31 Days in May
Art is about experience
I’d been hoping that the 31st day of the month of May might fall on a Monday, Wednesday or Friday this year, just to tally up nicely with a story about something that featured during the early Summers of my life in the 90s.
Pic: Nainoa Shizuru
It’s a Sunday this year, the 31st, so this is the closest I can get to it, seeing that I’m not here Monday, in that next week, the first week of June, I am taking a week off as I retreat to Scotland to photograph for the week in the beautiful Scottish highlands. I’ll have plenty of stories to tell you, though, I’m sure.
Experience.
That is a word I come up with when I consider why I photograph. There are other facets of the why behind photography, but this is a pivotal one I believe, and a reason that attaches itself to other creative outlets I have, but I’ll stick for now with photography.
I know that when I started photographing professionally, I may have attached other words to being a photographer, but considering that I’ve been taking pictures since I was knee high to a grasshopper, the strangest idiom, lifting a viewfinder to my eye, has certainly not always been something connected with my wallet. It may certainly have been in buying film and processing, but I didn’t see any folding, as they say, coming back the other way.
So I have to think of it as experience. I do this, taking or making pictures, or receiving pictures as Paul Sanders, the architect behind Discover Still says, because I am rewarded by experiencing something that I may well look at, but not necessarily see.
I think of some of the earliest pictures I took with my Russian-made camera that starts with Z that may or may not have had an H at the end, and I recall that I photographed details mainly. The inside of a radio studio, when I visited as a complete enthusiast a long time before being entrusted with a live microphone, and the footplates of working narrow-gauge locos, which enthralled me. These were things and places I was experiencing, and I sense that, without necessarily being a conscious decision, I wanted to keep those feelings of what it was like to be there, in case life tosses a curveball and turns me into an accountant instead. No offence, accountants.
Photography undoubtedly helps me experience the world in a way that I don’t believe I would if I weren’t carrying a box with film or digital gubbings within.
It’s providing me with my time capsule of memories, which all sounds a little bit Instagrammy, I know, but it really is. The two words ‘focus attention’ are very pertinent here, both physically in the process of working the camera and mentally in terms of experiencing deeply or degrees of, what I point my camera at. I think I’m experiencing what’s in the viewfinder in an entirely different way and fashion than if I simply did a ‘walk-by glancing’.
I’m not sure I’d stand beneath a towering pine tree and really notice the scent of it, the resin in the air, the earthy smell of the forest floor and pine needles, if I didn’t have a camera in my hand slowing me down enough to pay attention. Photography makes me concentrate on the experience with all my senses, not just the visual side of it.
Is this making sense?
Take my experience of photographing weddings. Sure, you can photograph tears and make a picture that delivers emotion to a viewer, but then you can also look through your viewfinder, and study the scene unfolding. Perhaps a father looking at his daughter during the wedding banquet, rolling back the years, wondering how to hold back his tears, and there you are, not an innocent bystander just waiting to casually press a button, but someone experiencing the beauty of human emotion, that storyline guiding you to the click by the wonderful nuance of facial movements.
That’s a prize that money can’t buy. And I’m sure my landscape friends will feel exactly the same way when standing before a majestic mountain waiting for the tiniest of expressions made by light breaking across a range.
That is experience.
Which oddly brings me back to where I started.
31 Days in May was the title of a month-long daily competition run by Radio 1 in the UK, which, for three years of my tenure, I was a part of.
Each day, there would be one prize that one presenter had the job/privilege of announcing: a question, a phone-in with an answer, a pluck-winner-from-hat, and a phone-back live-on-air mechanic.
The idea was simple. It was a prize that money couldn’t buy. This was the BBC after all.
In essence, of course, money did buy the prizes, insofar as those offering them funded each of them. What made the competition feel special, though, wasn’t necessarily the monetary value. It was the sense that Radio 1 could open doors into worlds listeners normally only imagined from posters, magazines and the radio itself. That was the magic of it.
