety two, which was the
year of Black Monday, when the pound crashed against the dollar,

(01:34:31):
was it there was a man selling you would buy
the newspaper then, So for ten twenty thirty p or
whatever it was, fifty per you would buy the Evening Standard.
Every day I would see the same old gentleman turn
up in his pinstriped suit and his waistcoat and he's
bowler hat. He was the man. He was the father

(01:34:51):
out of Mary Poppins, the father who would you report
to the old blokes in the Bank of England and say,
you know, don't waste your penny on feeding the birds.
You know, invest it, young man, invest it. He was
that gentleman. He was a man for a bygone age,
and I realized he was even then. He was a
bit of a relic, you know. He was a rarity.

(01:35:13):
And I wouldn't see the likes of him again. After
a few years he disappeared. Of course he disappeared because
he looked as if he was in his nineties then.
But he would drag himself. I think I spoke to
him one day and he said, oh, I try and
come up every day. But I have retired, but I
like to keep my hand in, you know, that lovely
expression of I like to I like to still do it,
you know, to keep myself young. Actually, that's the thing

(01:35:35):
about photographers. We like to try and keep our hands
in and stay young through our photography. And that's quite important.
The point is that there is no man in a
pinstripe suit anymore. There is no bowler hat. The young
men now they don't wear socks. Their trousers are too short,
and they wear blue suits and they got designer stubble.
That's of its day. I photographed both and I have

(01:35:57):
them both in my collection and everything in between. That's
really important. So whether it's red arrows or a country doctor,
things are not going to stay the same. The point
about the country doctor, of course, the premise is about
optimism about doctory. The fact is that we don't have
enough general practice doctors out there practicing relationship based doctoring.

(01:36:19):
It's a rarity and there's not enough of it. Doctors
have become numbers. Time is their time is its quantified
in minutes, and it's not enough. Her way might be
seen as nostalgic We've tried to not make it that,
but I know that the pictures I've taken of her
and the way she looks, the way the surgery looks

(01:36:41):
will date very quickly. That's fine, I want that.

Speaker 1 (01:36:45):
Yeah, it's interesting when you're talking about how things change.
And I was recently scanning legs from London from about
nineteen well about nineteen ninety eights and stuff like that,
and I'm scanning them thinking it's just stock going to work.
It just looks so dated, and I'm thinking, how am

(01:37:06):
I going to sell that a stock now? That one
off of somebody wanting a sort of shot from the nineties.

Speaker 2 (01:37:12):
My archive exists as as digital files on photoshelter, et cetera.
As we've said before, I still have four filing cabinets
here full of originals. In fact, to me blunt, I
have culd an awful lot over the years because my
third and fourth rate pictures I see as being superfluous,

(01:37:33):
and I've ditched a lot. And I know that some
people out there and go what I do as well,
mad are you mad? And a very special friend who
lives up in Glasgow could not believe that I that
I've done this. The point is. I had to because
I'm running out of storage space. But I have kept
very very carefully everything else. I've kept my A edits

(01:37:53):
and my B edits, and I've kept my my prime
stories and projects and assignments that I've done in one
single filing cabinet. They are sacrifancs to go back through them,
even now. I traditionally it is a task, and it
gives you a neck ache, and you realize, you know,
what you didn't enjoy about bending over a light box

(01:38:15):
for days at a time because of, you know, the
headaches it gave you. I do realize when I go
back through that each time. I've done so every year
for the last ten twelve years. Every time I go
and do another sweep, I find something new, and I
find something new because what you've seen as not very
interesting at the time then gets promoted up the list

(01:38:37):
of being a little bit interesting. Well, that is quite
interesting too, That is very interesting now because of the
way that we live our lives now through the internet
or phones or whatever. I've covered many protests in Westminster, Brexit,
climate change, XR, all those kinds of things, and I
purposely stayed clear of Downing Street because in the old days.

(01:39:00):
I'd done a lot of political work for people like
Time and Newsweek, either on assignment or they used the
pictures afterwards. People like Tom Stoddart and Keith Bernstein and
David Madell and z and John Ridden. We'd all been
there working for different people. So I'd been and done
the Downing Street thing, and for all those years of

(01:39:21):
going on to other things, other assignments and books and things,
I had steered clear, well clear of Downing Street. But
because it was someone's someone said something to me on
Instagram just before when when the rumors were circulating that
you know, Boris was about to go, I thought I'd
really like to be there to see him get in

(01:39:42):
the car and drive down the lane again, just as
Stature did. I thought that was quite enticing, although as
it turned out he didn't. He just he stood at
at his podium and walked back inside again, which was
actually quite an important picture as well, because it described
him not quite leaving but not quite leaving. He was
checking out but not quite living, like in the Eagles.

