World Photo Day

I shot my last roll of 35mm film in September 2002 after a trip to New York. I wasn’t a professional photographer and had just returned to using a camera after after a 10 year gap. It would be another three years of using medium format cameras before I would switch over to digital in 2005.

World Photo Day got me thinking about how little of my film archive remains (there are some boxes of transparencies and slides somewhere) and how the process has changed so much – from having to heat up Polaroid tests under my arm to make them develop quicker (fun) to not knowing whether the film plate had scratched your film, the bike courier might lose it or the lab damage it (not fun).

It’s not often that you open up your pictures to scrutiny where they are rough, in the midst of learning and trying new things. The gallery of 50 images below – some are 30 years old – covers one of the first pictures I ever took (a double exposure on a turn of the century Kodak) through to that last 35mm roll in New York. They were taken 50/50 with each of these things:

Konica Pop & Canon AE-1

There are a few surprises in there. A cocky looking Gordon Ramsay. Tasmin Archer (remember Sleeping Satellite?), The Stranglers, and Derek Jarman. A picture of a random child in Camden with his hands tied. A model looking at me very suspiciously as she has her nails done backstage at a fashion show. The homeless. Fragments of street life when documentary photography actually felt easier than it does now. Plenty of dodgy manual focusing and less than sharp pictures.

No retouching. No colour management. Just film.