Week 59: Guy Batey

The rotating gallery features the work of an emerging photographer as well as an interview with him/her, and will change every Wednesday. The gallery is based off ‘collective curatorship’, where the photographer from week 1 chooses and interviews a photographer for week 2, week 2 chooses/interviews week 3, etc. There is only one stipulation to the process: Next weeks photographer has to be someone he/she has not had direct contact with yet. Ideally, this will take the gallery on a linked tour around the Internet, and exploring and unearthing new photographers as it goes.

This week, Michael Napper interviews Guy Batey.

Michael Napper: As a photographer that shoots 99% in black and white, I’ve often found most color photography for me to be sort of lacking in weight. But your color work for me is different, it has a certain solidity that I usually only experience with black and white photos.

There are qualities in your use of color, like in the Melancholy of Objects series, that remind me of some of the color work done by Helen Levitt in the 1970’s. Can you talk a little about your general approach to this series, the genesis of the idea, and any parameters, conceptually/technically and otherwise, that you might have set for yourself?

Guy Batey: I came to photography about 5 years ago after 15 years as an abstract minimalist painter. Colour was one of the few things I allowed myself in painting, so I think I instinctively used it right from the start as a way of structuring photographs.

I started The Melancholy of Objects about two years ago. I was living inSouth East London at the time, and always loved the abandoned stuff I found on the streets. I began documenting what I found there, and the photographs started to turn into a series.

In a way they’re disguised portraits. I’d walk the streets for hours, and very occasionally, I’d see something that just demanded to be photographed: a real presence, a personality.

I ended the series last spring after I found a grand piano abandoned in the middle of a housing estate. I think someone was telling me, yes, you can have this one, but then that’s it. No more.

Michael Napper: As one who also came to photography after being an abstract painter, I’m curious about what photography gives you that painting doesn’t. Can you talk about the different mind-set and  the approach to working on a body of photos as opposed to a series of paintings?

Guy Batey: Photography gives me a connection to the world. The last few years of painting I sometimes felt I was stuck inside a white cube, staring at a monochrome canvas. Abstract art can get endlessly self-referential. Whereas with photography at some point I had to come to terms with the reality of the world outside my studio.

The time-scale of painting and photography seem on the surface very different. My paintings were very slow long-winded affairs – I’d work on a group of three for often over a year. I’m a pretty slow photographer too – I’ll take maybe 3-4 shots on a good day. But the feedback from a brush is so much more immediate than waiting for a roll of film to come back, or downloading and processing digital shots. And yet a series of photographs can and should talk to each over a period of weeks and months – maybe not so different to the time-length of a series of paintings.

I had a problem at the beginning with the sheer amount of images I was producing, even as a pretty low-volume photographer. I was used to making 3 or 4 images a year as a painter: suddenly I was producing seemingly hundreds of the damn things. I found the sense of profligacy really alarming. Working in and to a series became essential in allowing me to have some sense of purpose and direction. Otherwise I’d obsess too much about every single photograph, expecting each to carry the whole weight of an idea

Michael Napper:: OK, let’s talk technicals here for a moment. What sort of camera are you using, film, developers, etc. And why film still, in this digital age?

Guy Batey: I started out with a Nikon D50 and a 35mm f/2 lens. I liked using just one standard lens, and getting accustomed to that point of view. Two years ago, I bought a Rolleiflex T from a friend, which has been my sole camera ever since, apart from a brief flirtation with a Holga last month. I love the way the Rollei works almost like a mini view-camera. It’s quiet, discreet, and really suits and encourages slow and meditative photography. There’s something very different about the glowing ground-glass of the view finder, compared to the brightly-lit window of an SLR. As soon as I looked down through a borrowed Rolleiflex, that was it, I was hooked.

I started using colour slide film mainly because that was what I used to use when I borrowed a camera to photograph my paintings. I then started to have some problems scanning slides, so I moved to colour negative film, using Fuji Pro400H. Great stuff. It just looks right.

Recently, I’ve been experimenting with B&W film, using Neopan and Tri-X handheld, and Pan F with a tripod. I’ve got a very dusty flat, and a great cheap lab just down the road, so I haven’t yet tried any home-developing. I don’t actually enjoy chemistry that much, and I can imagine getting completely overwhelmed with the possible permutations of developers and whatever.

The B&W film and the Holga were attempts at reducing the amount of information in a photograph and trying to isolate and concentrate on the essentials, on the emotional content of the image. Everyone seems obsessed with getting more and more resolution from a photograph, while I think it’s useful to have a lot less sometimes.

Michael Napper:: I’m intrigued by the approach different photographers have to black and white versus color. Can you elaborate on what you feel works with color, what works with black and white? And on a somewhat unrelated note, in the last 10-15 years photographic prints have been exhibited on an increasingly larger scale in museums and galleries. I saw some Robert Frank prints recently, and they were tiny (8 x 10 inches) compared to much of what’s being shown now, and I wondered how they would fare at larger sizes. What’s your take on this new monumentality as regards the size of photographs nowadays?

Guy Batey: Print size is related to resolution, as one often provides the justification for the other. But you do get diminishing returns from big prints. The extra impact and scale can get very bombastic and repetitive – very few images actually need to be poster-sized. Another problem is that the internal perspective of a huge print can look oddly wrong unless you stand well back from it – in which case it might as well be smaller. I like the intimacy of arms-length prints, maybe 12”-16” wide. I also love the hand-sized directness of photography books, with their built-in possibilities of serial structure and narrative.

I’ve always liked other people’s B&W work. I’ve been trying to work with B&W for the last 3 or 4 months, but haven’t yet made up my mind if it’s going to work long-term for me. I find B&W much more malleable and adaptable than colour in the way it can handle stronger light and contrast and a wider tonal range without appearing unnatural, but I am beginning to miss colour. I’m so used to looking and composing with the warm/cool axis and the colour of the light. It’s that I miss much more than bright colours in themselves.

In terms of colour dictating the subject, I do find I can only take colour photographs in subdued light out of direct sunlight, so I often prefer what seems like very flat or dull light. But I think any subject can work equally well in colour or B&W – I don’t see any kind of hierarchy or particular subject/content suitability in either.

Michael Napper: I think one of the things that really strikes me about your color photographs is the light, it is very subdued, yet the colors seem all the richer for it. Here in southern California, everything is always too bright for my liking, and I find that if I’m going to shoot outside, there’s a very narrow window of time when the light is to my liking. You are in Berlin at the moment, can you talk about how things are different there from London in terms of your photography, eg., the light, your subject matter, the general feel of walking around and shooting?

Guy Batey: I really do believe there’s no such thing as bad light. Some is obviously much more difficult, whether it’s hard and flat or dull and grey, but it can all help make a photograph. Certainly for colour, subdued grey light can bring out some amazingly subtle and rich colours. I like neutral even light, and try and avoid light that has a certain known ‘look’, like the traditional landscape ‘golden hours’ of sunrise and sunset.

Berlin is in many ways not so different to London. It still feels and looks predominately like a northern European city. Berlin shares with London a depth of history and a personal resonance, but also has a freedom and emptiness to it. But I’m moving away from the idea of using Berlin as a subject or a specific backdrop because it can be so loaded, it can overshadow the photograph. My London photographs had a feel of London to them, but I wouldn’t want to think of them primarily as portraits of London.

As I said, after the ‘Piano’, I really thought it was time to drop the Objects, and I’ve been searching for new subjects and themes all the time I’ve been in Berlin. I’m enjoying experimenting, and I’m getting closer, but it’s taking time.

Michael Napper: Thanks Guy, I’ve enjoyed it, and looking forward to seeing what the future brings to your eye.