#21 Tony Othen - 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 the geft Stop forhotok right. Chatter Photographer is about
their life and connection to the world through photography. To gust,

(00:31):
photographer Tony Uthan has been covering a mix of social
and educational and corporate clients over half a century. I
only became a wave of Tony's work when his book
The Best of Times and the Worst of Times was
published by Blue coll Press a couple of years ago.
So I was eager to find out how the book
came about and delve into his working practices and his

(00:52):
thoughts and his take on life as a photographer over
the fifty years he's been working. I discovered also that
he runs the Greenwich Gallery, which is down on Peyton
Place in London and SA ten right next to Greenwich
Town Center. So we delved into his early days, the
different stages of his life as a working photographer. We
talked about his life at sea as a photographer and

(01:13):
educator on oil tankers in the early seventies.

Speaker 2 (01:16):
And so I was sent off down to Cape Town.
I had to join an oil tanker that was on
its main voyage, and of course they weren't going to
call in a port to pick up a youngster who
was going to take photographs. I had to go three
miles out off limits in a little tiny boat and

(01:37):
meet this enormous oil tanker quarter of a mile long,
and it was empty, so it was very high out
of the water, and they threw a rope ladder over
and I had to jump, get on the roape ladder
and climb up. And that was how I got to
see life at sea.

Speaker 1 (01:53):
We Chad a lot about his work within communities around
the UK and we discussed how the best and worst
of times came about. He was talking to Tony that
he had a real passion for taking photographs and being
amongst the variety of different communities around the world and
in the UK, and it was the feedback on social
media which ignited the process of creating the best of

(02:15):
times in the worst of times. I also discovered he
had a fascination for the English language and its colloquialisms.

Speaker 2 (02:21):
Depending on which part of the country you come from.
I've heard the alleyway called a snicker, a snickeleway, girdle,
gad snick it gonneal ginnle Jennal Twitter Jolly Twitter, Gidty,
Giga Giga Rat, Squeeze Golf.

Speaker 1 (02:37):
And then I mentioned the book he published, but you
hadn't realized had been published. You did another book called Tough.
Can you tell me about this? It was published by Walden.
I think Walden Books. Ah, don't call that really.

Speaker 2 (02:51):
The only other book I did was a self published
thing This is Britain which and that wasn't called Tough. No,
that was just one copy.

Speaker 1 (03:00):
If you need to look on a books and you'll
find Tough by you, that's interesting. I think it's about
fought and man.

Speaker 2 (03:08):
Oh but how by workman.

Speaker 1 (03:13):
Becure you gets signed? So I was looking forward to
having a chat with them. The day came and I
asked him what it was up to.

Speaker 2 (03:21):
Well, at the moment, I'm recovering from a few medical conditions.
But apart from that, we actually run a community arts
hub here in Greenwich. We live and work in the
same place, my wife and I, and photography is a
part of that. We used to have darkrooms and studios.
Now it's gone on a bit more digital that. There's

(03:42):
nothing wrong with that. The Greenwich Gallery has been going
for several decades. Was actually started by my daughter she
done a degree in arts history and was absolutely concerned
that it should not in any way be commercial, and
so we only ever showed stuff that she wanted and

(04:04):
that she liked. We never sold anything. So I mean
that was great. It was it was not a financial dependency.
Fortunately now in COVID and so on, we've obviously had
to close it down and we are aging a bit
now and we've had to rent out the space to

(04:25):
another outfit who want to use it for environmental and
social benefit and so as such, at the moment, the
Greenwich Gallery no longer exists.

Speaker 1 (04:36):
That's a shame.

Speaker 2 (04:37):
It's been the years of being able to show photographs
and encourage people to come and see things, not as
an art artistic place that you've got to know things
about the photographs of people and things that very often
bring back memory and bring back visions of perhaps the

(05:00):
future now, because I think that whole, my whole kind
of work now, particularly in these days, is justified by
bringing forward stuff that I shot fifty years ago, not
for some grandezment of of what I did, but for
the capturing of those moments which actually generate memories, and

(05:25):
those memories generate comments and the comments seem to be
very useful in terms of revealing community attitudes, not only then,
but also now.

Speaker 1 (05:39):
You've been a photographer now for over sixty years, haven't you.

