BigShinyThing

From the early London punk scene, through Leigh Bowery and the clubs kids, to street culture in Japan and the Asian mainland, Hartnett has been there to capture the look while it’s still fresh and raw. We were keen to ask a few questions of the man who’s seen it all.

BST: You’ve been documenting youth and street culture for over 30 years now. What is it about those worlds that keeps you excited?

PAUL HARTNETT: I started documenting street and club culture at the age of eighteen as a means of social lubrication. I wanted to get close to the key punk players such as Soo Catwoman and Sid Vicious, who lived in the next road to me in West London back then. I wanted to go beyond the visual. A camera seemed a perfect excuse to talk, exchange ideas, develop a rapport. Sometimes there’d be very little beyond the hair spray and eye-liner, sometimes there were all kinds of viewpoints, the most brilliant perspectives.

At the core of my work there is a continuing look at customising, how individuals have crafted a look. My pictures are portraits, executed with a Kodak Instamatic, a Polaroid camera and a range of Nikon stuff. I’m not a technical person. For me it has always been about faces, dimly lit, content driven, not style driven. Faces, colours, textiles, soul. The messed-up, the dressed-up. The fucked-up.

You’ve recently been exploring Chinese youth culture. What were the most interesting things they’re up to?

I recently visited Shanghai and Beijing for i-D magazine. I was involved with a street and club exhibition at Source’s Kong Gallery and this was a way in to meeting some creative souls. Visiting fashion schools such as IFA Paris and Raffles Design Institute was my focus, away from the gallery. There is such a rawness to Chinese fashion. It is often quite crude and quite different to the work Chinese students do at the likes of Central Saint Martin’s in London or FIT and Parsons in NYC. Having observed over 600 fashion students at work, having photographed a selected few, I gained insights. The Chinese are so very different to the Japanese. The work at Shinjuku’s Bunka, for example, is on another planet compared to what is happening in Shanghai and Beijing. Yep, it’s superior. That said, I was fascinated by the grounded approach of so many students at IFA Paris in particular. It’s a place to watch, they certainly have the technical skills.

You’ve covered the most important musical and style movements of the last 30 years. Which of those do you feel the most empathy with, and what’s going on at the moment that you are most excited by?

I saw The Sex Pistols perform many weeks before the Punk Festival of 1976. It was just electric, kind of like Brecht entering the stage. Before that I’d only seen Sparks, Bowie and Cockney Rebel perform live. I was in a band as a teenager, Missing Presumed Dead, so inspired by the DIY ethos of Punk and Power Pop. What I love about fashion and music is when people are totally fired up, and a bit ‘bonkers’ with it. Really exploding internally and doing something individual externally, going beyond a commercial formula, a safe established pattern.

Right now there’s a musician named NIYI who DJs at club nights such as Gauche Chic. As a producer, NIYI is unpredictable, he uses the most unexpected samples. He is very playful and could certainly be categorised under ‘bonkers’. He is my #1 muse right now — a joy to photograph, when he can be bothered to turn up.

You’ve run clubs as well as documenting those run by others: have you always been that involved in the scenes you cover photographically? Have you ever had issues with access — scenes or subcultures who you wanted to document, but who simply closed ranks and didn’t let you near them? How do you deal with that? Who or what scene have you not covered, but would most have wished to?

I ran a club named Kawaii in London back in 1983. It was very inspired by Japan’s club culture. I also ran the world’s first club for drag kings, women who dress as men, back in 1995. The majority were female to male transvestites, some were heavy-duty transexuals. Every Thursday night there’d be 150 toughies, and me. There was one simple rule: NO CAMERAS! This allowed me a somewhat strategic exclusivity.

I’ve never had issues re access. I’ve had good coverage over the last three decades, and I tend to be guest-listed without ever having met the promoters. Door whores just know who I am. Being fat and a few months short of fifty seems to be a plus nowadays. Verification for clubs abroad is easier than it was in the past due to my website, people can check out editorial content, photographic approach, fast as click-click-click. Some fetish clubs can be stand-offish, they live in fear of News International and local councils.

The only club I have ever experienced shit with is that shit club named Boom Box. Oh, what a Hoxton hole. Just so hyped, so over-rated, and so over. I took a few pics… then pressed the delete button and left. I have little patience for fashion sheep.

You seem both fascinated by style and its associated fantasy worlds, but your photos are raw and uncompromising
– you talk about showing the ‘reality of fashion’. What does that mean to you?

Take a look at street-style pics in magazines such as i-D and Dazed & Confused and you will often find credits for an entire team of mag slags; hair stylists, make-up performers… an entire circus. To me this ain’t street-style, it’s manipulation. What I have done for the last three decades is SNAP with seconds of seeing. No touching, no altering, no upgrading. SNAP. Same location, same same same reality. Sure, sometimes I’ll ask for a plastic bag to be put aside or an event bracelet to be concealed, that’s all. So many magazines provide clothes that their advertisers wish to be promoted. That sucks.

