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John Cooper-Clarke, London 1981.

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Saturday, 1 May 2010 I’d arranged to meet John Cooper-Clarke in the bar in Waterloo Station and even as I was chatting to him over a quick drink, I noticed him periodically looking past me to check himself out in the mirror behind the counter. As we walked to the photo location, I noticed he wasn’t able to go past any sort of reflective surface without stopping to take a look at himself and play with his hair. I think he’s our greatest living poet, and a lovely guy, but he certainly never met a mirror he didn’t like.

The importance of a USP.

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Friday, 30 April 2010 Every so often I get emailed by people, mostly students, asking me things like "do you have any advice on how one can become a successful photographer?"

That's a very good question. And because of the current economic climate and demise of so many magazines and newspapers, even harder these days to answer.

It's certainly way harder to answer today that it ever was when I started out.  But, in my years working in the advertising business, I learnt about the USP (Unique Selling Proposition). Wikipedia suggests it was the great Rosser Reeves that came up with the term back in the 1940s.  

Basically it means you have to identify and promote the one thing that's most different and compelling.  In advertising it'll apply to a product or service but it can probably equally well apply to an aspiring photographer.

One way to have a USP as a photographer might be to shoot in a significantly different way to everyone else - so that art directors and art editors then have to seek you out if they want that particular style.  This is a fantastic area of opportunity because most photographers don't have much imagination (any art director or art editor will tell you that).  But, fortunately, most art directors and art editors don't have as much imagination as you might think either.  Therefore they usually have to see the precise style they want in a photographer's portfolio before they'll commission anything similar.  Hence a big gap in the market for the truly different to jump into.

Another way might be to shoot in the same style as everyone else but find subjects no one else thought of.  For instance, if I was an art editor and I wanted to commission a series of photos of smiling, big haired girls with their thumbs stuck provocatively into the top of their bikini bottoms, I could just stick a pin anywhere in the map and I'd find a thousand acceptable photographers that have already done plenty of work in that style.  Not that there's necessarily anything wrong with that sort of photography but there's a million GWC's in every country that can do it.  Therefore, I'd have absolutely no reason to pick you out and ask you to shoot that.  Unless you lived right next door.  If, on the other hand, I wanted someone to shoot the West Molesey Three-Headed Toad, there would be a far smaller number of photographers who might be able to do a good job.  I don't know if there is a three-headed toad living in West Molesey.  Probably not (though there are some very funny things in the water supply round there).  But the point is, if you look hard enough, there will be something or someone, somewhere near you that is in some way remarkable.  And which could be made into an interesting photo story.  It just needs an imagination and a willingness to see the possible.  You don't become a photographer like Sebastião Salgado by just sitting around waiting for the phone to ring. 

In both the cases above, it comes down to having a USP.

There are undoubtedly many other ways to become a successful photographer but having some sort of USP is a decent start.

Clint Eastwood, Cannes 1994.

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Thursday, 29 April 2010 I took this photograph whilst on assignment for Loaded at the Cannes Film Festival. I was with the writer Martin Deeson and our brief was to gate crash as many film star parties as we could. As always with Loaded, it was a last-minute decision to go, so we didn’t have time to apply for any passes or accreditation. Martin’s view was that none of that mattered and, besides, he’d be too drunk to care. The trip didn’t get off to the most auspicious start because when we got to the airport, someone noticed that the Loaded office had erroneously booked us two return tickets to Caen, in Northwest France, rather than Cannes, in the south.

This photograph was taken whilst I was hanging about on the Croisette, together with about 20,000 die-hard French film fans (Martin was comatose in his hotel room, recovering from the night before). Just as I was passing the famous Carlton Hotel, the gendarmes held everyone back for a long black limousine. Although the windows were heavily tinted, I could see the occupant was Clint Eastwood. As the car passed me, I noticed the back window was open slightly, so I pushed forward and poked a small camera (a Canon Mju) through the gap. I managed to shoot one frame before one of the gendarmes pulled me away. As he passed, Clint Eastwood looked at me and gave me the sweetest of smiles, so I guess he didn’t really mind. That, ladies and gentlemen, is a real star.

Thierry Henry, London 2002.

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Thursday, 29 April 2010 Some of my fellow Spurs fans may never speak to me again for including this photograph, but there’s no doubt in my mind that Thierry Henry was one of the greatest footballers ever to grace the English Premiership. If he’d worn a Spurs shirt maybe he could have made something of himself.

Kerri French, Koreatown, LA 1992.

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Wednesday, 28 April 2010 I met the performance artist Kerri French one night outside the Ball Bizarre in downtown LA.  She and a friend came out onto the street and they both had their heads encased in elaborate latticework helmets. So naturally, I asked them if I could take their photograph.  

Ultimately, we became friends and I used to photograph Kerri quite often. She was very keen on being in front of the camera. She lived in a small wooden house in Silver Lake, which was a museum full of strange object trouve, rudely altered Barbie Dolls and lots of bits of her art. There was a tree in her front garden that had grown in through the louver windows and had completely taken over her front room. This shot was taken in a burnt-out store in Koreatown, shortly after the LA riots.

Douglas Adams, Bridges Place, London 1995.

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Tuesday, 27 April 2010 The thing that immediately struck me when I met Douglas Adams was that he was almost the double of a friend of mine, another photographer called Gordon. Not only facially, but he was the same (large) size and had the same sort of dress sense and a similar gait. It was uncanny. As soon as I got home that day, I rang Gordon and told him that I’d just met his doppelgänger. “Oh yes” he said “everyone tells me that.”

