I was a science teacher until I recently retired. Now I focus on photography. I live in Tynemouth which, believe it or not, lies at the mouth of the river Tyne in N.E. England. It’s a beautiful place to live. Newcastle City is close by and we have miles of unspoilt beaches to the north of us. It’s not Teignmouth- that’s in Devon!
Me and Photography
I think that photography might be the perfect form of expression for me. I’ve always loved art and literature, yet perversely, ended up having a career as a science teacher. I studied Maths, Physics and English at A level. A weird combination and one I’d be sceptical of with my students these days-but indicative of my split personality aged 16!
My friends were better off than me and had cameras in their teens. I first got to use a camera and develop film at sixth form when my Physics teacher, Dave Owen, ran a hobby class. We used archaic ‘Zenit B’ cameras (complete with the now very trendy and desirable Helios, ‘swirly bokeh’ 58mm f2 lens). They weren’t super cool but nobody wanted to steal them and they did the job. I got to dabble in some macro work and in film development as well as comprehensively photographing the cemetery, opposite the college. This was like a rite of passage for Dave’s photography students and we all competed for the gravestone of the year award. I still have some of the images I made then and I still keep in touch with Dave who now lives mainly in Zurich. Looking back, he can’t have been that much older than me and I’ve aged a lot worse than he has. In upper sixth you have to make that enormous career choice and, for me, I found myself facing the fork in the road. I went right, down science street and did a degree in Physics, specialising in Astrophysics in my final year, based on a love of Star Trek and Mr Spock more than anything.
My family were pretty much on the poverty line and Science /Engineering seemed to promise more of a route to financial independence than Art and enable the climb out of the pit of poverty. I was the first person in my family to do a degree. It channelled me down a road that I was never entirely happy with. Ok, knowing about sub -atomic particles and the inner workings of a black hole sounds impressive but to understand those things you have to fill your brain up with a lot of detailed information and, certainly, some mathematics. Space for creativity was restricted to standing room only.
I hadn’t quite given up all hope of a non-scientific career upon graduation. I had won quite financially lucrative essay competitions at University which meant that I didn’t have to have summer jobs to earn money. It was easy – the majority of science undergraduates couldn’t really write, and these competitions were to encourage self -expression by scientists and engineers. I had A level English Literature secretly hidden down the back of my trousers to save me from a severe spanking and I wasn’t telling anyone. Smug bastard. I got my first proper camera ( a shiny silver Olympus OM1) for my twenty first – more of which later.
Upon graduation, I wrote off to 30 or more rural American newspapers asking for work as a photojournalist and, to my amazement, got half a dozen offers. One was for an inflight magazine where I would get free air travel all over the states in return for writing little pieces about each city visited from a Brit viewpoint (this was my idea and they totally loved it). Get yourself out here and we’ll give you a try. Except I had no money, even for the transatlantic plane ticket, never mind accommodation or a set of lenses. I told myself that, that door had slammed but, in retrospect, maybe I was just too scared- I nearly said chicken but that comes later- keep reading? I also thought the ideal job for me would be as a TV presenter on ‘Tomorrow’s World’. My knowledge of Star Trek, black holes and fluid dynamics would come to the fore and see me through the interview process and little matter that I had a Geordie accent and acne. The BBC would come to me and I would cheerfully deliver the goods alongside Judith Hann, elbowing Raymond Baxter into retirement.
Reality eventually struck. I got a job in Edinburgh as an engineer. It was dull. Physicists were second rate gophers compared to real electrical engineers. They went for the glory and we wrote the instruction manuals for the weapons of mass destruction they invented. Our department got sent to Granton wireworks in the docks area for a whole year and nobody missed us. It was a Lord of the Flies situation. I was lucky to survive and can’t talk much about it today. PTSD they call it now. I still wake up screaming in the night crying out ‘Leith Street!’ A catering truck brought lunch each day from mission control. We sat and watched the aeroplanes lining up for landing over the Forth on the approach to Turnhouse and we crossed off the days on our calendars.