What’s the future of street and club photography as you see it? What’s the role for ‘photographers’ as such, when the ‘kids of today’ have MySpace and a bunch of club photo websites on which to show off their poses, and every phone is a camera?

The Internet has come along and fucked so many people sideways. The music industry is in a tizz, everybody
seems to be online so much of the time. Punk’s DIY ethos is everywhere. People pimp their profiles to a narcissistic extent on myspazz and facebore. There are street-style photographers such as Facecunter (I think that’s his name) who snap at fashion events, but in a really bad way. So cheesy and hap-hap-happy. All very Grazia or Closer, Heatish.

I think it’s great that so many people are taking photographs, even if it with with dinky telephone toys. I love that crap quality, that low-res fuzz. I love the diversity available. That said, I continue in my own way. I have CCTV eyes, and pay an almost forensic attention to detail. I like clarity and the portraiture I have amassed is for a future audience I have never met.

Paul’s work will be on display at the Vibe Bar in Brick Lane from 14 February 2008. Go see. Also check out the PaulHartnett.Com and PYMCA sites.

[Thanks to Adz!]

If anyone asks me why I live in London, I always say, “For the culture, darling, for the culture”. Unfortunately my life usually revolves around working till I drop occasionally punctuated by wine fuelled loiterings in a pub. Recently, however, I managed to spend a couple of weeks soaking up culture enough to last a year.

Wagner was the major motif for this cultural overdose, with the added bonus of a visit from Father and Sister – long overdue and acting as the catalyst for the other events. Although the trip was organised a year in advance I made the significant sacrifice of giving them the two tickets allocated my “Friend of Covent Garden” status. With hawk-like concentration and swooping tactics I managed to get returns for all performances except the all important Walkyrie featuring Domingo as Siegmund. Undaunted, I queued for hours outside the ROH for the privilege of a daily return. (Note to anyone who queues for day return tickets: If the person in front of you asks if it’s okay for her friend to join her in the queue the answer is No. However, Karma made a brief visit and allocated me the next return two minutes after they got the last of the day release tickets – and a much better seat it was too. Ha!)

As an opera lover, I am amazed at how infrequently I manage to get myself to the ROH or ENO. Perhaps it’s a bit extreme to do no opera for 7 years and then cram 20 hours into 1 week – and since I thought I’d not be able to get tickets for the performance I also went to the rehearsals. Mmmm. 40 hours of opera in the space of 3 weeks. But absolutely worth it. Not for the fainthearted, what with all the naked rhinemaidens and incest, but a glorious celebration of some of the world’s most debated music. And the lights. My god the lights.

Not sufficiently sated with this mammoth Wagner-fest, I felt honour bound to offer my family an insight into all this culture I supposedly drown myself in on a regular basis. We went walking in Kew Gardens and admired the Henry Moore. I can recommend this to anyone as a fantastic day out – and if you arrive by 11:40 sign yourself onto the free guided tour.

We followed this up with a performance by Einaudi and Friends – and my, what friends he has. A real treat to hear Ballake Sissoko on the kora, and Djivan Gasparyan on the diduk.

All fired up with the washes of emotive sounds from one of the leading minimilists of our time, we hotfooted over to the Barbican for a little Sibelius. Nothing like Sibelius to rouse the blood. Throw in an entirely unexpected debut performance of Saarioho’s Quatro Instants with an inspired rendition by Karita Mattila and you have an evening of glorious culture which deserves extended wallowing.

And in amongst all this opera, symphony and art? Trundling over to nearby Peckham to attend the “Fall into Place” art event: an unexpected experience I am convinced could only happen in London. Housed in an unassuming terraced house on a quiet residential street accessed through the ground floor window, this innovative celebration of art and music was great fun. Unfortunately, I timed it badly to coincide with a non-musical half hour, but after a slightly ungainly entrance, and possibly more literal interpretation of falling into place than was wise, I had a jolly wander through the rooms. I particularly liked Alice White’s portraits in the main room, and the bathroom decorations.

All in all, a couple of weeks to remember. I live in London for the culture you know, darling.

Many news outlets are currently reporting on the breaking story today that a cruise ship is sinking in Antarctica after hitting an iceberg. Thankfully, this is no modern day Titanic: Susan Hayes, of Gap Adventures, which owns the ship, told the BBC, that 91 passengers and nine crew members have been evacuated to lifeboats and then to another ship.