Speaker 2 (05:41):
Yes, I've been extraordinarily lucky to be working for a
lot of educational bodies and charity charitable bodies, so it's
never been a kind of commercial exercise. Somehow I've managed
to keep going and keep bread on the table, and
that's been a privilege right the way from school. When
I was in school in the late sixties, I was

(06:05):
able to have a dark room underneath the science lab
and I learned there how to protess and film and
print and so on, and that became quite fun, and
I was able to share that with other people. And
then when I left school, I went on vso to

(06:31):
Botswana was called betchron Land, and while I was there
it became Botswana as well. There for some reason, I
ended up helping in a hospital doing the paperwork because
it was run by a lot of nuns, and they
they were nurses and they didn't want to do PaperWorks.
I did paperwork, and in conversation at one point somebody

(06:54):
said something about photography and I said, oh, yes, I'm
a photographer actually said are you well? You can take
X rays, can't you? And the only sort of connection
was that they gave me a booker about how to
take the X rays. But the connection was, of course

(07:14):
you were processing film in those days, and it was
in three gape three gallon tanks, and of course I
knew about processing film in dark rooms. The only difference
there was when you took the lid off. There was
a massive pomp mosquitoes that would fly up into That
year in Botswana probably suggested to me that I wasn't

(07:35):
good enough photographer and so I'd better come back and
go and do some education work. So I went to
the London College of Printing, which is now called something
something Else.

Speaker 1 (07:50):
Your main stay all for the Games has been the
charity sector, hasn't it?

Speaker 2 (07:54):
Well?

Speaker 1 (07:54):
Yes, yeah, and lot of the stuff. That's what I
want to find out, because you don't get much away
on your website. Well the Best of Times the book,
which was published in twenty twenty two by Blue Cook Press.
A lot of that work stemmed from your tough force work,
your social action projects and stuff like that. Was there

(08:19):
anybody else you were working alongside? All for the guys
like newspapers, magazines and stuff.

Speaker 2 (08:25):
Not newspapers and magazines, but a lot of charities like
NSPCC like it was called in those days National Association
Mental Health it's now called MIND and for an enormous
amount of time working on adult literacy. And so in
those days we we actually campaigned to start something called

(08:48):
the Adult Literacy Resource Agency and the government gave us
a ton of money, and then that developed into being
the Adult Literacy Unit, and then it broadened to become
Adult Literacy and Basic Skills Unit and finally the Basic
Skills Association. And so it started with literacy, but it

(09:09):
then developed much more into numeracy and all sorts of
bits of education. And I suppose that my role in
all of that, yes, was to take photographs, but was
really to try to be part of the presentation of
any work that needed to be or any initiative that

(09:32):
needed to be done. So I used to be in
charge of putting on lots of presentations in all parts
of the country, so getting used to projectors and screens
and making things a little bit different and perhaps having
things in the round rather than having thirty rows of

(09:53):
people in a stage. At the far end, we got
the audience integrated and and that seemed to work quite well.
In doing that, obviously people would see what I was
doing and suggest that I might help in other ways
as well. I did some commercial work as well, and
most of the work was certainly educational, things like Children's

(10:18):
Holiday Venture, which was something that I did in nineteen
sixty seven.

Speaker 3 (10:28):
I guess that.

Speaker 2 (10:30):
Where it really all started was when I went to college,
to the London College Printing. I obviously had to live somewhere,
and somehow I came across what used to be called
in those days a settlement. Now they're called social Action centers.
But I went to a place called Bead House in Bermondsey,

(10:50):
and so that meant that you were in touch with
a lot of things that were going on, not only
locally but also globally. Certain things cropped up, somebody went
went deal and I had to get my camera, go
down to the South coast, get on a ferry and

(11:13):
meet somebody called Bernard Faithful Davis, who was the head
of the Children's Relief International, and my job was to
drive him around Europe for four or five weeks while
we looked at the work that they were doing. Because
the charity itself was started in Cambridge and it was
Cambridge University students who raised money throughout the year to

(11:38):
encourage work to be done for children who were in
need of care on a holiday and so they had
holidays and that meant that I photographed a lot of
stuff as well as driving around, and somebody in that
lot said, oh, have you a task force? And so

(12:02):
task Force which was something that was starting by Anthony
Steen in about nineteen seventy something like that. He was
trying to encourage young people to volunteer to help in
the community. And so I was sent all the way
around around the country to photograph not only what was
being done, but what was the social need, what was

(12:25):
the need to try and encourage young people to say,
oh I could help that little old lady. And so
that became a real purpose, not only, as I say,
to photograph what was being done, but what could be
done if the right to processes were put forward. And

(12:46):
it was very successful. We had I think at the
highest point, something like thirty thousand volunteers, mostly school children,
young people around the country. Unfortunately, somewhere along the line
something called risk assessment became the phrase, and so the

(13:06):
whole thing then closed down and became very much more
of a campaigning body called the Young Volunteer Force Foundation.
No again, I photographed for all of that.

Speaker 1 (13:18):
I want to build a more in depth picture of
that period in the sixties and seventies where you were
photographing around the country. I particularly like your Cardiff work.
We'll have a little talk about that in a minute.
You were born in Staffordshire, yep. Take me back to
that period. Take me back to have it started in
Staffordshire and how did you end up as a nineteen

(13:39):
year old on the streets of Cardiff shooting documentary photography
and then I just get some of your thoughts behind that.
Let me just take me on that journey of what
got you to Cardiff.