For 4 years I steadily stashed away the money, then did a PGCE and then went into teaching. I consoled myself with the thought that teaching brought the reward of longer holidays and that I would write that book, take those images, or paint those cubist masterpieces in those balmy summer weeks. Except you don’t. You recover from the year, you take a week’s holiday, you enjoy taking your kids on picnics by the river and then you start preparing for the Autumn term. When you teach on a yearly cycle all of that information has to keep churning around in your head like underpants in a tumble drier. It doesn’t leave a lot of room for creative thought. Or it didn’t with me.
There were three halcyon years at College (the same college I went too as a student- why risk adventure?) where, by an accident of fortune, I actually got to teach photography to GCSE and A level classes alongside Physics. Ironically, I was using Dave’s old darkroom and the students gleefully romped over that cemetery in the belief that no student had ever thought of this prime location before. I said nothing. The numbers were modest and often, with my A level students, we would just jump in my car on a Wednesday afternoon and head off into the wild blue yonder in search of images. This, clearly, would be entirely frowned upon these days. One of my first students eventually did a photography degree and she came back to teach the same courses I’d instigated at college. I felt good about that. I absolutely loved teaching photography – even the monotonous bulk loading of film into canisters for the students to take away and the fact that I permanently smelt of darkroom chemicals. I was always looking for cheap cameras from junk shops as the students kept destroying them. No Zenit B’s for my students – I began collecting second-hand Pentax K1000’s. Bulletproof. But…
“ I think I may have accidentally dropped it ……into a rockpool… I did rinse it out under the tap though …so sorry Chris”.
( actually, it was a silver Pentax K2-lovely camera as I recall? – lasted all of 3 days!) I set up a pretty good darkroom facility, bought some studio lights and class sizes increased. It eventually took off massively as a subject in the curriculum and I put myself out of a job as a full -time photography teacher was employed – sending me back to the science lab and the arms of Isaac Newton for the next 20 years! The art department were delighted to see the demise of their science interloper!
Outside of teaching, I had joined the local amateur camera club and made some good friends. It was highly competitive. There were always competitions even then. Why does everything have to be a competition these days? – “and the person who is sadly leaving us today is……..Brian ”). So poor Brian walks out of the big brother house or the Masterchef kitchen or the bake-off tent and wanders off to find a ditch and a bottle of vodka. I really don’t like competitions or being competitive. Whist others may want to be the pilot, I’m quite happy just being the passenger. There will always be some alpha male (sorry ladies – always male who will try to outdo you through sheer volume of production, bigger print sizes or better gear. There were the nature photographers, the safari photographers and the, scantily clad, gorgeous young lady photographers. Then there was me. I got arrested for taking pictures of frozen chickens in a supermarket. They thought I was from the animal liberation front and had poison in my camera bag. For the first time I found myself in the position of having to explain myself to people who just didn’t get it. “OK, Sir, so you were photographing the chickens ….as a hobby?”
I had a picture (sadly, not the chickens) accepted into an exhibition in Japan. There were even annual club awards- silver trophies and platters. Heady days. I got invited to join a smaller group of, Northumbrian based, landscape photographers. We had camping trips up to the Scottish Highlands and ate pot noodles. One of the guys thought of himself as a bit of a survivalist – like, if a nuclear war happened, he would cope in the post -nuclear winter wilderness and fight off any predators. He explained this for hours as we sat around the campfire on the first night, gobbling pot noodle. It sounded exciting. Then we shared a tent and he snored all night long. I didn’t sleep a wink. I remember thinking that the walking dead from 20 miles around would just wait until nightfall then just shoot him in his tent. I wasn’t really a landscape photographer. Whilst they shot twisted up lone trees and dramatic skies on the moors, I was on my belly shooting multi coloured oil patterns on the surface of a peat bog. This was probably the pinnacle of my photography journey (part 1) as, then, I stopped doing photography for 25 years. I had decided this as I had been asked to do a talk at the camera club about my photography “An evening with Chris Charlton”. Now, anybody who knows me, will realise that this is not an exciting proposition even with unlimited alcohol and homemade cheese straws. I had a whole year to think about it-but didn’t. As the day drew closer, a sense of panic gripped me and I had cold, sweaty, flashbacks to the frozen chicken scandal. Trying to explain myself for 90 minutes to a room full of people more accustomed to photographs of open- mouthed Blackbird chicks in a nest or Nicola in a purple hat just didn’t appeal. Me, a teacher as well! In the end I did a talk about the history of photography to fulfil my obligation. It was awful. I died. I just didn’t have enough volume of work to even make a stab and no ego or confidence whatsoever. I had a family and responsibilities, my money was needed elsewhere and I couldn’t just drop everything and commit myself to casually scoffing chilli beef pot noodles on Rannoch Moor and discussing Ansel Adam’s zone system anymore.