(01:40:05):
And so I found myself in down the Street again.
I'd show a press pass and went through security and
had my stuff x rayed. I'd never done that before,
but I ended up standing next to a really really
good photographer called Leon Neil, who's a staff news photographer
Getty and we had crossed paths over the last few

(01:40:27):
months and I've got to slightly know him, but hugely
admiring of him. And he said, you know, I have
never That's he I have never shot a role of
film in anger or any job ever. And I said
what never? And he said no. When I did my
press course at Sheffield, he said we had I had
a nick on d something and it suddenly dawned on

(01:40:50):
me that, you know, those of us who had been
working in the nineties and up to well, certainly in
my case, I last shot film properly after The Red Arrows.
The Red Hours was the last project that I ever
used film for, and I started using digital soon afterwards,
but thereafter there so there are there are people working

(01:41:11):
now at our very high level that have never used film.
So in that respect I feel slightly dinosaur ish, but
also blessed. Yes, yes, I am blessed. I think we
are blessed, Zach. We are all blessed that we've experienced it,
because you know, it's a bit like I mean, we're

(01:41:33):
pre internet, we're pre phone, we're pre everything apart from
the only the only thing we have in common now
with the new generation is that we look through a
rectangle and pointed at some point you see as mildly interesting.
Thereafter everything's changed. And I had for the year or

(01:41:54):
two years when I migrated to digital, I had a
huge problem getting my head around the fact that there
wasn't something physical inside the little black box that I
held to my eye. And I found that disconcerting and
uncomfortable and worrying, and I found I was quite anxious thereafter.
I had no idea what to do with the files,

(01:42:14):
and when I deleted the wrong versions, I didn't know
what my digital asset management was all about. I I was,
I was, I was, I was floundering us slightly, but bit,
bit by bit it came together. But after learning a
lot of from the mistakes I had made, as I
had made mistakes in exposing coder chrome and transparency film,

(01:42:37):
you know that we never quite managed to do properly.
I got through it, and now I'm I'm you know.
I was so cameras did you did ask about cameras?
Didn't you can we did you want to touch on that?

Speaker 1 (01:42:51):
Let's go back to cumbers, I guess. So what was
your first camera?

Speaker 2 (01:42:54):
Canon eighty one, one hundred and sixty nine ninety nine
from Queen's Road in South End on Sea that I
bought with a paycheck from the airport. I paid for
it because I realized that as a non smoker, one
hundred and sixty nine pounds was worth several packets of fags.
So I thought, if I'm not smoking, and I never have,
I could put this to better use. So I did that,

(01:43:17):
and it was probably what amateur photographers said that a
beginning amateur should buy, and it was Yeah, it's great
little camera. Fifty mil absolutely, yeah, fifty mil. Yeah, nothing wider,
nothing longer. Yep. What was the film you were putting
through color Kodak? What would it have been at the time,
I don't know. Wouldn't have been portrait too early for portrait?

(01:43:39):
Coder color, Yeah, of course it was coder color, colder color, yeah,
yeahh holiday snap film, Yeah, definitely.

Speaker 1 (01:43:45):
It's interesting listening to your stories about the Red Hour
was who was paying for all of this?

Speaker 2 (01:43:51):
Oh? I paid for that myself.

Speaker 1 (01:43:52):
It's interesting content, doesn't it?

Speaker 2 (01:43:54):
Yeah, totted up how much it cost me to do?
It cost me cost me about ten grand. And I think,
having said that, what should have happened is that we
had a loose arrangement at Cat's IPG for the if
the agency, the powers that be John easter b in

(01:44:15):
fact liked the idea of the idea, if we didn't
have a guarantee against page race, or we didn't get
an assignment out of the idea, the agency would pay
fifty percent of expenses. That's the way it usually works.
So if I went to Downing Street and shot four
roles of Fuji Chrome hundred, they would pay fifty percent

(01:44:36):
of the processing might the metro processing be In fact,
it was put on their account, and they would bill
me for fifty percent of of the cost. So as
would they would with flights or trains or buses or
whatever or food. If I went away somewhere for a week,
I would bill them. I proved to them, how will
I cross? So that's the way it would work. When

