Hi Rob,
to change a recent song: "She's sexy and she knows it."
You are a lucky man. Today you won't be out with the three girls alone. There would be a design director, an art director, perhaps a deputy art director, a deputy photo editor, some more photo editors and designers and a few more iPhone pinchers and Blackberry button pushers. Oh, I forgot – a director of photography (this is perhaps the photographer).
I like your image(s) a lot. Where you a part of the black boys group from the east end? – – Brian D – – David B – – Terence D – and – Rob C?
Best,
Johannes
Hi Johannes,
Thanks for the compliments, but sorry to disappoint: Rob C was alive, of an age with, and working at the same time, but up north in the distant Scottish mists and not the fourth musketeer in any trinity!
It would have been nice to go south, but the problem was the same as faced most folks not already living in the London area: property values. I’d a nice home in Glasgow; eventually we closed the rented studio and added on a studio to the house, and all of that would probably only have bought us a garage in London. With a wife and two kids, there was never any way I was going to risk effing up their lives on a wilder ego trip than I was already on. In fact, I came to appreciate being where I was because I did manage to carve myself a pleasant clientele that allowed a lot of delightful work opportunities – as can be seen from the calendar stuff on the website. Unfortunately, I did a Duffy and destroyed the entire fashion work that I couldn’t sell back to clients when we were leaving to live in Spain. It simply never entered my mind that one day it could be interesting beyond the job itself. I did far more fashion work early on than I ever did calendars, which happened in the later years of my career, so most of my life’s work is lost forever. That’s one thing about the digital age: you learn that pictures can have many lives and to destroy nothing!
Yes, the ‘team’ way that shoots follow nowadays had already started to happen more or less as my commercial work drew to a close; I didn’t like it at all, and to be brutaly honest, it wasn’t a system in which I could do anything much – I more or less need to be alone with the people in the shots or I get distracted, confused, short-tempered and feel like telling the others to just bloody do it themselves. Not clever business, but how it works for me. Yet it’s strange: as budgets supposedly get tighter, more people go out to do the same job than were ever needed before! I watched Helmut Newton say more or less the same thing on tv, that photography had become so expensive that everything (that had once been pure fun) had become such a big deal.
Ciao –
Rob C
