Garson Byer is a London-based street photographer who captures unique images of people in all types of quirky places. His pictures seem out of place and full of hope or near sadness, with a black and white 1950s movie feeling. Here, Byer takes us through his career in photography…
How did you get started in photography?
When I was 18 I started work in a black and white darkroom in the basement of a minor advertising agency in Holborn. After a couple of months the owner decided to travel around the world in his 2CV and leave me in charge. I had unlimited access to paper, film and chemicals which were very expensive and spent most of my time misusing the rostrum camera to copy photographs from old movie books. Sounds odd today, but the ability to do that and make prints of Orson Welles or Montgomery Clift was like having keys to the toy box. Of course I got the sack when the owner came back to the huge bills I’d run up. I also spent some time as a photographer’s assistant to the arguably the world’s worst photographer. He specialised in boring pack shots and managed to blow up the first Apple Mac in the UK by plugging into 240v and destroy the matt finish on a fifty grand piano at Steinway & Sons by using dulling spray to stop a reflection. I learned nothing at all, but he used to pay me extra not to tell people he’d screwed up.
After that I started to take photos in the street with a borrowed camera, but always of architecture or fragments of the past – 1930s shop fronts, 1960s lettering on building names etc. Never people then – I was way too timid. I used to like to walk around the City of London on a Sunday. In the 80s nothing was open and you’d see no one else around apart from the odd tramp.
Did you have a main inspiration or someone that pushed you forward when you were younger?
There were two people who actively inspired me – one was a Brazilian photographer called Flavio Colker who mainly worked in fashion and album covers/music videos but who got me to buy a tiny Minox 35mm camera to take pictures in the street without people noticing. He also encouraged me to break the rules in what was considered ‘good’ and ‘bad’. The other was someone I never met in person but whose work changed the way I thought about what I could or couldn’t photograph. That was Garry Winogrand who had a retrospective at the Hayward Gallery in about 1991. In those days the only way to see the work of others was to be lucky in who you met or hope that a gallery put on a great exhibition. Books of the classic street photographers were very thin on the ground. There was also no way to analyse the technique of these guys from books alone. Only with the advent of YouTube did I find out that Henri Cartier Bresson used to lie in wait for hours for one of his ‘decisive moments’ or that Winogrand really did just walk up to people and shoot in their faces. I used to take the train to Paris just to go to the Centre National de la Photographie at the Trocadero, where they printed these little pocket boots of the great photographers. The others who were an influence on me at that time included Danny Lyon, Bruce Davidson, Diane Arbus, Burk Uzzle and Richard Avedon. Movies were also a huge influence in the style of what I wanted to shoot. The inherent fashion element in Avedon’s ‘non-fashion’ work was a big influence, too. I like taking photos of people with interesting style or clothing. That attracts me to someone in a crowd immediately, whether the style is intentional or not. Usually, it’s more interesting if it’s unintentional.
How have you developed your skills in photography?
I would say my technical skills are still pretty non-existent. It took me a long time to be comfortable showing my work to anyone because all the other photographers I knew were always talking about f-stop this and 50mm lens that. I had no training in the camera end of photography and so felt disadvantaged. Now, I realise that it was the other way around to a large extent. Not knowing what I was doing produced a very personal style.
I stopped taking pictures for many years whilst working in the music business in Rio and London. When I started again I was amazed that the style was still there almost exactly the same. In other words I hadn’t got technically any better but my eye were still there picking out the same things. Some photos taken in the last couple of years can easily be confused with images taken 20 years ago. Partly this is because I’m always attracted to people and things that are not of their current time. The images at The Social are not just seen through the passing of twenty years, but were all images that were already out of their time and place – the Horse Loose on Council Estate looks like Ireland in the 1960s, the Man Reading in Shaftesbury Avenue is wearing a 60s raincoat with a kind of late 50s version of greasy long hair, the Woman with Dog, Boy With Pistol look like New York from the early 80s. These were all images that struck me as being out of place even then. Even the Orthodox Youth at East Finchley station, when you think about it is a boy wearing 19th Century clothes with a 1960s Tube train passing, despite being shot in 1991.
With specific reference to the question I don’t think my technical skills have got any better. I still develop my own film when using 35mm and still mess it up from time to time but I like that aspect of the work. One of my favourite pictures is one I shot in Rio in the early 90s. It’s only two thirds of the last frame of film on a roll. It’s blurry and out of focus and there’s a scratch through the negative no doubt caused by me, but somewhat magical for all that.