Speaker 2 (13:48):
Well Born in stafford I don't remember very luge about that.
I think at the age of about three we went
to my father got a job in London. My father
was a lecturer in education science education, and he got
a job in a school in North London and that
went on for about five years and then we moved

(14:09):
to Cardiff. So I was ten eleven something like that.
We weren't a very wealthy family and we were very
much middle class. Fortunately, my grandfather was able to pay
for my education and I went to a school, a
boarding school in Surrey called Katrum. So I was flitting

(14:31):
backwards and forwards from k Trim to Cardiff for six
or seven years. Really I did a lot of photography
in Cardiff, just for my own reasons.

Speaker 1 (14:42):
Really, how did you start with that? Why?

Speaker 2 (14:45):
I mean, I think my father did buy me a
camera when I was sort of eight or something, and
I wondered that I had to do with it, so
I tried to learn a bit about that. And as
I say, when I was at school, I made a
dark room so I got out and my father, being scientist,
was always really cleverer about telling me what developers did

(15:06):
and what they didn't do, although he didn't have.

Speaker 3 (15:09):
Experience of himself.

Speaker 2 (15:10):
I mean, he knew knew the science of it all
at school. Obviously did lots of things on would at school,
photographing games, photographing people, photographing trees and things that didn't matter,
And that kind of helped me to understand that there
was something connected between what you saw how you saw it.

(15:34):
And later on, working as I was for charities and
educational bodies, the most important thing that came out was
why you photographed it, not So photography is about what
you photographed, how you photographed. And we nowadays in the
digital world, we know we know exactly when and where

(15:55):
the photograph was taken. But what we don't know and
is not record it is why the photograph was taken.
And I suppose that's one of the strongest things that
I want to contribute, if you like, to perspectives of photography,
because people, I mean, there are millions of photographs put

(16:17):
up on social media every day, so photography is really
in sense become less special and become very prosaic. And
it takes people like you to spend years photographing pigeons
and the bird men in order to allow people to

(16:37):
understand what was going on in those days. And I mean,
your book of Birdmen and Pigeons is fantastic because it's
something that I should think about. Ninety three percent pot
promotion have no idea about.

Speaker 1 (16:53):
Oh, it took me that long to work it out
myself as well, to be honest and to work myself out.
It's the labor of love, isn't it. And I think, yeah,
when I think about the images I've seen of yours
in the sixties. There's a fascination with people. Obviously, there's
a fascination with composition, definitely good use of lighting, technical aspects,

(17:15):
and you picked it up very quickly. I mean it
would have been about eighteen nineteen at the time, were.

Speaker 2 (17:20):
You indeed indeed, indeed, yes, I think I was very lucky.

Speaker 1 (17:24):
But who was the influencers then? Photographically I don't think.

Speaker 2 (17:28):
I wasn't sort of into the big world of photography.
And in those days there weren't many books that published.
There weren't many certainly no podcasts.

Speaker 1 (17:39):
I think that was for a long time afterwards as well,
because we didn't have the internet. It was only really
until the sort of nineties the world opened up a
little bit with a big bit, but we had to
go to the library to get books and the newsagents
and stuff. You didn't have really any influencers then then.

Speaker 2 (17:54):
No, I didn't think. So I wasn't following anybody because
because I mean, it wasn't photography that I was doing.
It was supporting the charity that needed a few things
being said, and so it was a question of what
needs to be said, Let's see how we can do
it in a most useful way. So one needed to

(18:17):
be aware of how people communicated. And one of the
important things is that anybody who's presenting must be aware
of the language, the style, and the concerns of the audience.
And so the audience is terribly important. And so my
photography then was very much to do with is this

(18:40):
photograph going to help this particular charity with the ideas
and needs that they are expressing. I mean, for instance,
as I said, I worked for Mind for quite a while,
for many many years. It was in those days there
was a movement to close psychiatric hospitals and two and

(19:02):
mine was very keen to make group homes in the community,
and so people could be taken out of psychiatric awards
and put into group homes and there would be a
certain amount of care that would be and support that
would be given to them. Unfortunately, I don't think they
asked the community closely enough and the community wasn't very

(19:25):
excited about having a house next door full of psychiatric patients.
So my job there was to go into psychiatric wards
and try to photograph the people they're looking as normal
as possible, because that was the message that we wanted
to get across and you know, the sister would unlock

(19:45):
the door and push me in and lock the door
behind me, and everybody in the ward would go absolutely mad.
So I didn't photograph that until I sat in the
corner and fiddled my camera until things had calmed down.
And job was then to try to photograph what might
have been there before I came in. And in a

(20:07):
sense that's so true of many photographic exploit used the
very social action photography, which I think was coined by
Greg Hobson, because to me, social documentary photography or documentary
photography really had had a need to photograph every angle

(20:30):
of what you were photographing, because then it wasn't if
you didn't do that, it wasn't documentary, it was selecting.
Greg Hobson coined this idea of social action photography, which
tried to encourage and engage the reason for the photograph
being taken, the why why the photograph was taken. When