I didn’t think much more about it until a couple of years later when I was hanging out with Gordon at the Cannes Film Festival. He and I had just got into the year’s glitziest party and we were both sitting, just inside the entrance, watching all the big movie stars arrive and get pounced on by a huge gaggle of the most highly accredited paparazzi.

We were just about to go off and get a drink when we saw Mick Jagger arrive, together with a huge entourage. There was a big commotion as he waltzed past the paps, completely ignoring them (including people like Dave Hogan, who he must have known personally). Then he did something very odd. He saw us, walked straight over and embraced Gordon like a long lost son. He asked him how he was, made a big show of it all, then turned on his heels and walked off again. Gordon was dumbstruck. And if you knew Gordon, you’d know how remarkable that is in itself. He’d never met Mick Jagger before and had never much liked the Rolling Stones’ music. So we were both completely mystified.

Afterwards the only explanation either of us could think of was that Mick Jagger had mistaken Gordon for Douglas Adams.

The Slits, Chelsea 1978.

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Monday, 26 April 2010 This photograph dates from a time when I was really just a rock fan, playing at being a photographer. But I’d started to look for bands and musicians to persuade to let me photograph them. With or, more usually, without any good reason. My day job was that of an advertising agency art director and, in that business, you learn to develop a certain amount of chutzpah. Back in the ‘60s and ‘70s all admen thought they were the masters of the universe anyway. So one day I rang up the Slits’ office (God only knows how I got the number) and got straight through to Vivienne Albertine. So I just nonchalantly asked her if I could do a photo shoot with her band. Now, I’m sure the very first thing she would have asked me was “what’s the photo for?” I honestly can’t remember exactly what I said. Maybe I lied, I don’t remember. At that point I’d had only about half a dozen photographs published, so I was a real novice. But certainly a novice with a lot of front.

Unbelievably, Vivienne sounded interested, came into my office in Mandeville Place and we had coffee and I managed to persuade her. Then I rang up a professional photographer friend, Lorenz Zatecky, and asked him if I could borrow his Chelsea studio one evening and, er, whilst he was at it, could I sort of borrow his assistant too. And so it was that I came to shoot this session. Eventually one of the shots (of Ari Up falling over backwards) was published in the The Face.

The photograph above has never been published.

Tony and Freddie, Southwark 2000.

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Sunday, 25 April 2010 This is a portrait of Tony Lambrianou (RIP) and Freddie Foreman commissioned by Vox magazine.  Freddie Foreman who is, incidentally, the father of the actor Jamie Foreman, was once known as ‘Brown Bread Fred.‘  If you don’t know your cockney rhyming slang, the significance of this nickname won’t be obvious but save to say they were both once rather dangerous men.  They were both associates of the Kray firm and they both served serious prison time for their involvement in the murder of Jack ‘The Hat’ McVitie. 

I photographed them around Freddie’s old manor, in the area south of Southwark Bridge in London. I went on a pub crawl with them afterwards and they were very amusing company, with endless stories of the old days and all their friends, euphemistically known as “the chaps.” They were nice but, even in their dotage, I’d be lying if I said that they were completely devoid of any hint of menace. If I’d have met them in their pomp, in the ‘60s, I’d have run a mile.

The thing is, back then, they might not have let me.

Lupe Max, San Francisco 1990.

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Saturday, 24 April 2010 I once photographed the lead singer of a San Francisco girl band called Lupe Max (the name of the band now escapes me).  She was very beautiful with long, wavy (and at that time red) hair, tattoos and lots of earrings.  She also had earrings in places where there were not necessarily any ears.  Her small house had one main room that was packed full of an array of the most incredible, hippy dippy junk and there were feather boa's, whips, Nazi helmets and all sorts besides.  It was hard to find anywhere sensible to even sit down.  She collected animals but, apart from her pet white wolf, a boa constrictor and a couple of caged tarantula’s, they were all dead animals.  Not stuffed animals, you understand, but squashed road kill she’d just up peeled off the road.  She had 3 or 4 cats, a couple of dogs and several others that were way,way past any sort of forensic identification whatsoever.  They were all laying around and propped up as a sort of household decoration.  It seems that she just liked the way they looked, all brown and decayed and disgusting looking.  I’d been there about an hour, I’d finished photographing her and I was just packing up when a pile of old her clothes in the corner stirred and some guy emerged, stood up, rubbed his eyes, looked at me accusingly and stormed out of the room.  “Oh, that’s okay" she said "he's my boyfriend.”  Until that point, I’d thought we were in the room alone.  I made my excuses and left.  She lived in a dangerous part of Potrero Hill, but I felt safer outside.

Actually no, I was just kidding about the last bit.  She was very sweet it was just all the dead stuff that spooked me a bit.  The last time I saw her, about a year after the photograph above was taken, she'd cut off all her beautiful hair and she looked like a changed woman.  I met her for a coffee on Market Street.  She looked and sounded really scared.  Apparently she'd been involved in some sort of business deal "south of the border" that had gone wrong and she thought the other party might be out to get her.  She was quite a hard core biker and would not have scared easily.  I know a little more than I'm saying but I obviously can't write down it here.  It was certainly not good.

I haven't seen her since.

I really hope she was okay because she was a great talent and a real one-off.  If you know where she is now, or know anyone who knows where she is, please send her my regards.