(01:44:57):
I was doing the red hours project. That should have happened.
That should have kicked in when I finished and I
totted up and gone, okay, mysteries to be this is
what it's cost me. It's cost me ten grand. Pay
me five thousand pounds and I'll be very happy. And
then you know, we'll split the proceeds on what the
book makes on print sales. Blah blah blah blah blah.
There was no agency. I was on my own. I

(01:45:19):
had to foot for the lot, as I had done so,
but I'd got zero back. In fact, when the agency folded,
there was a threat. And this was nothing to do
with John. This was the powers that be that took
over the the insolvency of the agency, because don't forget,
we were owned by Hashet. They they closed us down.

(01:45:42):
They're the ones that said, on one Monday or Tuesday morning,
said do not answer the phones anymore. You are closed.
Do not trade, do nothing, go home. And essentially, thereafter
the whole I hear, the whole of Cat's Pictures archive,
and thereafter was dismantled piece by piece by students who

(01:46:05):
were sat at the cellar at the X staff's desks,
finding pictures from hundreds and hundreds of contributors, stuffing them
into plastic sleeves, and then in theory, boxing them off
and sending them back or having photographers come and get them.
What happened is that they were putting them into plastic sleeves,

(01:46:26):
turn them upside down. Lots of originals are falling between
the floorboards where they remained to this day. I imagine.

Speaker 1 (01:46:32):
Wow.

Speaker 2 (01:46:33):
Not only that, but the people running the insolvency said,
the scans of your projects like yours, Richard red Arrows,
you don't own those. We own them. They were scanned
on company time by company staff. And I had seven
hundred scans of necks that I put for you know,

(01:46:55):
they would scan them for me. So when I say
that I was out of pocket, I was out of
pocket ten thousand pounds or five thousand pounds. But I
had a hard drive full of the computers full of
my folder, saying Richard Baker Red Arrows, seven hundred of
which we were high res scans. They then said, you
can't have them.

Speaker 1 (01:47:15):
Nice.

Speaker 2 (01:47:16):
So yeah, nice. So what we did, and what I
certainly did, and what many of us did, was go
out and buy a new generation of hard drive that
plugged in by USB from what was it, from flash
center or somewhere, and plugged them in at lunch time
when the insolvency man left for lunch, plugged them in

(01:47:39):
and dragged everything into the folder and walked out with
my scans. And that's how I had the scans for
the book. Otherwise I would have had to have scanned
all my own work themselves, which would have cost me
how many x A thousand pounds, you know, huge amount,
because I didn't have an IM and con I didn't
have any cannon scanner.

Speaker 1 (01:47:59):
I don't know many people apart from one person who's
got one of them, David Levins's got one.

Speaker 2 (01:48:04):
Well maybe I could have paid Levinson to do it,
but he would have charged me, you know, the going right,
of course he wouldn't know.

Speaker 1 (01:48:09):
He did no you know what he did mine for
He did about seven eight seven eight. He did something
for me for free. It was very kind of did he?

Speaker 2 (01:48:16):
Oh Well, The point was that it very nearly didn't happen,
and that project very nearly didn't get published for all
sorts of reasons. Least of all I wouldn't have had
my scans. But I have an X but I didn't,
you know, I didn't have an agency, that I didn't
have a publisher, that I didn't have an agency, and
it could have they could all still remain on DVDs

(01:48:37):
just sitting behind me here in my office. That's where
it could have could have ended up. As it happens,
I negotiated a deal with the publisher to give me
seven hundred and fifty books that I could give away
to art directors and picture editors as a little sweetness,
saying I'm on my own here, I'm floundering. I need
I need some jobs. Will you take me on? Will

(01:48:58):
you give me some work? Almost felt as if I
was back from scratch, except I had a book and
I did so in the summer of two thousand and five,
which you may remember, there was a series of explosions
on the underground in London, including a bus and including
the tube. I at that time was traveling into town
with books laden in a big rucksack, all packaged up,

(01:49:21):
all addressed, and with personal notes and cards to advertising agency,
art buyers and picture editors, people who I thought would
be able to buy into the product and give me
some work and maybe allow me to do something similar.
And people on the tubes and on the public transport
gave me a really wide berth when I was getting
on with this big rucksack. I mean, can you imagine it.