My darkroom at home just gathered dust and returned to its former life as a laundry room and dumping ground. In summary, if Alan Yentob ever makes the Arena documentary ‘Chris Charlton (age 30) -the analogue years’ -I really didn’t do all that much! Literally, I couldn’t really afford the gear or even the film. Analogue photography was expensive if you were the sole bread winner and trying to raise a young family! People forget that. Also, there were disappointments. You developed your latest fiIm and things didn’t always work out – many crushing disappointments occurred repeatedly and you had to pick yourself up, buy another roll and try not to cry into the back of the camera as you loaded it. You learned patience. You didn’t expect miracles and you were always up against some guy who had more time and money than you. They had a medium format Hasselblad and a hand- held light meter and you were still plugging away gamely with your aged but trusty Olympus OM 1 and getting your colour films developed at Prontaprint in North Shields. David vs Goliath. They were shooting ISO 50 and going for quality and I was using Kodak TMax 3200 and trying to get the grainiest, grittiest negatives of chicken thighs possible. Anything grainier and could have just drawn my images by dotting the paper with a sharp 2H pencil.
Career wise, in my thirties, I went into college management and worked with some genuine lunatics. The bigger the bullshitter the higher they got. I just can’t tell lies or pretend things are something they aren’t and never will be. I just found myself disagreeing with pretty much every decision being made. So, I remained a rebellious bottom feeder and sulked. For several months at one point, I found myself trapped in my office staring at a poster of an Amazonian tree frog which the previous office holder had abandoned. It seemed exotic and I longed to be with it in the jungle. Weird things happened. I was teamed up with the local vicar (a truly lovely woman) and asked to organise the religious aspects of the curriculum. I’m an atheist and had to confess this to her at our first meeting. She was great about it. I got to go to her house once where she was chairing a meeting of all of the local clergy top brass. It was raining heavily. She opened the door, ushered me in out of the downpour and showed me into the living room where the semi-circle of God’s disciples were all seated. I shook hands with everyone and took my allotted seat. There was a perfect semi- circle of brown, muddy footmarks all over her cream coloured carpet. Nobody said a word. We had to organise a Christmas carol service and I had to do the readings to a handful of special needs and hairdressing students. Nobody else came. This couldn’t continue. I was still the passenger but, this time the aeroplane was on fire and losing height and the pilot was insane. Then I found the co-pilot’s parachute in the overhead locker marked redundancy. I ended up back at the chalk face in a new school (after taking a management severance deal from College I just couldn’t refuse) My career path was now resembling a losing game of snakes and ladders. As I’ve grown older, the teaching has become more and more natural and automatic and I found that I had to spend less and less time in recalling and preparing information and that more free space opened up in my brain for the ‘arty things’ that had always been there buried in the filing cabinet at the back of my cerebral cortex. Photography career part two was about to begin….I could feel it in my bones! I had acquired ( on the way out of the aeroplane ) a decent Olympus digital camera with a mighty 5 mega pixel sensor. You couldn’t change the lens but, instead, you could screw on additional lenses to change the focal length. I liked it. My allegiance to Olympus was re-kindled! I liked that camera so much that I bought two more as they were obsolete and ridiculously cheap on e- bay. (I have this crazy idea to get one of them converted to 720nm infra red and another to full spectrum infra red. It’ll probably never happen).