(20:51):
you talk, as I have done to a few historians,
one or two of them have been kind enough to
say that they're photogos. Some of the photographs that I
took were helping them in their historical realizations and comments
that they were making there was one picture of a

(21:14):
little boy in Cardiff wearing a very old coat, and
one historian said that exactly shows my theory that those
days in the late sixties early seventies was the turning
point between Victoriana and the current day. And of course
I was very pleasing that he saw some use in

(21:37):
that photograph. But of course another historian would look at
it and come up with a completely different viewpoint. And
so that's why I think that it's quite useful to
try and explain what was going on your through your
head when you took that photograph. I guess that you're

(22:01):
going to ask me what I photographed now, and I'm
going to say, I find it very very difficult to
photograph things because I don't have a reason to do it.

Speaker 1 (22:10):
Is this now, you don't have a reason to take
pictures or no.

Speaker 2 (22:15):
I take the camera to my eye and I looked
around and said, oh, that's a nice picture. But why
am I taking this? There's no reason do you take it?
But I'm trying hard to overcome that and to take
some nice pictures.

Speaker 1 (22:31):
I'm still very intrigued by that transition from boy on
the streets taking pictures to then going out and working
as a photographer. Obviously you've taught. Just explain part of
that transition to be how did that present itself, that
next step between shooting on the streets for fun, maybe
not really knowing what you were looking for, but finding

(22:53):
something you really cared deeply about. What was that transition
period between did you make a portfolio? How are you
you work out? Did it? How did that next step
come about? Well?

Speaker 2 (23:03):
I suppose it was personal contacts, and I suppose it
was projects that it occurred. I mean I had a
friend who was an artist and who had a connection
with something called It was a charity for boats at sea,
and they put a library of books on all the boats,

(23:28):
or all the commercial boats at sea, because very often
the boats, particularly the big oil tankers, would be at
sea for six months and they would have a very
small crew and they get very bored. So this particular
charity occasionally put artists on board and taught the crew

(23:49):
how to paint and encourage them to see things in
a different light. And they were having a big exhibition
up in the city, and they decided to send me
to photograph what life at sea was like, so that
there was a context to the exhibition of these paintings,

(24:10):
and so I was sent off down to Cape Town.
I had to join an oil tanker that was on
its main voyage, and of course they weren't going to
call in the port to pick up a youngster who
was going to take photographs. I had to go three
miles out off limits in a little tiny boat and

(24:31):
meet this enormous oil tanker quarter of a mile long,
and it was empty, so it was very high out
of the water, and they threw a rope ladder over
and I had to jump on the rope ladder and
climb up. And that was how I got to see
life at sea. And that meant there was a big
exhibition in the city, and that caused some useful contacts

(24:53):
with people who said, why don't you come photograph of this,
or let's explore this a bit more.

Speaker 1 (24:59):
Tell me about the work to be shooting on the ship.
Where can I see that?

Speaker 2 (25:02):
My flicker thing collapsed? But there is one thing there
called is life at sea, and there's about one hundred
pictures there of life at sea.

Speaker 1 (25:12):
Right.

Speaker 2 (25:13):
It was to, as I say, provide the context of
the situation in which people crewed. People would get very bored,
perhaps pretty annoyed with each other. People didn't express themselves
strongly because they didn't fall out with each other because
you're at sea for six months and you know, you

(25:36):
can't have enemies. You can't have friends really either, so
it becomes a very cunning neutral environment. So I had
to try and photograph that. I was also very excited
that I discovered something called sound, and I had bought
a tape recorder, so I took that as well and

(25:57):
taped the sounds of sea and the sound of.

Speaker 1 (26:00):
People doing things.

Speaker 2 (26:01):
I was fortunate because I was a super numery officer,
which meant that I could be anywhere in the in
the ship, you know. In my I think it was
my early twenties, I was still a youngster, and so
I would go down down to the crew downstairs, and
they would try very hard to get me drunk, and

(26:22):
I would stagger upstairs to the officer's mess and they
would continue that process. It was amazing that any of
the photographs were in focus. But wow, it was quite
quite a while, quite a good thing for me.

Speaker 1 (26:38):
Who became your influences in photography and what did you
eventually take from the influencers.

Speaker 2 (26:45):
Eventually Dom McCullen. Of course, I very much associated myself
with the East London he was brought up. I spent
many years later lots of time in Bermondsey, and so
I was very pretty much part of that sort of
poor community work. He then grabbed a chance to go

(27:06):
off and do war photography, which was amazing and different,
and he was very he is very morally strong in
not trying to concoct anything. He was very keen to
photograph reality and not try to photograph something that wasn't

(27:27):
appropriate or representative, I think. And then he came back
and as you know, went backwards and forwards taking more
war photographs. But in the meantime in Dorset started taking landscapes,
and the landscapes looked amazingly like many of his warfast graphs.