But what is extraordinary is that either someone onboard the ship, or involved in the rescue, has already managed to upload some photos of the wreck to Flickr. For traditional news outlets this represents somewhat of a problem: users don’t need their platform anymore. We’ve certainly got our RSS feed fastened to Flickr user Keep Left and not the BBC for developments on this story. And yes, we are ambulance chasers - we admit it.

We are BIG fans of CSI: its noirish plots, zeitgeist-grabbing storylines (remember the Furries episode?) and general ridiculousness. This season, it has got the geeks gossiping about the use of Twitter in a scene and the attendant neat explanation of what drives people to live their lives online:

“Some people just don’t value privacy.”
“They don’t expect privacy, they value openness.”

Nice bit of transmedia advertising/storytelling too. Via Plasticbag.org.

Our friend Danny loves film, so it was only natural that he ended up writing a column in Sight and Sound magazine. And being a film lover, it’s not surprising that Danny also has an opinion about the British Film Institute (BFI), Sight and Sound’s publisher. What he didn’t expect was that a jokey comment about BFI director Amanda Nevill on his personal blog would see him fired by the magazine, via the following email from S&S editor Nick James:

Dear Danny

I have some not good news for you, so I’ll get straight to business.

Since your call for Amanda to resign – something I’m sure you know she took very personally – your column, fine as it is, has become more trouble to me than it’s worth. To have someone who is on very public record of having called for her head as a regular contributor to S&S makes it look like we tacitly agree with you. We can’t do that.

The upshot is that we will pay you for the latest instalment, though it will not appear, and I’m afraid that will be that.

I’ll save any further obsequies for when I next see you.

Nick

Danny is understandably pissed off. We encourage you, dear readers, especially any of you who are BFI members — or Sight and Sound readers — to write to the magazine and express your disappointment with this knee-jerk over-reaction. It might be a bit late for them to try to kiss and make up with Danny, but at least an apology would seem in order. Followed by a bit of clarification of Sight and Sound’s willingness to fire a contributor on the basis of nothing more than a comedic posting on a site totally unconnected with the BFI. Surely a little thin-skinned? And paranoid.

Earlier this year, venerable medical journal The Lancet was part of an action which shamed its publisher, Reed Elsevier, into ending its long association with Arms Fairs. The Lancet didn’t hold back from criticising its own publisher and using the magazine as a platform. Sight and Sound could do to look and learn.

UPDATE: Danny’s got his job back! He blogs:

Yesterday I was offered my column in Sight and Sound back. Nick James wrote:

Dear Danny

I’m glad to say that the position apropos your column has changed. I did over-react on this issue, but I want to take this opportunity to explain my reasoning.

Carefully argued criticism of the BFI is one thing, one-line uncontextualised personal sniping is another. It is the latter that is alien to Sight & Sound’s ethos, and that’s why we felt there was a problem of association.

However, you didn’t write the one-liner in Sight & Sound, and I agree that the issue of freedom of speech is too important to be affected by a one-line jibe, so I’m happy to offer you your column back, should you decide to accept it, along with a personal apology from me for the anxiety caused.

Nick

I won’t say much else except that the future of the BFI is indeed a matter for careful and serious, not to mention open and honest, argument.

Thank you to everyone who offered support, both publicly and privately, not just for me, but for S&S’s editorial integrity. Sight and Sound’s a great magazine and I’m delighted to still be writing for it.

Thank god for that. Now we don’t have to cancel our subscription.

On odd occasions we use this site to eulogise the advertising agency where we both used to work: HHCL and Partners. In this case, we wanted to share a couple of ads that sadly never made it to air.

First up, Harvey Keitel (yes, you read that right) for Texaco.

Magnificent. And, Shape ‘Eat It Like a Bloke’. Brilliant.

With thanks to Chris.

Graphic artist (and mate of BST) Jeremy Hutchison has a new exhibition as the Lower East Side Tenement Museum’s Digital Artist in Residence.

‘we are multicolored’ invites people to explore national identity in a playful way, dismantling national flags and reassembling them into a personal flag. “Highly complex ideologies, histories and national identities are embedded in the rigid shapes, forms, and colors of a nation’s flag,” Jeremy says. “This project should prompt people to ask important questions about the array of cultures to which they belong, hopefully provoking recognition that we are all products of hybrid cultural identities.”

Personal flags are added to a “superflag,” a constantly shifting collection of shapes and colors made of all the flags created through the site. Each time the superflag is viewed, it will take a new form, reshuffling the arrangement of visual material across the screen. Users can click on any single flag to learn about the individual it represents. Visitors to the site can also learn about the meanings of colours and symbols on various national flags, offering an insight into societies around the world. Jeremy collaborated with programmer Matthew Brown and Pentagram designer Joe Marianek in the creation of the work.

Jeremy, along with Nellie Perera, arts and education program manager at Henry Street Settlement, has also been running a series of workshops centred around ‘we are multicolored’, encouraging students to ask questions about what colors and shapes mean in different nations and how national identity is created.

