My tutor recommended that I look
at ‘Gary’s Friends’, both because of the relevance of the subject matter and
because as a photo book it might give me some ideas about how to construct a
book about my relationship with my mother.
Adrian Clarke gave up his career
as a lawyer, specialising in cases of miscarriage of justice, in order to become a
professional photographer. However, he retained his interest in human
interaction, swapping clients for sitters. ‘Gary’s Friends’ is a collection of
portraits of people affected by violence, alcoholism and drug addiction in
former mining villages in County Durham and in Middlesborough. Each of the 40
portraits is accompanied by an account from the sitter of how they had lived their
lives. In addition, Clarke includes some ‘gritty’ urban and rural landscape
photographs of the area in which the sitters lived.
The book, which was published
nearly ten years ago, has met with critical acclaim from a number of sources,
both as a photo book and as a social statement.
Review
Children of broken marriages,
violent and/or alcoholic parents, juvenile delinquency, early exposure to
drugs, gangs, alcoholism, prostitution, violence and heroin addiction are
themes in a bleak picture of shattered lives, surrounded by an industrial
wasteland following the closure of local mines. Clarke paints a bleak
picture of his subjects, all of whom are connected, in some cases tenuously, to
Gary Crooks, ex-drug addict, drug dealer, gangster and armed robber. Each
portrait is placed opposite autobiographical text, succinctly paraphrased by
the photographer.
When I first opened the book I
started reading the text before looking at the portraits, but I soon switched to
first observing the portraits and then trying to second guess the story of the
subjects before reading the text. It seems that other readers of this book may
have used a similar technique – in his introduction, Alexander Masters
memorably suggests that Kay (Image 1) “might be a holiday operator testing a
hotel bed in Tenerife, but is actually an alcoholic sitting in her rehab room”.
It soon became clear that there were few winners in these stories, although
many talk about making new beginnings.
Image 1; Kay Moore
(Adrian Clarke)
Amidst all the personal carnage
there are stories of minor heroism, in particular from the mothers, such as
Christine Crooks (Gary’s aunt), who never abandoned her son Philip (see Image
2) despite his continuing heroin addiction.
Image 2; Christine
and Philip Crooks (Adrian Clarke)
Image 2 is a great example of how
Clarke brings out the character of his subjects very well in the family images,
where the subjects can and do interact. When the sitters are alone it becomes harder
to predict how their lives have turned out. Nearly all the portraits were taken
indoors, either in the sitters’ homes or in institutions, using natural light.
Sometimes they are cropped tight but on other occasions their surroundings
(usually in a sitting room) give the viewer the chance to get a feel for their immediate
environment. It was only when I looked through the portrait photographs again,
ignoring the text, that I realised how much of the sitters’ characters were
revealed in the photographs.
The landscape photographs further
add to the bleak picture created by the text. Cemeteries, dead end streets,
motorways and urban and rural decay all feature, with the image of a man
walking his dog past a derelict garage (Image 3) being typical.
Image 3 (Adrian
Clarke)
Those of us who read this book
are likely to be in far better shape than the subjects that he describes. This
should not allow us to be critical of them. What would have happened to me if I
had been born in one of these villages, perhaps to a single mother who could
only make her living out on the streets? Perhaps I might have been born a
heroin addict (an example is described in the book). Only the strong and/or
lucky can make good having been brought up in an environment such as this and
how strong you are as a person is dictated, to some extent, by your genes –
it’s a vicious circle, in which the easy solution appears to be to turn to
crime and/or to take to drink or the needle. Clarke delineates a major social
problem that is not limited to the communities that he so eloquently describes,
but he does not offer a solution.
Photo Book Organisation
Following some introductory
images and the written introduction by Alexander Masters, Adrian Clarke’s book
sticks to a rigid format. Text is placed on the left hand page and portrait
images are opposite the text on the right hand page. If, as it often does, the
text goes onto a second page, it is accompanied by a non-portrait image opposite.
I am planning to also place passages of text on the left hand page, but to
follow each passage of text by an odd number (1,3,5) of images, to be placed
starting on the right hand page but then alternating between right and left
until the final image is placed on the right hand page. A new piece of text
will then be placed on the next (left hand) page unless a new chapter is to be
started (my current intention is to split my photo book into four or five
sections, although this may change in the future). Clarke’s is the first photo
book that I have found where there is a substantial amount of accompanying text
and where the formatting has some similarity to the way I would like to format
my own photo book.
Final Comments and Learning Points
Adrian Clarke’s text and images
speak eloquently of a broken or crumbling community at a certain time, where
lives had been and were being ruined by social deprivation, shortages of jobs,
boredom and social decay. As such, this work carries a powerful punch. Will it
change (or has it changed) society? This is doubtful, because it is likely only
to be read by the ‘converted’. We are also, of course, looking at an
unrepresentative cross-section of the community. Surely not everybody in the area was
taking drugs, was an alcoholic or a prostitute. Some people would have tried to
break out of this apparently dead end existence and doubtless some will have
succeeded. New housing estates (mentioned in the book) will have brought
comparatively well off commuters into the area: new supermarkets to serve them and industrial
estates to replace the rubble will have brought jobs. The community will be changing, hopefully for
the better.
The use of a combination of text
and images here produces powerful and at times emotional messages. This is exactly
what I am trying to do in my own project, so Adrian Clarke’s book represents an
excellent lead for me to follow. Likewise, the construction of the photo book
provides a useful template for me to investigate.
No comments:
Post a Comment