(01:49:43):
The paranoia and the nervousness at the time was quite remarkable.
So it was around that time that I was hawking
around the book and I got absolutely nowhere. I got
nothing out of it, and I on one one more.
I thought, I know the person I'll send it to.
Let's try this person. Let's send it to a writer

(01:50:05):
who's work I've quite admired and I was intrigued by.
And it was a It was a philosopher writer. An
essay is called Alander Bottom, and I knew that he
had published a book called The Art of Travel, and
in it he confesses to be an aviation nut, but
not a plane spotter, And that really struck a chord

(01:50:27):
with me because I just thought, I wonder if he'd
like to see these pictures. Who knows what would happen
if he likes airplanes and the esthetic of air travel,
of airports, the culture of being a passenger and being
an air traveler. Let's let's just see if he likes it.

(01:50:47):
And I sent him a copy to his agent, and
within two days I got an email back from Alander Botton,
who said, Hello, really really like your book. I've just
spent two hours in fact an afternoon looking at your
website and I think this is really interesting work. I
am writing a book. I'm just researching it at the moment,

(01:51:11):
and would you be interested in collaborating with me this
idea of a book called well, it was a book
about the world of work, about logistics, about how products
reach our Let's let's pretend that we're doing a book
about a chapter about tuna fish. Let's, for example, say

(01:51:32):
I wonder how a tuna fish is caught in the
Indian Ocean and how it ends up on our dinner
plate on a Friday evening. Let's explore how things get
to where they're supposed to do. Let's imagine that we
are traveling with the product and see how.

Speaker 1 (01:51:48):
The transportation got there.

Speaker 2 (01:51:51):
The commodities of our daily lives are ending up where
they need to be to be sold. What's capitalism all about.
Let's also see Let's see where pylons take electricity. Let's
imagine electricity flowing across the landscape and ending up from dungeness,
let's say, at the power station where it's generated to

(01:52:12):
let's say the West end of London, where the consumers
are burning the power to power neon lights. Let's do
that kind of thing. Are you interested?

Speaker 1 (01:52:21):
The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work?

Speaker 2 (01:52:23):
And that became a book called The Pleasures and Sorrows
of Work, which led onto another book straight away because
he was asked, on the strength of that book whether
he would become an artist in residence at Heathrow and
he said, yes, but I will only do it if
I can ask I can ask Richard Baker to do
the pictures. So he and I spent three weeks running

(01:52:46):
around terminal five. He and we did a book that
was sponsored by British Airports Authority BAA that doesn't exist anymore.
And they said what we said, first of all, yeah,
but what if we see a cockroach running? This is
a face. This is the famous instance. What if we
see a cockroach running under people's feet? All there's are rats?
We see a rat? Can we write about it? And

(01:53:07):
they said, yes, but you're not going to see one.
When we thought, well, let's go and find the rattle,
the cock croach. Let's let's just prove a point. The
point was they led us basically write little stories, little vignettes,
little portraits of passengers and the people who work there,
and it became a little little it was a little
paperback book that they that we that was published by

(01:53:29):
Profile Books became a success in that it was you know,
it was the archetypal airport book that was sold at
airports for people to as people to experience as passengers
stories of other passengers about air travel and that period.
And so as a result of that book, you know,
it was it was like leapfrogging stepping stones from from

(01:53:51):
Pleasures and from Red Arrows to Pleasures and Sorrows to
Heathrow became an idea that that was published by Profile Books,
the Heathrow book. Profile Books then published wanted to publish
a book in conjunction with this book for Alliance Insurance
about risk. And that's how Polly and I were put together.

(01:54:15):
So that's the full circle about how all these books
have come into being one by one. But had it
not been for the Red Arrows, had it not been
for the fact perhaps that I lifted those scans that
allowed me to make the book that then Alan saw
that then a bit by bit after several years that

(01:54:37):
Polly was introduced to me. You know, the last book
about a country doctor wouldn't have happened. So who knows circumstance,
by circumstance wouldn't have happened.

Speaker 1 (01:54:49):
Circumstance, by circumstances have had not your friends sat down
to dinner with somebody who then thought he could do
the he could do something here. Yeah, your life totally different,
or the or.

Speaker 2 (01:55:01):
The phone call that said someone starting an agency. You
know you have to You have to then piece together
all that those happenstances to then find out what your
path is. And you can only look at the path.
You don't look at the path forward. You look at
from up front, looking behind. You don't choose. You can
only then recognize how much utter perfect sense that makes.