Recently we were discussing Wikipedia’s anti-business bias: Wikipedians tend to find businesses ‘not notable’ and often dismiss entries about them as them as ‘advertising’. Whilst it is admirable to root out the many articles on Wikipedia which are barely-disguised pat pieces, just because Wikipedians don’t find business interesting doesn’t mean it isn’t. It’s as if the resurgence of the long tail has become its own kind of snobbery — a land where the entry for Anna Nicole Smith can stretch to several pages but where entries about famous businesses get deleted.

A similar debate has been going on on Cute Overload. Put simply: do possums make the cut? A Wiki ‘delete war’ can stretch out for weeks and hundreds of empassioned postings. Cute Overload — understanding the nature of social media, and therefore its community, opened and closed the debate within the space of two posts:

People, it’s tough at Cute O headquarters. We can never decide if possums are cute, or just horribly evil. (There is a fine line, and otters LOVE to jump back and forth across that line, taunting! always taunting!)

But I digest. Check out this dewd with this anerable paws. Don’t look at his schnozzle or ears tho. OK, you can look at his schnozzle.

Rebecca M. claims:

• They RULE in the Moist Nosicle category.
• They have a thumb without a nail on their back feet.
• They have elaborate whiskers.
• Their ears are pink when they’re babies and turn black as they grow up.
• They CARRY LEAVES CURLED UP IN THEIR TAILS — Come ON!
• And let’s not forget they carry their babies in a pouch — North America’s only marsupial.

Wikipedants, take note. There should be a joke here about possums and long tails, but frankly we’ve got better things to be getting on with.

More photos of Ryan’s show on Flickr, along with the rest of our London club photography. [Image © Darrell Berry]

East London artists D*Face and the Chapman Brothers are having a scrap over whose idea it was to graffiti over banknotes. In brief: Jake and Dinos Chapman made a big show of defacing £10 and £20 notes at the Frieze Art Fair this year and D*Face — who has been doing this for years — cried foul, telling The Independent:

I did a project in 2003 where I got £20 notes and defaced them before putting them back in the system. There were 20 variations of hand drawings and printing techniques in which the monarchy is satirised, with images of the Queen being hung, having her head chopped off. Last April, I marked her 80th birthday by showing her dead, with a skull and crossbones… It seems that inspiration for the Chapman Brothers’ latest work pays more than a striking resemblance to mine. But it’s just not as good and two years later. These are mainstream artists stealing from sub-cultural artists.

The Chapman Brothers have fought back, with Jake saying “Drawing on money is as original as graffiti and that is as old as the Caves of Lascaux. It’s not a great revelation to draw on money. It’s not original. What’s interesting is that because it’s unoriginal, it’s authorless. No one can claim ownership of it. It’s strange for someone to claim authorship of graffiti which is by its very nature an avoidance of the notion of authorship,” he said. He added the Frieze work could not have been inspired by D*Face’s work, because neither had ever seen any of it.

Now, subverting money is nothing new — hell, we used to get invites to the Sensateria club that were defaced dollars — but D*Face does seem to have a point. And, more importantly, he’s not getting to invoice for his work and the Chapmans are. So we asked him for a follow up quote on this story:

The point I was making when I saw the Chapman brothers ‘defaced notes’ was nothing to do with Graffiti, for them to pull a comment like that was laughable, just look at their background and mine. Nobody owns or should own graffiti, it’s power to the people, the the every man and woman’s freedom of expression, void of any need for an artistic background or gallery curator, so for 2 artists that have NEVER dabbled or even tried to do graffiti and have been carefully curated into existence they should be the last people to make a graffiti led argument.

When I saw the dead Queen note that they’d used for their press release and fed to their PR agency it it was simply a case of letting the pictures do the talking. There’s not a person out there that cannot look at the two notes and say that their note was not ‘inspired’ by mine. The fact there was a huge paste up at the bottom of their street that I put there over 2 years ago (and still remains today), makes the point of where they got their inspiration from very very clear. This is just another case of the establishment or the established stealing from the subcultures. It just so happened I know the art editor of the Independent and when she saw their note, she called me up as annoyed as I was to see this.

To claim they never heard of me is funny, my assistant works weekends in a trainer shop the Chapmans regularly go in, which is also near my studio, a few months back he had to walk with Jake Chapman to drop some shit they’d brought off to their apartment, as they walked along he mentioned he worked for me and pointed out the Dead Queen poster as reference to my works… but somehow they forgot this and who I am… convenient?

At the end of the day the simplest way to end this debate of authorship is to let the pictures do the talking, after all a picture speaks a thousand words.

We’re on the side of the angels with dirty wings…

With thanks to King Adz.