Notebook #13: Photo North, The Hepworth, Scotland Forever

A Yorkshire special

From This Is Not A Life, It’s Just An Existence. Credit: John Bolloten

Eye to eye

To Yorkshire, for a couple of days of cultural wandering in a part of England of which I know very little. I intend to go exploring far and wide with my Jaggy Thistle notebook in hand over the coming months and years. The Jaggy Thistle on the road.

First stop on my Yorkshire tour was Photo North, a photography festival in Leeds now in its sixth year. Held over three days with 15 exhibitions and a dozen events, it puts Scotland’s arts world to shame. Where is our version of Photo North? Where is Photo Even Further North?

Main gallery space at Photo North, which is held in The Electric Press, in Leeds. Credit: The Jaggy Thistle

There was lots to love here, including a moving Harry Borden exhibition about male suicide; classic Northern street photography from John Bulmer; and, one of my highlights, Dawn Mander, a photographer from Blackpool with a wonderful generosity of spirit.

But star of the show for me was John Bolloten, who was at Photo North to launch his latest photobook, This is Not a Life, It’s Just an Existence.

If there is a braver photographer working in Britain I’d like to meet them. Bolloten has photographed bare-knuckle pit fights in English market towns, far right football ultras in Georgia, outdoor cannabis farms in Yorkshire, and the UK rap battle scene.

From Blood Brothers. Credit: John Bolloten

From Tblisi Raw. Credit: John Bolloten

From North Guerrillas. Credit: John Bolloten

From Words Are Weapons. Credit: John Bolloten

This is tough material that requires steely nerves and considerable personal courage. And yet there is nothing swashbuckling about Bolloten. In person he is a gentle, unassuming man with an owlish look and an unthreatening demeanour. Come to think of it, this is perhaps the reason he gets such great access.

I had a long chat with Bolloten and found him to be an impressive human being. He did not pick up a camera until the age of 43, an inspiration to late onset photographers like me. His day job is working in drugs outreach in Bradford, and along with his camera he always carries Naloxone in case he comes across someone who has overdosed.

Bolloten gave a talk at Photo North and in the Q&A he was accused of glamorising drug use. I think this questioner missed the point. Yes, some of Bolloten’s pictures are beautifully lit and tenderly composed. But anyone who thinks photographing someone with their trousers around their ankles and a syringe in their groin is an example of glamorisation has a curious definition of glamour.

What sets Bolloten apart from many other gritty documentary photographers is his personal investment in the people he photographs. This is no hit-and-run job. Bolloten knows these people as human beings, not objects at which to point a camera. He has gotten to know them over time and won their confidence. In many cases they are his friends.

Bolloten himself has a personal history of addiction and mental health struggles. He knows something of these people’s worlds.

One of the things I liked most about his new book was its inclusion of more than a dozen pen portraits of the people he had photographed, in their own words. Many of the stories end on a note of hope. And then you notice the book is dedicated to the memory of three of them: Mark, Gary and Shaun.

They didn’t make it.

And yet for others there is redemption in the form of treatment, a rudimentary home, a loving relationship. The pictures that made the deepest impression on me, the ones that packed an emotional punch, were not the ones in squalid, needle-strewn drug dens but the ones in tidy council flats and half-way houses where addicts were trying to put their lives back together.

They smile a little sheepishly at the camera, barely believing their luck at having survived this far.

Bolloten does not glamorise. Nor does he exploit. Instead he bears witness to lives of unimaginable pain and degradation. He does so while treating the subjects of his photographs with respect. He looks them in the eye. And he invites us to do the same.

# This is Not a Life, It’s Just an Existence by John Bolloten is published by Fistful of Books, with books and bundles starting at £25.

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String theory

A model of Barbara Hepworth’s sculpture for the outside of the John Lewis building in London’s Regent Street. Credit: The Jaggy Thistle

Thirteen minutes by train from Leeds is Wakefield, home of an art gallery called The Hepworth, housed in a remarkable jumble of concrete boxes designed by David Chipperfield and situated on the banks of the River Calder.

Chipperfield is one of my favourite architects and I can’t wait to see the result of two projects he is working on in Edinburgh at the moment: the Dunard Centre concert hall and the renovation of Jenners department store.