Speaker 1 (01:55:25):
You know. It's interesting you say that. I don't know
about you. But all the way through my working life
as a photographer, every time somebody called me for a job,
I would say fifty to fifty out of the blue.
I used to I used to be astounded. But I
never got over the fact that people would bring me
to go and shoot for them and want to pay
me like money to go and take pictures and they

(01:55:46):
never even met me. And I was just I never
got off of that. I never got off of that.
It always baffled me and a standard me that it's
phone call the fate and how it takes you on
another ball, and how helped you take a mortgage. It
never never got off of that.

Speaker 2 (01:56:06):
Back in the day, I think our all our own philosophies, well,
you never say no to anything, you say yes to everything.
I kind of reverse that. You know, as I said
in the beginning, I make no sense to myself because
I turned things down. Why because a A smell a rat
and I know I'm going to be screwed somehow. That's

(01:56:27):
what I feel in my water. And like Kate Moss
said on them, does it island this the other day?
You can smell a wrong and you can you can
sniff out the ones that you should stay stay away from.
But also I've been there and done that, and I
couldn't put the time and the effort as I would
have done as a thirty year old. Now I'm in

(01:56:48):
my sixties and you need to pace yourself. The last
thing I want to touch on is you know how
paths cross We mentioned pads crossing, and how when you
take on a project you don't understand quite what you're
in for. And when someone says that I've got an idea,
and it's about healthcare and access is going to be difficult.
But then you think, well, this is during a pandemic.

(01:57:10):
How could I say no? This is of course, this
is going to be interesting. I'm going to say yes
no matter what she says next to me, and you do,
but then you still don't know what you're in for.
And then the writer says, have you heard of a
book that John Berger did about a country doctor? And
you say yes, and she says, oh really, and you

(01:57:30):
go yes because someone mentioned it to me at college
at Newport's thirty forty years ago, And of course I've
heard of it, and I've been thinking about that book
ever since. Alander Bottom then mentioned it to me as
maybe we should look at this as a way of
collaborating on this next book. So then say to this
current client a collaborator of mine, or as John Berger

(01:57:53):
might say, accomplss because he used to call John Moore
an accompliss. So Polly hasn't heard of the book, but
I have. And then when Polly, the writer says to
the doctor, I don't suppose you've heard of a book
by John Berger that was about a country doctor in
nineteen sixty seven, and the doctor says, it's why I
became a doctor. I know that book and I've read

(01:58:13):
it four times. Wow, once twice, two, three times when
I was a teenager, when I was fourteen, once when
I finally thought I might want to study medicine. And
then by accident, she then discovers after she's become a
doctor and she's accepted a new post in a country practice,
she then realizes that the book is in exactly the

(01:58:35):
same practice, the same landscape as she's been into. Wow,
that's when you think the threads are all the stars
are aligning here the stars say this was meant to be.
That's when you realize you've got something special on your hands.
And to be honest, that's not where the coinsidency stopped.
They go on and on and on. You think this

(01:58:55):
is really cosmic. It is, and that's when you think
I should have said, I'm glad I said yes to
this because this was meant to be. So all these circumstances,
all these little ven diagram circles, all converging. You think,
taking some right decisions, and I'm probably taking some bad ones,
but you don't remember those, do you just remember the
good ones?

Speaker 1 (01:59:15):
Well, going full circle. We actually worked together on UK
at Home in two thousand and eight.

Speaker 2 (01:59:20):
Oh yes, Oh that was lovely, wasn't it.

Speaker 1 (01:59:22):
Oh yeah, that was a nice That was a freedom
that was It was a nice free job. The freedom
of the shoot was what did you do on it?

Speaker 2 (01:59:31):
I did?

Speaker 1 (01:59:33):
I got I think I had three pictures in. I
did because I'd come off the back of my birdman.
I did color picture of a guy holding the wing pigeon,
sort of the pigeon with its wings flapping in the windows.
I did some people eating fish and chips in Oxfordshire.
And I did a mother and a son in Newcastle.

(01:59:55):
Oh no, I had four in. I had some woman
mooring the lawn and the husband had his feet up
with in the paper and she was mourned the lawn around.
I've got a few in there. What did you have in?

Speaker 2 (02:00:08):
I'll look him up afterwards. I have it on my shelf.
Of course you didn't, Yeah I did. I went mad.
I said to John, give me everything. I've always wanted
to do one of these books and so so he said, well,
come up some ideas, but also we'll feed through lots
of things. I went. I ended up in Scotland. I
ended up in the Isle of Sky. I went, I
went down in a submarine. I went, I went. I
went to the peace camp. Then I went to visit

(02:00:30):
a hermit that lives in a in a in a
spoon shack on the Isle of Sky. I went round
the Isle of Sky, did loads of things. I just yeah,
loads of things. It was great, great, great couple of weeks.
Really really enjoyed that.