Speaker 1 (27:45):
What was your kind of choice at the time and
in the sixties.

Speaker 2 (27:48):
Oh, I'm never very good on cameras, but I think
I had something called an exactor. I think I then
had two or three pentaxes. I seem to remember carrying
loads of lenses around with me. Much later on I
reflected that you know, if you were walking around with

(28:10):
one hundred and thirty five millimeter lens of you were
looking around you in the frame setting of one hundred
and thirty five millimeter lens. If you were had fifty
milimeter lens on David Hearn always had and never had
anything asked. You'd have to walk and go closer if

(28:31):
you wanted to be closer, or you stayed where you
were and you took what it was. So in those
days it was a question of changing lenses. Nowadays, of course,
with these wonderful lenses that go from twenty four mil
to a thousand, and the effect that it has on
me walking around now it means that anything that I see,

(28:53):
I know that I can photograp.

Speaker 1 (28:55):
I'm seeing a lot of thirty five mil twenty eight
mil with your work.

Speaker 2 (28:59):
In those days, yes, there would have been twenty eight million,
I guess.

Speaker 1 (29:03):
And what was your phone? Were you called? Ok Ilford.

Speaker 2 (29:06):
I did anything and everything that I could afford at
the time. I mean, one was very conscious that every
time you press that button it was one and sixpence.
You had to be very wary about over. I mean, okay,
many of my clients were paying for my fill, but
at the same time they were short of money, so

(29:27):
you had to be very careful, and you had to
try not to photograph loads and loads of things, so
you had to choose. And sometimes I'm a little bit
surprised that I managed to get some photographs that seemed
to be of the perfect moment, and I think they
were just a fluke really. Now nowadays you take twenty

(29:50):
in one buzz and you'd select the best one.

Speaker 3 (29:53):
But in those days you only took one. Do you
remember bulk all phil Oh, yes, yes, yes, loading up
your own cassettes in the dark.

Speaker 1 (30:04):
Room, Oh my days. Oh yeah.

Speaker 2 (30:07):
A friend of my father's had a business in this
in the city World, and when he said, oh, he said,
I can give you a few off cuts of thirty
five mill city film and he would send me a can,
you know, and it would just be, you know, about
four hundred.

Speaker 3 (30:26):
Cassettes worth.

Speaker 1 (30:27):
You know.

Speaker 2 (30:28):
You had to try and load them up, and I
didn't have a dark room at that time, so I
had a black bag and I turned the light out
and loaded them up under the sheets of my bed,
made the book film in the canisters. Then.

Speaker 1 (30:42):
I think bulk loading was probably the worst invention ever.
It was horrific. I remember in Vain trying to do it.
In getting really upset. I thought it was a cheap alternative.
As you were saying about trying to save on form.
Oh my days, it was horrific. It was actually close.
Second worst ever invention was trying to block at your

(31:04):
little deform onto in the dark room, in the dark
when you're putting it in the can. And that was
just that was the bane of my life. There's one
picture in the Corpus book which really resonates with me.
In factice there's a couple of pictures. There's two pictures
of the the adventure playground that wouldn't appent adventure playground

(31:24):
in Cardiff. Yeah, I'm old enough to remember, wouldn't makeshift
adventure playground? Can you imagine them sort of playgrounds now?

Speaker 2 (31:38):
Health and safety no way. I mean so many of
these pictures show that there was no health and safety
in those days. And I mean the creation of that
adventure playground that you were talking about beautifully done and
it was the height of a telephone post. It was
amazingly high, and kids they're climbing up and getting there

(32:01):
into the into all the thing and zooming down. And
in fact I did that. I thought it would be
good to photograph as I came down. So I went
up there and came down, photographing as I went. Fortunately,
people caught me as I got to the to the enda.

Speaker 1 (32:19):
Do you remember big slides?

Speaker 2 (32:22):
Oh?

Speaker 1 (32:22):
Yes, remember in playground you have huge, gigantic slides. Yeah,
and you're so small. I remember being so tiny climbing
to the top of these massive slides as I'd done,
and it was just nothing at the time. But if
I saw my kids doing it, that would freak out. Yeah.
Book the Best and Worst for me and correct me
if I'm wrong. There's two things that represents for me,

(32:45):
regardless of geographics and location because it's about around the UK.
But the two things which resonates for me is community
and childhood. Feel a little bit about your childhood as
well in a sense.

