No Comply - Somerset House - 19th July 2021 to 19th Sept 2021
For quite a few years I wanted to exhibit the work I made in the 1990s and early 2000s while I working for various skateboard magazines in the way that I first saw it; on a lightbox with a magnifying glass over the top of it. I finally got the chance to do just that in the summer of 2021 at an exhibition curated by Tory Turk called ‘No Comply’ at Somerset House in London, which ran from the 19th of July 2021 until the 19th of September 2021.
I really wanted people to have the same experience that I did when I picked up film from the processing lab at the time. In the pre digital photography era, we would select the picture we wanted over the light box using a loupe or magnifying glass to see the image as close as possible. Then we’d use scissors to cut the frame we wanted from the strip. The selected transparency would go off to be scanned and made ready to be placed into the magazine layout.
The tiny squares of film exhibited are mounted positives, not ‘negatives’ as many people think. Though they are pieces of the actual film that went through the camera in the same way that negatives are, when this type of film is developed it comes out of the tanks of chemicals as it looks. It hasn't been copied, printed or made from anything else.
This is what many people would refer to as ‘slides’ but in the publishing world it was known as transparency film. At that time in history it was standard material to use in the production of magazines and books. The tiny bit of film is the ‘original’ and had all the colour and sharpness required to transfer well onto the printed page. But once it was shot and developed the image was fixed. There was no way of enhancing it in the way that you can with printing from a black and white or colour negative or, in more recent times, with digital editing tools.
Many thanks to Tory Turk for curating such a great selection of items. I feel likeI now have sense of how tricky that is as I had to decide what I was going to select to display on the lightbox. Thanks to Somerset House Trust Exhibitions Manager Ali Quine for always being the calm voice of reason throughout that selection process. Thanks also to Helena Long who did such a great job of steering the huge institution towards the best possible outcome from her position within the wider UK skateboard scene and thanks to all the other staff at Somerset House who made this happen. It’s another massive milestone for the ‘culture and community’ of skateboarding to be recognised with an exhibition at such a prestigious venue.
Prints from the show are available here.
Please enjoy the gallery of images from the rest of the exhibition below.
