As soon as people find out that you are a photographer,
they tend to ask, "Ooh,
what kind of photography do you do ? ". I used to have a terrible time
answering this
question. After all, sometimes I'd be photographing a wedding, sometimes taking
a
portrait, sometimes working for a brochure, or creating a christmas card,
and more
often than any of those, photographing a dress-rehearsal for a drama group.
So what
"kind" of photography is that ?
In fact, as I soon realised, there are two distinct
threads running through everything I do. To begin
with, it all involves people. Show me a beautiful landscape or a dramatic-looking
building and I'd
be asleep before I could get the lens-cap off. What I photograph is people,
sometimes the hu-
man face, often the whole person, dressed up in some way, or looking the way
they usually look,
but always people.
The second factor that links all my work is something
the computer-literate would recognise
as WYSIWYG, otherwise, "What You See Is What You Get". Someone once
said, and let's be
charitable and put it down to medication, "the camera cannot lie".
As anyone will tell you that
ever picked one up, the hardest thing to do with a camera is to tell the truth.
At this point I would draw
the witness' attention to their passport photograph. Their own mother might
eventually recog-
nise them from it, after much thought and a little prompting, but how border-guards
elicit any-
thing from these parodies of the human phiz, I cannot imagine.
I tend not to flatter. I've been taken to task for
this on occasion, but despite the customer
always being right, ( ill-informed, confused, completely hat-stand, perhaps,
but always right),
I'm interested above all in the way you actually do look, not the way you
think you ought to
look. (For any budding thespians out there, I might add that casting agencies
feel the same
way). My task in portraiture, is to find the angle from which, and the lighting
under
which, your face looks its absolute best. It's the face God, genetics and
hard-living
gave you, so savour it. I promise to do the same. Besides, have you ever tried
to get
Vaseline off a lens ?
In the Theatre, in much the same way, I photograph
what is in front of me. On occa-
sion I feel like standing up and yelling that my picture would be much improved
if the
lady in the hat was on the other side of the stage, but I doubt they'd appreciate
it. Lighting is also out of
my control; many's the time I've struggled through a show where the lighting
seems, for all the world,
to have been provided by glow-worms, trained to amble along the lighting-bar
by yet another lighting-
designer confusing moody and dramatic with plain old dark.
The late Kenneth Tynan described his metier of theatre
criticism as "embalming the transient". Before
I noticed that he'd said it I would refer to what I do as "preserving
the ephemeral". After all, that's the point
of theatre; when it's over, it's over; final curtain, applause, goodnight
Vienna. All that's left is memories, a tattered programme and, er , photographs.
Tim Hinchliffe. 2004.
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