Speaker 2 (32:58):
Yes, I was brought up in an older brother and
we didn't get on well, so it was quite good
that my grandfather sent me off to a boarding school.
So I developed much more as perhaps I would have
done if I was the younger member of a family
that was arguing all the time with my brother. So

(33:20):
I became much more independent in a boarding school and
were there were always lots of things, and my father's
you know, was incredibly good at opening doors for me
in anything to do with learning and education. He would
never he would never prescribe anything. So anything that I
showed an interest in, he would he would open open

(33:42):
whatever doors he could find to let me get involved
in that. And so once again the idea that photography
is so much about the heart as well as the head.
But it's an instinct that you feel that you want
to be part of what's happening there, and so you go,

(34:02):
if you're a photographer, you go and photograph it. I
suppose I've always had a bit of a dilemma about whether,
particularly nowadays of course, whether you should ask me I'll
take your phedrap please before doing it. In those days,
of course, you never even worried about that at all.
Nowadays you kind of, you know, have to get a

(34:23):
form signed to say that this person allowed me to
take this photo. That has changed things enormously and very
proud of the book that I'm not proud and very
excited about Mark Davenant's book about the homeless, because I
became very much involved in a homeless charity here in

(34:44):
Greenwich called the Great Winter Night Shelter It's very clear
to me that all Mark's pictures there he had a
relationship with the person there. Obviously he talked about who
they were, what they were doing, what they was, what
their aspirations were. But most of my photography I think

(35:06):
never had that in it. Certainly my street photography. I
suppose the stuff on board ship meant that I was
involved as one of them, But I think I've always
been sort of in a corner looking rather than going
forward and saying, Hi, who are you, what are you doing?

(35:28):
Can I can I help? Obviously there's lots and lots
of wasted photographs. I mean tens of thousands of them.
Don't strike the balance that some of them apparently do.

Speaker 1 (35:39):
It's a people's book. It's interesting because in the sixties
and seventies there was a lot poverty in the UK
and that's been well documented by people like Nick Hadjew's,
the Exit Photography Group and so on, and places where
you were photographing, in effect, are quite deprived areas. I
feel that there's a very romantic free to your book.

(36:01):
It's more about the people in the environment, say like
Nick Hedges was really studying the slums and looking at
that area of deprivation. That was always in the foreground
of his work, even though he had people and the
corporated people within that, and that was the mainstay of
his angle in the work he did for the sort
of housing charities. The difference with yours for me is

(36:23):
there's a sense of dignity with the people. There's not
a love affair with the people in a sense, but
that their image of this community. You were definitely into composition.
You can see you were definitely following the route of
design with your work. And there's little things within your
street work where you position the woman in between the
posts and the washing is hanging above her head, and

(36:44):
just little lovely things coming together. And I think that's
pretty good for a twenty year old, to be honest,
especially then as well.

Speaker 2 (36:51):
Maybe it was unusual there, it was just a novelty.

Speaker 1 (36:56):
Oh no, there's definitely a sense to have your composition
understanding work. For me, your work just is about the
people who are part of this community, and the actual
geographics of it don't don't really matter. It's about the
character that people have to fit into the environment and
a sense of childhood. Like there's a lot of pictures

(37:17):
of kids in an environment, having fun, going about their
daily lives. And then there's that grand other figure, There's
that granddad figure, there's that parent figure. Do you understand
where I'm coming from.

Speaker 2 (37:29):
Yes, exactly, but I mean in do you like defense?
I mean that was what the task force was doing.
I mean they were they were opening playgrounds. They were
trying to help them old people to be more aware
of the community around them. And what was so fascinating

(37:52):
and what has been so exciting about these photographs finding
their way onto social media has been the reactions in
some cases saying, ah, that's me in that picture, and
I had I've had people coming over from from different
parts of the country coming to Greenwich and saying, could

(38:15):
I please have a print of that's me standing on
now as good know, and so that again, and then
telling me stories about how they felt. But also are
the people saying, oh, that's Siren, so ah, he was
a really lovely bloke. He's dead now, but you know
it was really he was really great and we all

(38:36):
loved him. And there was a whole the community reaction,
the social and the historical viewpoints that that these pictures
are now creating fifty sixty years later is very exciting,
I bet, and people say, oh, that's that's my aunt
How did you get a picture of my auntie? You know,

(39:01):
her son died two years ago. He would have loved
to have seen this picture of how you know. And
of course in those days there weren't that many photographs.
You know. Nowadays nobody even blinks about seeing a picture
of themselves because sixteen of them were taken at the
same time and put up on Facebook. When these things

(39:24):
there was in Derbyshire there was a little mining village
called shire Brook and when the mine closed, they closed
the village because the village was for the miners.

Speaker 1 (39:39):
Sorry, it was called Poolsbrook, I think Poolsbrook.

