How I got here 3: The life change
So….I was approaching 40 fast, my “career” in retail finance had been destroyed, my interest in photography was crushed, as was my creative side. My working life was punctuated by depressing exchanges with desperately indebted individuals intent on getting money from the company I worked for at any cost, and my lack of interest in any of it became more and more noticeable to my enthusiastic American employers. (How the hell do you remain enthusiastic about depriving the poorest in society of anything they earn by charging 3124% APR on a Payday Loan, or knocking on doors in Newcastle’s West End to try and recover £500 off some bloke who has “Fuck The Police” tattooed on his lips?). Needless to say, the job I’d had for ten years or so came to an abrupt end when I was summoned to the HQ in Nottingham and promptly demoted because I was shite. I could have swallowed the decision, and continued to exist in a working life devoid of any joy, but just couldn’t stand it any longer. I resigned in the autumn of 2002 with nothing to go to. The next 16 months were dedicated to changing my life for the better. I finally got the driving licence I’d promised myself for so many years, decorated our house from top to bottom, and put it on the market. Luckily, Tina was in a decent job, and she took on the role of responsible adult while I had my mid-life crisis thing. During this, I made the decision to just go for it, and become what I should have been some 20 years prior – a working photographer.
Because of my delicate age, I needed a plan to get onto the Foundation Degree course that I’d set my sights on – this was a vocational course run by Newcastle College. It combined formal study of the arts, with practical elements in the form of weekly projects, and lectures on business, retouching, and photographic history. The most important part of the course for me however, was the availability of work experience. I had a year to prepare for entry, and needed to put together a portfolio that I could take to the admission interview. Scary stuff. I enrolled on a saturday course at the college, which focused on B&W shooting and printing using a film camera. ( I sold my lovely old Nikon EM, and invested in a brand new F55 and kit lens)
It all built to a final project which I called “waiting to die” – a series of images detailing the state of mind brought about by a daily, depressive routine doing a job you hate. It was apt, as I was working in HMRC on a temporary contract, suffering a daily, depressive routine, doing a job I hated. A few pictures from that series are below. I actually shot quite a bit of the project work whilst at work ironically. The one year course helped to remove the negativity from my psyche – a set of behaviours built up over 20 years of suffering arbitrary jobs in order to make money. My creative side – long submerged, began to breathe again.
During the year, we moved to the North Northumberland countryside, into a rented cottage while our house sale was being processed. That sale fell through, and we found ourselves locked in a limbo for a while. My HMRC contract was coming to an end, and it was imperative that we freed ourselves of the burden of paying both rent, and a mortgage repayment. My entry to the Foundation Degree course was successful, but wouldn’t be possible unless the house sold. It did eventually, at the start of the summer, and my life change was on the starting blocks.
We spent the summer backpacking in the Far East – Hong Kong, Singapore, & the Malaysian islands. I bought one of my favourite cameras of all time – a heavily used Nikon F5, with a mid range Nikon 24-85mm zoom. This 12 fps behemoth was to be my mainstay throughout my course, and was hastily swapped for a digital counterpart some time later.
Once home from our travels, I prepared myself for entering full time education again, and started on a sunny day in mid September……….. along with a whole class of kids over 20 years my junior.
Luckily, by this time in my life I’d gained the relative maturity that comes with age, and my days of partying were pretty much finished. I’m not one for “getting down with the kids”, and let them get on with the trappings of youth, while I got down to business.
Being a mature student was the greatest thing ever. I relished every single second of the experience, and took every opportunity to learn new things as I ploughed through the work. The projects were varied, challenging, and often way out of the realms of the things I’d planned for afterwards. They involved things like taking a random hat out onto the streets and asking a stranger to pose with it. I replicated scenes from movies, I shot fashion images, high key and low key portraits, did architectural twilight shots, and handled the printing of mono and colour shots in the darkroom. I used cameras ranging from a simple Pentax film SLR, through Mamiya medium format equipment, and large format 5×4 Toyo cameras with all their movements. Everything but digital. The other students were a mixture of guys and gals between 18 and late twenties, with different motivations, but huge talent. Some of them fell by the wayside during the course, some went into mainstream employment afterwards, but many are still working successfully as pro’s, in studio’s, as medical photographers, or as freelancers. The teaching staff were largely inspirational, and the support staff were all hugely talented and knowledgable in all aspects of photographic practice.
My 40th birthday beckoned during the course, and I spent the occasion in the means streets of the Big Apple. Just before we headed off, I bought a used Fuji X2-Pro camera – my first foray into digital imaging. This 6mp beauty was my fave digital camera of all time. The colours were totally lovely, and the files weren’t too big for my old eMac computer to handle. I took it to New York, and spent whole evenings shooting street scenes while Tina and her brother/missus shopped incessantly. Shops are just shops everywhere aren’t they?
An aspect of the course which came to life on this trip was the weekly art history lectures, which bored the tits off most of the kids. I used to sit there in fascination as the lecturer illustrated legends of the art world from the impressionists to the current day. I studied the topic for myself, and produced a workbook with subjective comment that gained a distinction in the final assessment. Walking round MOMA in Manhattan had me in a spin, as I moved through the wondrous spaces occupied by hundreds of the pieces I’d seen in books or the internet. Absolutely incredible.
Another aspect of the course that proved useful to me was the constant flow of work experience offered to students. If there is one things that sets this course apart, then it’s this. Some of it was paid – like snapping the tables for an events company at Christmas parties, and most was done simply for the experience of learning how things are done – changing medium format film cassettes in 20 seconds for a pro on location, whilst in the middle of a debilitating flu-virus. Towards the end of my course I began freelancing for good money, but was knocked off my perch abruptly and unexpectedly – but more of that in my next post.
The two years sped by, and I ended up with a distinctive grade Foundation Degree in Contemporary Photographic Practice – along with about twenty grand of debt, and an uncertain future ahead. Our year group raised the funds, and organised a graduation show at the Newcastle Arts Centre. A nice end to a wonderful reboot of my life. Now I had some of the skills, a little bit of experience, and a renewed confidence. It was time to get out and carve a niche in the extremely competitive world of the working professional. Deep breath….. Here we go.
