1984-97 · Fragments of Britain

The Early Years

I was aged around 10 or 11, I was gifted my very first camera. It was a Kodak Brownie Twin 20 made of Bakelite. I was gifted it by the father of my then best friend, Julian Trick, a few days before I made a trip to London with Julian and his mother. The father was a psychiatrist at one of the town’s two mental hospitals. He specialised in cocaine addiction and, from conversations around the breakfast table, I understood that many of his patients were famous pop star and celebrity type people. It was the mid1970s.

The two and a quarter inch roll film I bought in a local chemist’s shop. It came wrapped in foil paper, inside which was a plastic spool, which held the negative film wrapped in an opaque paper. My very first picture was of the front of Buckingham Palaces: a distant dot of a Grenadier guard and the palace façade, which filled the rest of the frame. At the bottom of the square picture was a diffuse shadow – my thumb beginning to encroach on the lens. There were twelve exposures on the roll of film, which I finished a few weeks later – taking pictures of the cat, Sooty, below a hydrangea bush in the back garden.

The first cameras: Kodak Brownie Twin 20; Yashica Electro 35 CCN; Pentax ME Super.

My curiosity had been sparked and although the pictures were not good – the guard too far off; the cat too dark; the brothers out of focus – I would begin the long journey of learn from my mistakes. Taking pictures with a Bakelite box that you could not really focus had its limitations, so after a few years I acquired a second-hand rangefinder – a Yashica Electro 35 CCN. I still have a soft spot for rangefinders, as they are small, quiet and unobtrusive but decided that I wanted an SLR (single lens reflex) camera after seeing the photographs taken by my then best friend – I was then 13 – Mark Lucas. Mark was fascinated by wildlife and wanted to be a marine biologist when he grew up. We would go out on Saturday afternoons and take pictures of ducks and other animals along the River Nene that flows through Northampton. Again, my pictures were not up to much but I would happily lose myself in the pursuit. Mark’s were better! He had a Pentax 1000 SLR.

I bought my first new camera when I was 14 years old. I saved my wages from a Saturday morning job in a hotel in the town centre, where I’d been working since I was 11 years old. It took a full year of saving to buy a Pentax ME Super. It was the camera I would use to take most of the pictures in “Under Grey Skies” – the first three sections – and was stolen from me when I was mugged during a small riot in Notting Hill, London in 1988.

I had used the camera to photograph much of my teenage years: school excursions and a trip across Eastern Europe: the goings of the daily life of adolescence; the short blissful period of my first girlfriend; punk concerts; trips with friends in punk bands – a dozen or more squeezed into vans; hitchhiking trips across Europe to Berlin of old (East/West) and to north and then, fleeing the cold, to south Europe; years of activism in the peace movement and, principally, the animal rights protests and covert direct actions.

I guess that I should have missed that camera after having it so long, but I didn’t. It was just a tool, after all! The worst thing was losing the pictures of that day, victim rage, not being able to take photographs for a while and having to scrape together the funds to purchase another. I don’t really like cameras and eventually all my cameras are stolen from me before they break. Whether they have been taken from me at knifepoint, gunpoint or by stealth, the best option is to walk away in one piece – fit to click another day!

Looking back at these photographs from forty years ago, I can see the context of a process of a loner becoming more of a loner. The camera allowed me to enter into others’ worlds. It gave me the pretext and the means to drift in and out of other’s lives. To be able to do this is a privilege and with that comes a responsibility to respect and have empathy with those who have trusted you and allowed you in. Even if you are opposed to what they do or what they believe, one cannot ignore that they are, like oneself, individuals their own travails, dreams, realities and frustrations. A seed of empathy for others sows a seed of empathy in you. beings. The word and the image are tools that should be used to explore, explain and, if possible, enlighten and entertain. But I shall cut this text short here, as I feel myself being drawn to a something more philosophical on the theme of images, which I’ll write another day.

Under Grey Skies are photos that were made when it was not so easy to make photos. After 36 or a dozen photographs, one had to pause and change films. Thinking and making decisions at the moment of capture were determinant and helped one to hone one’s style – one’s eye! Even today where it is so much easier to take pictures, I still take relatively few photographs as most of the time I am observing and, often, moving to where I predict I will need to be to take the photo when one of those moment arrives. “Less is more” is the platitude I tell students when I teach, but really what I mean to say is that most of the work you put in will not be seen nor recognised by others, but is the foundation on which all rests.

Paul Mark Smith · Medellín, Colombia – March 21 2024

Anti-vivisection protest. (My first published photograph) · Ledbury, Herefordshire