Do you have a system to your work flow?
I’m naturally very unorganised so I try to organise as much as possible but I find it hard. Maybe the ability to see the unusual in the everyday needs a certain kind of unstructured mind, I don’t know. I do keep all my negatives together and they have survived countless house moves and country moves and radical decluttering. These days I use Adobe Lightroom for digital images, but I’m still quite bad at organising the workflow.
Do you keep up to date with new technology and how do you feel about digital prints?
Well it was the fact that Leica finally had a digital M series camera that used classic lenses that got me back into photography a few years ago. No more mess, no more 36 shots on a roll, plus black and white quality that was as good as, albeit different, 35mm film. The irony is that soon after buying the M8 I felt a desire to start using film again and bought a Leica M4 and then later a replacement Minox GT, the tiny 35mm camera I started street photography with. I’ve got two of those now and carry one most places I go. Now it depends on my mood which one I use. It’s great to have the choice and to be able to get an image from camera to laptop in a fraction of the time it takes to develop film. But sometimes I like to dig out a few undeveloped rolls, process them and then scan the results. It’s great when you’ve forgotten the images on film and rediscover them. Both ways of working have their magic. The prints at The Social were all shot on film, all developed at home, but scanned and digitally processed by the guys at Metro then digitally printed. The idea that you can get so much information from a tiny negative compared to wet prints is fantastic. It just enhances what’s already there in the image.
Do you have any other creative outlets or is photography your true and only passion?
Years spent in the music business, and before that writing screenplays and drama, made me realise that the ideal for me is to be able to be creative entirely alone, without the need for any collaboration. From camera to photo blog is an entirely personal journey that relies solely on me. I like that. I do sometimes go on a ‘photo walk’ with another photographer friend of mine but that’s like working in tandem. The results of shooting even the same people are entirely independent of each other.
Is your interest in people or the culture of the city you are surrounded by?
I would say it’s the people foremost. Especially people for whom the word ‘culture’ is only every written with a small ‘c’ –where it’s not contrived. The fact that that takes place in a particular city definitely adds to the mix though. Milan, Tokyo, London are all cities that are intensely photographic in terms of people. One of the reasons I love Oxford St so much is that you never know what the next person in front of you is going to look like. I was recently in Vancouver and it was clearly a fantastic city to live in, but everything seemed so ‘nice’ and I hardly shot any photos at all. Coming back to London, a city that gets harder every year to physically live in with its crumbling infrastructure and stratospheric cost of living, you can see something happening to photograph almost anywhere.
In your latest exhibition held at The Social, you show photos from the past 20 years in London – do you have a favourite photo?
From the images at The Social I love Man Reading in Shaftesbury Avenue. When I was framing these pictures for the exhibition someone at the framer’s asked me if anyone ever recognised themselves in one of my photos. I laughed and said it had never happened and was so obscure that they ever would, especially these images from The Social as they were mostly around two decades old. That same evening someone emailed me having seen that photo on my website. He told me he knew the man and it was his old maths teacher, one Mr Collins, who regularly hung outside the ABC Shaftesbury Avenue (now Odeon). That completely freaked me out, the fact that I’d loved that picture for so many years and suddenly there was a name to the figure, Mr Collins, nevermind the chances of someone into photography chancing upon my site and then knowing the the guy in the main image. I loved the flyer the guys did for The Social with Mr Collins on the cover. However, my favourite image is the Woman with Dog, Boy with Pistol. They were walking along the Bayswater Rd one hot summer day and she had mirror shades on and a faded glamorous outfit, and the boy, who looked Indian, was shooting himself with a water pistol. When I took the photograph, she said ‘Why?’ But, if I hadn’t taken it there be no record of them walking there that day.
Can the general public buy your work?
Yes, all the photographs at The Social are for sale. I probably should have marked them more clearly! I’ve sold a number of them – including the ‘Woman with Dog’ to a lady who realised afterwards that she lives yards from where it was taken.
There’s also a photobook of London based images from the last 20 years to go with the exhibition which you can buy from my website.
Garson Byer’s exhibition of photographs from the past 20 years is currently showing at The Social, 5 Little Portland St, W1W 7JD. You can also visit his website www.InALonelyPlace.org and follow him on twitter @GarsonByer.
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