Speaker 2 (39:42):
And now years and years later and they have a
Facebook community group called I'm from Spike because that's what
they called their town. Somehow they found a picture of
mine and after a while they managed to contact me
and say have you got any more? And I said, well,
about three hundred and sixty. And they went absolutely wild

(40:06):
because this was their parents' time, their parents' generation, and
for many of them was this the skinhead the skinheads, Yeah,
and some of them and the children playing in really
broken down conditions. I remember the only time I've ever

(40:28):
been approached, I was in the little alleyway between the
ends of people's houses, and of course at the end
of your garden that is the loo, and the loo
needs to be emptied. And every two or three weeks
there would be a horsetrawn cart that would come and
there's an external door, and they would empty the loo

(40:53):
into this butt into this cart, and so it was
not a very and sometimes they had missed the cart,
and so it was not a very pleasant or clean
area to be it. But children played there, and I
was photographing a group of children playing there and suddenly
I looked up and they'd all run away. And I
looked up and there were the boys and they were

(41:16):
coming down this little alleyway and I looked behind me
and there was no way out. So I stood there,
played with my camera a bit, and they came up
and said, hey, Lad, what doing I said, hey, lad,
just take in Ford. I was like, oh, thank god

(41:37):
for that. They said, we thought you were so smoothie
from London. Yeah, coming up, cup of tea. I couldn't
keep it going, so I didn't. At least that saved me.
The only time that I'd been challenged.

Speaker 1 (41:51):
Just going back to you defending yourself. You didn't have
to finish, so I was applauding your work. I was
complimenting you. It's interesting think you're talking about how people
reacted to your work, how when you introduced it to
social media. I mentioned the skinheads as well, because that
ended the skin you were shooting at the Lady Golm Club,

(42:13):
went with the sixties, just some skinheads, and it ended
up it was there was some prints found in the
corner of a room or something that was your prints,
and these prints led on to a bigger book being
researched called Scorches, the Skins, Rabbit Culture or something like that.
Wasn't it the scorture book with the context of somebody

(42:34):
finding your images from the Skinheads in a box in
the corner of the room. What happened to the images
which ended up in the worst and the best? What
was the transition period? Did you just file all of
these images away for ten years or something?

Speaker 2 (42:49):
Yes, I meticulous because I processed all my own negatives obviously,
and you fared them away and you made a contact sheet.
You used the contact more often they use the negatives occasionally.
You would think that you had to print up one
or two of these, So there are I don't know.
I think the last time I counted something like fifteen

(43:12):
thousand negatives. In the early days subsequent to that, obviously
there were lots more, and now, of course they're all digital.
But I mean there's probably twenty thirty thousand negatives in
all kicking around. They're all here. I have digitized all

(43:33):
of them, roughly many of them. I then clean and
wash and make sure that I get the best I
possibly can out in them, and then digitize them at
high resolution. And those are the ones that got used
in the book.

Speaker 1 (43:48):
Here.

Speaker 2 (43:49):
The story of the Scorcher Book is, I'm afraid a
new story to me. I had not quite logged onto that.
You're absolutely right. I was in a settlement called Beadhouse,
and Lady Cargom House was where I had my darkroom actually,
and where I showed I encouraged lots of skinheads. They

(44:13):
would be called her to come and do things in
the darkroom. They thought they were doing other things in
the darkroom, and I managed to get them to do
photography in the dark room. Yes, there were piles of
prints left around, and I guess that somebody picked them
up once, but I wasn't aware they'd be made into
a book called The Scorch. The ones that I selected

(44:34):
for the Best of Times, Worst of Times were, as
Colin Wilkinson always says, is that they should be black
and white, they should be taken in Britain, and they
should be of that time. So that narrated the selection

(44:56):
down a bit. So I then began to be putting
them up onto Facebook. And there are lots and lots
of different Facebook geographical sites as one in cardif As,
stay be Leaders, Paul's Brooks, or all over the country,
demon ands On. And so I put these up with

(45:17):
the help of one or two people who got excited
about them, quite literally hundreds and thousands of comments, pages
and pages and pages of comments. That to me was
the exciting outcome of all of this was that people
were able not to say nice things about the photographs

(45:40):
and whether they were well composed or whatever, but just
what it meant to them and what it meant for
them to be able to recount their own personal history,
the social history, the ideas that in those days we
were all poor. We didn't know we were poor because
we were all poor and you know that that was okay.

(46:02):
Life was happy. There were no there was nothing to
value it against.

Speaker 1 (46:07):
You lived your.

Speaker 2 (46:08):
Own life and you and your community life. And I
think that's really fantastic because we could learn a bit
from those days, and we could learn to make our
communities a bit like those communities were, which were sharing
and caring. Nobody ever closed their doors their front door.

(46:30):
There was always an open door. There was always somebody
to go and and talk to or help you with
anything that you wanted.

Speaker 1 (46:39):
So how did the book come about? Then? What was
the inspiration behind Contacting Blue Corp?

Speaker 2 (46:44):
Well, actually it was Mark Davnan who saw some of
my pictures up on Facebook and you said, I think
you should get in touch with Colin, and so I did,
and Colin came down from Liverpool and to see me
in Greenwich and he looked at some of my archive
and said yes, And that was a very thrilling moment.

Speaker 1 (47:06):
What would you find a selection before the book at
how many pictures were on.

Speaker 2 (47:10):
Well, I suppose I was selecting probably out of about
five thousand, I probably selected these hundred. I was very
much influenced by some of the comments. Now, not all
of the comments are actually about necessarily about those particular pictures,
but certainly about those times, but where they are about

(47:33):
those particular pictures, then that helped the selection.

