Hellooo (and archive)

NathanPhoto Blog post 21 June 21 21/06/21 - Helllooo (and Archive)

Well hello, hasn’t it been such a long time, years in fact since I’ve been around but one is still here and still alive (just). You can blame my hiatus on my new direction/studies/changing markets/Pandemic*

Well, the persona NathanPhoto hasn’t been around for sooo long but the realisation is that it’s such a major part of me that I needed to update and refresh it so hence the website and an attempt at re-blogging my ideas and thoughts, not sure who’ll be interested this time around but there are certain takes that only the NathanPhoto brand can comment on.

I recently posted an archive shot from the Criminal Justice Bill marches which I photographed in 1993/1994 I think, memory is a little hazy as I now realise that those events happened nearly 30 years ago…I came to photograph theses marches and demos such as the Criminal Justice Bill protests mainly through attending the anti-racism demos of that time (not funny how time doesn’t seem to change things) organised via the anti-nazi league** and also through documenting what was around me which is now classified as ”yoof culture”, a term which is somewhat a double edged sword. 

This whole event was shot on film too so not knowing what you’d got till you developed it, interestingly I mainly shot in b&w then too, what would this work look like in colour? So there was always a chance you’d get something no one else would get if they were changing a film, on their last shot so saving it for a moment or just out of film..

I was proud of that image at the time, as I felt the others there missed the shot by shooting from the other side (somewhere there will be a shot with me in it). I also realised that I’d definitely taken a side, with focusing on the protestor but the others had taken the side of the police, at least physically. I got clocked soon after this shot was taken so I drifted back to the protest but felt like I’d gotten something, also coming off the back of me missing a shot where a protester stood in front of the police horse line looking somewhat religious and held his arms aloft***

With all that in mind I thought the post would gain more likes than my face but nope there you go, was it possibly because I blocked out the face of the person being arrested? Thinking was what if he didn’t want to be identified, has a proper job that would frown on that youth’s behaviour? I know that’s not a mind-set we hear from many (press/editorial/pseudo docu) photographers but that’s my thinking on it. Can you imagine the work that would be needed to track down the subject? Would anyone be interested? What if he said no to it being published? Is it even that great an image?

So, this brings me onto the subject of Archives. I have approached it from a couple of different angles recently. My boy is who is now 16, will probably be the beneficiary of it, so I have been introducing it to him as the idea of his inheritance (like most working photographers there’s no money) also that it’s been sat there doing nothing (well parts anyway, some of it was lost in a fire and some lost through life events) and that possibly there might be something of worth in there that would translate well to my new direction.

So, I’ve started to collate it and the stories behind the images, some of which I may write here and some I may not, thinking that if the work goes unpublished now but surfaces after I’ve gone when my son is nearing 50 in roughly 2061 then it may be of some value.

So I’m going to publish a mixture of archive shots and current wok as I go about the re-establishing of NathanPhoto for both archive and current reasons, the need to be current and relevant is never more omnipresent than now.

A lot of this journey will be played out on instagram which you can follow on the above link (top right). As the insta conundrum of what is liked and received is an interesting one. As said the 90’s arrest picture didn’t go down well, but my attempt at mocking hdr went down surprisingly well..

So I’ll aim to explore what that means and what to make of that !

I aim to post more thoughts in an already established random fashion, so thank you for reading and any comments or feedback or any sort of interaction really, I’m here for it.

Thanks again..

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Notes:

*delete as appropriate

** Reflecting back on that name it now strikes me as a bit of a dodgy name choice as were some of the t shirts featuring the swastika being thrown into a bin, why use the iconography of the person you are protesting about, from a distance those t’s might have been mistaken for a supporter of racism…

*** If anyone is interested I can post the shot, also remembering that this was a time when nothing was recreated and nothing was too staged so the moment had definitely past