Typical prizes included: flying to Dallas to record your own professional radio jingle package at a legendary production studio, the same company making jingles for major American radio stations and Radio 1 itself. For radio obsessives, this was basically Willy Wonka’s factory. Spending a day backstage with major touring artists during huge arena tours. Not a handshake-and-photo thing, but genuinely being inside the machine for the day. Getting to sit in on professional recording sessions with famous producers and artists. Unusual celebrity meetups or experiences stitched together by the BBC’s sheer influence in the music world.
The prize I remember is one that I had the pleasure of being a part of. We took a man and his wife, I think, we being a record company representative and I to see Aerosmith play in America.
You had to be free on the 28th June 1993, because the prize involved being flown to Memphis to see Aerosmith play the famous Pyramid venue on that date. Not only that, you get to see a surprise pop-up gig by the band the night before downtown, go backstage for the after-party with Aerosmith and make use of the band’s own limo during part of your stay. Oh, and just for good measure, they threw in a visit to the home of Elvis and were guided around the house by a relative. Now you can’t buy that, can you?
The memories of that experience were fabulous. The band were good for their word in so far that we did have use of their limo, although I think the driver was a bit confused with this huge stretched something or other that I should ask him to take us to a MacDonalds drive thru during the first hour of being picked up from our hotel. I don’t think we had many Drive Thrus in the UK at that time. The idea of seeing one in action, as well as my impish humour in seeing if a stretched limo could navigate around the corner of the ordering lane was to me, a little more of what money couldn’t buy. If only I’d had my camera. Experience.
The night before the big gig we headed downtown to a road basking in a choice of very American bars. We ended up in a bar that had, at a push I’d say half a dozen patrons. It was a quiet night, and I feel a song from Billy Joel coming on, though the regular crowd were certainly not shuffling in, in any great number.
Over in one of the corners, a band had set up on a small, makeshift stage and we took a table right in front of that area. The winner, his wife, the record rep… Anton, that was his name, and me. At 8 o clock the band entered the bar from a small room at the back and took up their positions.
It was Aerosmith. Tomorrow they’d be playing a sold out 21,000 Memphis arena. Tonight as they looked out, they faced half a dozen unwitting patrons, a barman or two, and the four of us at a table, at the front.
They spent a minute just getting accustomed to the stage. A few light strums, and a look or two from those in the bar.
You could tell by the looks on their faces.
“Is that who I think it is?”
“Da da da da, Dude looks like a lady…”
And they were off.
It was only a matter of two or three songs, and word has spread down the street. Steven Tyler and the boys were only playing one of the smallest bars in town so they were. The rest is a blur. If only I’d had my camera. Experience.
Two nights of gigs of very different proportions and on the last day of our time in Memphis we made the pilgrimage to Graceland.
Visiting Graceland is one of those places where you realise Elvis wasn’t simply a singer, he was an entire aesthetic. He bought the house in 1957 at just 22 years old and lived there until his death twenty years later. Some of the décor choices are extraordinary, even by 1970s standards. The famous Jungle Room, with its deep green carpet stretching across the floor and even the ceiling, feels like somebody decorating from the inside of a dream after eating spicy food at midnight. It is so unapologetically Elvis.
We were promised a family member would show us around, which didn’t exactly happen, because he wasn’t exactly very mobile, that day, but Elvis’ uncle, Vester Presley sat with us to share some stories for an hour or so at least. In that he looked after security of the estate, he had a fair few yarns to spin. You know what I’m going to say now. If only I’d had my camera. Experience.
Maybe that’s the point of all this Halfway. Not the stories about backstage passes, nice that that was, not the limo. Not even Aerosmith playing to almost nobody in a tiny Memphis bar the night before filling a giant arena. Wonderful though those things were.
It was the feeling of being there. The nervous excitement of the competition winner trying to take it all in. The absurdity of a stretched limo squeezing around a drive-thru. Sitting in Graceland listening to Elvis Presley’s uncle telling stories that would disappear with him not all that many years later, four I believe.
Those are the things that stay.
Photography, for me at least, has always been tied to that instinct to notice life while it’s happening. To pay attention before moments become memories. Sometimes we make a picture of them. Sometimes we don’t. But the camera has always been the excuse to stand a little longer in the world and experience it more deeply.
Which is why, when people ask me why I photograph, there are one or two answers to that question, and one of the most important is, to experience.
And that truly is the prize, money can’t buy.