Speaker 1 (47:38):
I do like the context of the text and the
photographs in the book as well. Also, I do like
the way you've focused on one person two or three times.
So you've took a picture of an old lady in
her living room, and then you've taken another one of her.
And I quite liked that narrative that just that extended
insight into that person, looking at them in a different perspective,

(48:01):
and I quite liked that. And there's a lot of texts,
as we just said, which runs through the book as well.
For me, that is again it's more bad community and childhood.
Again going back to the way the text resonated with
the pictures. And you know, I think you were doing
this all them years ago, waiting for this to happen.
And I said, it's interesting when you look back. Hindsight

(48:23):
is a really interesting tool. And I know what you're
feeling because of where I've seen some of my work
affect people and when they've seen their uncle John who
just died in that photograph, it's really special. You did
another book called Tough. Can you tell me about this?
It was published by Walden. I think Walden Books don't
recall that. Really the only.

Speaker 2 (48:44):
Other book I did was a self published.

Speaker 1 (48:47):
Thing This is Britain, which that wasn't called Tough.

Speaker 2 (48:51):
No, that was just one copy.

Speaker 1 (48:53):
If you need to look on a books and you'll
find Tough by you. That's interesting about fort Man.

Speaker 2 (49:01):
Oh, I'll buy woman.

Speaker 1 (49:06):
Becture. You get signed obviously off the worst and the last.
You've taken a lot of satisfaction. There's a lot of
contentment there what you've brought together with the pictures and
people's memories and what you've evorked. It's interesting that you're
not feeling that now with looking out in the future
and taking pictures and stuff like that. You've just said
before you were recording on the ship. It's so easy

(49:29):
to record that. Would you not think of doing something
with audio your and visual now?

Speaker 2 (49:34):
Well, yes, I mean I have done lots of things
for presentations that for Adultrigins charities that we were we
were working for, So I mean there were lots of
films and videos that I made that useful for what
they were doing. But I still come back, I'm afraid
to this excitement about not being so excited about the photograph,

(49:59):
but about the comment here we are these photographs show
how kids played and were never clean, but with healthy,
rosy cheeks under the muck. Depending on which part of
the country you've come from, there's this little alleyway learnt.

Speaker 3 (50:14):
I never knew this.

Speaker 2 (50:15):
Depending on which part of the country you come from,
I've heard the alleyway called a snicker, a snickeleway, girdle gad,
snick it gunnal ginnle, general twitcher, jolly twitter, getty, giga giga, rat, squeeze, golf,
alley group lane, vickers lane, switching. I mean, there's nowhere

(50:37):
in my life that I've ever been except in this
place in Derbyshire to see one of those. And yet
it's common knowledge in throughout the country, in a number
of different communities, and they call it something different. And
so the photograph, whatever we think about it, has generated something,

(50:59):
particularly in my understanding, of something that I never knew.
And so the usefulness of the photographs is bewitching to me.
I remember my mum filling jacks with water from a
tap out in the side of the road. No running
water in the house and a toilet down the end
of the garden. Bath night was a tin bath in

(51:21):
front of the fire. I mean, I didn't I lived
through those times. I didn't have to have a tin
bath when I was a youngster, did you not?

Speaker 1 (51:29):
That I can remember? No, I'm laughing, But I brought
up on the Northeast. It was an interesting place in
certain places still have outside toilets and stuff like that.
What's going to happen with your archive then in the future.

Speaker 2 (51:43):
My son says, Dad, you should do something with it,
because I can't.

Speaker 3 (51:50):
I don't know.

Speaker 1 (51:51):
I don't know.

Speaker 2 (51:52):
Maybe maybe it should go to I don't know, I
don't know.

Speaker 1 (51:59):
What advice would you get a young nineteen year old
documentary photographer.

Speaker 2 (52:03):
Now, I suppose it's a question of having a purpose
behind what you're doing, and that's the why you take
the photograph. If you're beginning your career, then set yourself projects,
set yourself little themes, you know, and they can be
pretty rubbishy. They could be a color, they could be

(52:27):
a shape, they could be a feeling. But walk out
the door and try and see something that illustrates what
you're thinking about. I think that for me was my
greatest asset was always knowing why I was taking the photograph.

Speaker 1 (52:48):
Thank you, Tonic, it's been a real pleasure to have
a chat with you and find out about the man
behind the camera, the photographer well.

Speaker 2 (52:57):
Thank thank you very much, and thank you for all
the working to to recreate and regenerate this. I keep
on saying that looking back is one of the best
ways of the most helpful ways of looking forward.

Speaker 1 (53:11):
Kind words, Tony, you take care of yourself, all the best.
Bye bye, bye bye.

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#21 Tony Othen - PHOTO TALK - WTF-STOP PODCAST

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