Second time around I decided that I wasn’t going to get into the competitive arena. I wasn’t going to join any club or group and that I was going to do the ‘Zen’ thing and find myself through taking images. I was going to take pictures of anything that interested me. I was going to try to start projects and have themes. I was going to break away from single images and try to put together sets of images that supported each other and told a story. Finally, my photo- journalistic intentions were going to be realised. Except that I found Instagram. I read that you were crazy not to be on it and that, looking at other people’s images was a stimulus to self-improvement. But it’s just a massive, global camera club. It’s as competitive as hell. People follow you then drop you once you follow them. It exposes the worst of human traits. It’s 90% dross but tantalisingly there are some amazing ego-less amateurs out there. A topic for another blog other than this one ( update – see my blog ‘Instagram and Me’ for a scathing exposé! )
Photography, to me, is the perfect marriage between art and science. I understand exactly what light is (it’s just wave/particle duality innit?). Exposure, depth of field, ISO, apertures and shutter speeds. Piece of cake. I can apply all of that to capturing the image. So, in a way, my science background has removed all the technical hassle and allowed me just to think clearly about what I’m looking at. All I know is that, when I set off from home with my camera I feel completely tuned in to the world and keen to find out more about it. I’ve always been a quiet thoughtful guy rather than an alpha male and I tend to blend into the background – a useful asset when you want to take stealthy images. I find that just having a camera in my hand makes me more aware of what’s going on and that all of my senses seem to be working at 100%. I’m looking but I’m also listening. Even smells seem more powerful. If it’s cold, it seems bitter and if it’s warm, it seems scorching- everything is on full power, volume 11 in Spinal Tap terminology. I come home in a good mood. I come home smiling. I want to talk about where I’ve been and what I’ve seen. Photography is making me sociable! I used to class myself as shy. Then society turned shyness into being ‘on the spectrum’. That sounds worse. But no, I’m just thoughtful that’s all. I get bored easily in company when people just dominate the conversation and bang on aimlessly about their lives, the cruise they’ve been on, their favourite flavoured gin or any other thing I have no interest in. It’s just that, human nature, competitive thing again. Someone has to dominate so they can go home and sleep easily knowing that they have established their credentials. Now, I can just be out with my cameras- the vigilant observer of society. Except that makes you sound superior and that’s not something that sits easily with me. Even if it’s true! That’s one aspect of street style photography that you can’t brush under the carpet. It is exploitative.
My choice of subject material matches my choice in music – diverse! Except I don’t take hip- hop photographs. To begin with, everything seems fair game. It’s just good to be taking lots of images at virtually zero cost. Shooting digital is a breeze compared to analogue film days. Blast away and sort everything out on the computer later with a beer. Can it be this easy? Well, yes, as long as you don’t follow the work of any other current or past master photographers and have zero idea of what a good image is. I have built up a good collection of photography books by master photographers who I admire and I refer to them all of the time. You need to see the best to realise what has gone before but also to have something to aim at in terms of standard. If you are in a fallow creative spell – go back and research and find the images that first inspired you. (My photography website has a link to my ‘Pinterest page’ where I have images by photographers who have influenced me if you are interested?)
I don’t think, second time around, that I’m as naïve. Age might have a lot to do with that? I’m old enough to have looked back at my old work and realised how truly awful and pretentious it was. You just don’t know at the time. You don’t have a yardstick and you think that you are the bee’s knees. ‘Red boat on beach, Corfu” (yes really) was one of my first colour prints. I processed the image myself at home using a technique called ‘Cibachrome’ printing which is now archaic. It won the beginner’s competition at the camera club, got exhibited and I got a mention in the local paper. It eventually went in the loft along with my ambitions. At the time, I thought I’d made it and waited for the newspaper picture editors to ring with apologies for not recognising my talents before.