Speaker 1 (02:00:43):
Were you at the party then? Probably the exhibition launch party?

Speaker 2 (02:00:47):
Don't remember much about it, but you know, I imagine
it was. Yeah, yeah, I'm sure amazing.

Speaker 1 (02:00:51):
Now I can't remember much about it as well.

Speaker 2 (02:00:54):
There was a good party.

Speaker 1 (02:00:55):
Thank you for your time in listening to your stories
and your connection with photography in your life. There's one
little question in my head. When you said you were
shooting your memia in the cockpit of the plane, you
said you had twenty frames. Were you on six sixty
four of them?

Speaker 2 (02:01:12):
Then? Ah, no, No, it would have been less than twenty,
wouldn't it because six seven on two? Yeah? No, so
I shot two twenty. Yes, I shot to twenty two.

Speaker 1 (02:01:22):
Twenty, that's what I mean. Yes, where did they get
six sixty four?

Speaker 2 (02:01:26):
Yeah? Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, it wasn't one twenty, it
was two twenty. It was double it was double lengths. Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.
So the issue is that you've got so much more
film wound onto the spiral. Oh yeah that Actually it's
very tight, so winding it on is you've got to
be really careful because otherwise it could snap. Not only snap,
but if you know that the way that those were

(02:01:47):
meirs work, there's a lot of tension in the winder
that winds through by the gears into the sprockets and
the sprockets, so it can tear. So I didn't want that.
So every time I shot a picture, I had to
wind on really carefully, knowing that I was going round
a type bend or something. So it wasn't just about

(02:02:08):
the number of frames that was not very many, but
it was also about potentially breaking the film in the camera.

Speaker 1 (02:02:13):
That was the That was I had a memo and
I won't it actually, but I sold it. I just
couldn't use I can't use range finders, and that little
rocket underneath that little pop out winder is plastic and
if you break that, yeah U cream crackered.

Speaker 2 (02:02:32):
Yeah yeah, yeah, I broke I broke it, and I've
had and I've just had to order because I'm thinking
of selling them. I've ordered one that's made especially in
Italy by a bloke.

Speaker 1 (02:02:40):
And that's the car. I give you that contact. Did
you remember we had that long phone call about the
oh and you found him on flicker and that's how
I found them and these little.

Speaker 2 (02:02:57):
He makes it and sends it to you and I
got some one in Shoreditch to fit it for me.

Speaker 1 (02:03:02):
Amazing.

Speaker 2 (02:03:03):
But unfortunately, because I thought that was the only thing
wrong with it, the focusing mechanism is knocked out of alignment.
It's going to cost hundreds and hundreds to get it fixed,
and I'm just thinking it's not worth it.

Speaker 1 (02:03:14):
I know, I know a great man in Maidstone School
film guy. He said, he's amazing. You should I'll give
you his contact anyway. Ma Maya seven is a little
winder which pops out. For anybody listening doesn't know what
we're talking about. There's a little winder at the bottom
which turns out when you're ruling the filmmat and it's
a plastic. It's a design fault. If you've got a

(02:03:37):
Ma Maya seven and you want to and it's broken.
We know, man who makes bruss ones.

Speaker 2 (02:03:42):
We do.

Speaker 1 (02:03:42):
There you go listen. Then it's been a real joy
and I think you know this is gonna be a
two parts.

Speaker 2 (02:03:52):
Well, good luck to anyone who wants to listen to
me for two parts.

Speaker 1 (02:03:56):
I know there was a lot of questions in my head.
I wanted to ask you.

Speaker 2 (02:03:59):
Oh, there's lots of things I wanted to say that
I probably not said.

Speaker 1 (02:04:02):
I know, let's come back. Let's come back, and.

Speaker 2 (02:04:08):
Thank you very much, sach.

Speaker 1 (02:04:09):
It's been great fun, it's been wonderful, and thank you.
Enjoy your next book project.

Speaker 2 (02:04:15):
I'll let you know

Speaker 1 (02:04:17):
All the best, mate, take care, cheerio, bye bye h

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#18 Richard Baker - PHOTO TALK - WTF-STOP PODCAST

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