Have you ever wondered about the words we use to describe photography? They are all related to weaponry and wealthy rich men. We ‘load’ the film, we ‘cock the shutter, we ’shoot’ the photograph, we ’capture’ an image. Early photographers were, largely, rich males who previously had shot game on their country estates or went on safaris to Africa or India. The camera was the new shotgun. The camera was both a technological marvel and a status symbol. Even today there are the wealthy amongst us who have to upgrade their camera to the latest ,more megapixel, model every year and who like to be seen walking the prom with a massive telephoto lens and camera bouncing off their chest like a prized gold medallion. People are still willing to pay thousands for a Leica system to match their Rolex watch and Bentley car. I applaud these people. All of my cameras and lenses have once been theirs, only to end up on E-bay bought for bargain prices by people like me. Only with the Box Brownie did photography reach the masses thanks to George Eastman and only then, did it become interesting to me. It meant that the image had become democratic and that the images left behind became testimonies to the lives of ordinary people who I could relate to. It wasn’t faked fairies at the bottom of the garden, naked women draped across a chaise longue or a dead tiger surrounded by the servants. It was working class faces and local shops and people in pubs having a laugh. It meant that anyone could take up photography and not just the wealthy and that anyone might one day make it to the top. When I was a teenager we had Lord Patrick Litchfield vs David Bailey in the world of fashion photography in the ‘swinging sixties’ and that epitomised, to me, the class divide. Bailey was really my man, but Litchfield was sponsored by, and used, Olympus cameras and I quite liked them! My first real camera was that Olympus OM 1 and I still have it to this day. My dad bought it on H.P. for my twenty first birthday ( he, subsequently, never kept up the payments and I ended up paying it off myself once I got a job).
It helps if you have the attitude of being a seeker when you go out with your camera. It doesn’t matter what you are seeking – knowledge, perspective, self -fulfilment, your place in the universe, a better understanding of the world or just a ‘good shot’. You’re in the moment and literally taking everything in- you are connected. In that sense the image is secondary. It can’t possibly capture what you are actually feeling. It’s just the best representation of that moment in time, that day, in your life. There is a great danger of taking it all too seriously and getting totally ‘up yourself’.
If you know the film Crocodile Dundee ‘, ‘there’s that famous scene where Dundee’s love interest is about to take a photograph of an Aborigine man and, just as she is about to press the shutter he shouts “Stop!” She smiles at him and says “are you afraid that I might be stealing your soul?” and he replies ‘No, you’ve left the lens cap on”
Being creative is therapeutic. It nourishes the soul. It reduces stress and it makes you appreciative of just being alive. I recently shot over 100 images on a two hour walk around the streets and didn’t see any obvious value in any of them when I looked at them on the Mac. It was strange because that hasn’t happened to me recently, but I wasn’t dismayed. I just thought that the walk had done me good and cleared my mind. It was like a punctuation mark. I represented a break and a chance to take stock and re-evaluate what I wanted to do next. Also, if you can always come home with images worth printing them maybe your standards aren’t actually that high? It’s just your Instagram addiction slowly subverting your consciousness.
I’ve come to realise that, if the image is strong enough, then the camera/sensor /lens/megapixels aren’t important at all. Maybe that’s why I always shot high grain film in the analogue days? I also shot a lot of infra- red and that is as far from reality as you can get? I’ve also realised that the greatest benefit of shooting digital is that you can take shots that you aren’t convinced about at the time and yet find the value much, much later. Sometimes you just need to think about things for a while or that the image now fits a sequence whereas once it was just a weak stand- alone. Sometimes I do multiple exposure work and that image suddenly, in combination with another, makes something worthwhile. I shoot images just for textures or colours quite often. By building up a library of stored images you are opening up almost unlimited possibilities in the future ( provided you have a good memory or filing system!) Digital allows a certain reckless randomness to image capture. Accidents do happen and fluke images can result, but you have to take the risk and trawl through your shots endlessly. Also, you develop a sort of sixth sense where you sometimes press the shutter just sensing that there’s something there that triggered a response, even if it’s not obvious.
I’ve read a few books about Zen philosophy and applying a Zen approach to taking photographs but I didn’t do it to be ‘on trend’ but because photographers I admired ( eg Minor White) had used this approach way back in time and I thought it might suit me. It’s a good approach and patience really is a virtue. Getting an amazing image is rewarding but how many people then go back and try the same composition again and again? Your instinct is to think “it’s done- in the box, move on”. Also, I have the attitude that everything has been done before anyway. Never more so when you visit a new place for the first time – perhaps on a (foreign?) holiday. It’s new to you and, therefore, exotic and you’re totally aware of everything around you but totally forget that other local photographers live there full time and have 365 days of changing light and weather conditions to operate in. You may as well just save your effort and buy the postcards from the tourist shops? I guess I’m really talking mainly landscape there? I’ve never really been a landscape photographer for the reason I just outlined. Someone who knows the area intimately will have done it better with a large format camera and it’s their right as its their environment and not yours. I tend to look for smaller details in the landscape and go for that approach.
To save you reading the books, the Zen idea would say that you should go out and shoot a lot to start with. Build up a portfolio over time and analyse it constantly looking for themes and commonality. Find out what interests you and focus in on those themes. Constantly analyse and simplify until you have the very essence of what you are trying to say. Looking back at your work is always a good idea. Only the images that don’t make you cringe a year after you took them are worth keeping. The rest is just you thinking you were way better than you were.
Gear wise -I have lots. That’s probably bad. There is a gear fetish in most of us ( more so in males) and it’s nothing to be proud of but, if you admire a quality bit of kit it’s hard to resist. The worst thing is to use it as posing baggage only. Leica’s are the greatest cameras ever made but sadly I’ll never own one due to their expense and the fact that 75% of Leica owners know very little about photography. The other 25% are the best pro photographers in the world. I have Olympus, Contax, Bronica for film. Fuji, Canon, Sony and Olympus for digital. Most of it is other people’s secondhand cast- offs. Truth is, as you get older, you begin to value small size and light weight as being a massive advantage. I have an old MPP 4×5 inch film camera yet I’m currently shooting mainly on a tiny Olympus micro 4/3 system and constantly astonished by the quality. Mirrorless camera bodies mean I can still use my existing lenses built up over 30 years or more. I sold a camera yesterday and I instantly regretted it. It was broken and I sold it for parts but they could have still been my parts! I do get attached to things that I covet and I give them characters and personality. I’m too soft. I have been influenced by lens reviews in the past but, there again I use some lenses that have had really poor technical reviews and I absolutely love them. Images on a smartphone can be amazing as well.
I use Lightroom for processing my images on a 27 inch Mac and often then send them to my iPad where I use Snapseed to work on them even more. An image that looks fine on the ‘big Mac’ screen often looks totally different on a tablet? So, I end up with two sets of images – one for printing and one for social media use. I also sometimes end up with a colour and monochrome version of the same image. Mostly it’s obvious whether colour should be preferred but sometimes either version has different attributes. If I’m posting a set of monochrome images on Instagram -I’ll use the monochrome version just to make up the third image on a line ( I post 3 images at a time as I like them to make horizontal sense on my page – like a triptych). Speaking of printing images …I’ve just bought a pro level Canon printer but have yet to set it up. A job for misty Autumn days I feel? I’ve never printed digital at all so this might be a revelation. I have plans to dust off my enlargers and trays and get printing in the darkroom again. To spur me on I just bought some 4×5 sheet film for my MPP. Maybe that is where I will discover the joys of landscape eventually?
I have a list of possible ideas and projects to work on in the future and that makes me feel quite excited. It’s a long list.
So here I am. Photography back at the centre of my life and free to go out anytime I want. Oh, and there’s a pandemic going on….
Chris Charlton's Blog 