:: F2 Freelance Photographer ::

Drew Gardner

Starting out working for the local press in his native Midlands and moving onto the nationals, Drew Gardner is an award winning London-based photographer whose work today ranges from group portraiture to celebrities on location and in the studio. He speaks to David Land about his origins and current practice

Nottingham-born Drew Gardner, 43, grew up in Spalding, south Lincolnshire. He started out in photography aged 14 in 1978, when his dad bought a Praktica SLR.

“I was having these horrible feelings at school”, he says, “where I didn’t know what I wanted to do, and I thought this photography thing was quite fun, so I bought myself a Zenit SLR and took a keen interest in photojournalism, looking at Don McCullin’s work. No doubt my schoolwork suffered, because I was coming home, shooting lots of film, processing it in the kitchen, and printing on a little Russian enlarger I bought for £10 that would fold up into a suitcase.

“At that point in Spalding, large lorries would come down a very narrow street, and little old ladies would have to dive out of the way when they drove onto the pavement. I photographed that and made the front page of The Spalding Guardian. I got on well with the photographer there, Tim Wilson, and from then on I was there every weekend and all during the summer holidays, doing things like emptying the bins, but taking pictures as well, of Women’s Institute cake stalls, jumble sales and the like, which were regularly published. So I was a professional photographer before I left school aged 151/2.

Northamptonshire Evening Telegraph

“I moved to the Northamptonshire Evening Telegraph in Kettering, where I decided that I wanted a career in the nationals. I started coming up with self-generated news and feature ideas, which I submitted to the likes of The Times, The Daily Telegraph and The Independent. The first picture I had published in a national was on the front page of The Independent – it was of the last postman in Britain who delivered to a village that didn’t have a road going to it, in the western isles of Scotland.

National press

“Rather fool-hardily, I decided I wanted to be a war photographer, so I took three weeks holiday from the local newspaper and went off to shoot the civil war in Cambodia, where I met a journalist from the short lived Sunday Correspondent and we worked together. He was thrilled with the pictures, and back in the UK, The Sunday Correspondent gave me a job. This was in about 1990, and I covered Thatcher’s demise, doorstepping Michael Heseltine’s house and waiting outside Downing Street.

“I was always employed until The Sunday Correspondent went under, at which point I had to go freelance and I’ve never looked back. I moved to The Sunday Telegraph, for which I was sent to war zones all over the world.

“Covering war got to me in the end, because the people back in London didn’t want to know the truth. They’d tell you what the story was, and then you had to make the pictures fit their agenda. A classic example of this is when I was sent to cover the Serbs being removed from Kosovo. I was initially sent to an airbase in Bari, Southern Italy, to cover the RAF running bombing raids.

“I was getting pictures of planes, air crew and so on, and then the editor told the picture editor: ‘What’s happening is the RAF pilots are sitting on the sidewalk, and they’ve got all their fighter pilot stuff on and they’re ready to go. They’re drinking cappuccinos and they’re watching the girls go by on their Lambrettas, and then the call comes through and they have to jump into their planes. What I want the photographer to get is the pilots looking like pilots, sitting in a café with pretty girls going by’.

“This was all absolutely fine, apart from the fact that it wasn’t true. Okay, it’s not beyond the realms of possibility that people off duty would go into town and have a drink, but they wouldn’t look like pilots ready to spring into action, they’d be in jeans and t-shirts. I spent the thick end of three weeks trying to make this happen, and I thought ‘What am I doing? I’m just making things up to fit somebody else’s ideas’.

“To cap it all, we were driving out of Kosovo and got stuck in a situation where a British Army medical unit was trying to save the life of this guy who’d been shot by a sniper, and then we came under sniper fire for the thick end of an hour. We were pinned down under cars, and I was getting pictures of British soldiers under fire, carrying casualties away, the whole lot. There were more commendations for bravery in that single action than there were for the whole of the Kosovo campaign. It was an exclusive, and nobody would use it, because the front page was taken up with Rupert Murdoch getting married to his new Chinese wife.

“My phone was ringing red hot for weeks afterwards, with squaddies saying: ‘Can we have the pictures? Why didn’t it go in? Was it suppressed? What’s going on?’ That was the final straw. I thought, ‘This is nonsense. I’m risking my life. I’m staying away from my friends and family for weeks and months at a time, to peddle something that is not true.”

“Anybody who’s thinking today of going to college to study photojournalism ought to consider it really carefully, because most of my peers are getting out of the game: clients are now paying less than they were 15 years ago. Some of the very big newspapers are reluctant to use anything other than stock, and this is extremely depressing. It makes it difficult for young people to get into the job, and it makes it difficult for experienced photojournalists as well.

“I still love photojournalism, but sometimes enough can be enough. In mad moments, I still want to do issue-based projects, but I manage to stop myself, because I realise I would be pouring money into a hole in the ground. Photojournalism is something right now which you cannot regard as a serious living. You’d have to do it because you really want to.

Guinness World Records

“I realised that one of the things I really love about photography is meeting people and getting into interesting conversations and scenarios, and it struck me on my travels across the length and breadth of the British Isles that there were a lot of really interesting, eccentric people out there. I thought it would be funny to come up with a show based around some of the more extreme Guinness World Record holders, and I spent a year taking photos, which culminated in a four-week solo show at the Association of Photographers’ Gallery.

“I thought all the agencies and advertising companies would beat a path to my door. And then nothing happened. You can think that something you are doing is going to be The Breakthrough. Well it might be, but then again it might not. But that’s not a reason not to do it. It’s a step on the pathway to success.

“Things don’t necessarily have an immediate result, and often they can yield indirect results that help you achieve your endgame. For instance, I learned much of my lighting technique when I was on the World Record trail, and because of that show, I was given an assignment by The Daily Mail Weekend Magazine to recreate the life of Elizabeth I. I would really urge anybody: don’t expect it to happen overnight. It’s a very gradual thing, meeting more people, building contacts …

“There are no shortage of concepts, and lots I want to do right now. It’s in my blood. I’ve got a long-term project called The Descendents, which is about examining how much people’s descendents resemble their forebears. We’ve done getting on for 15 shoots, with another 10 in the pipeline.

London

“I moved to London three years ago, because I didn’t feel I was becoming successful quickly enough. I wanted to give it a good go, and not look back at my life with any professional regrets. I’ve got a small flat where I live and work. Prior to that, I was Northamptonshire-based. It has made a commercial difference to be London-based. The key thing is being able to network. I’m still chipping away with new clients, and it’s getting better all the time.

“TV stills is an area I’m getting an increasing amount of interest in, but it takes a long time to crack and doesn’t pay very well. The days of making significant sums of money out of it are sadly over, so it’s more a kind of shop window. It’s a funny thing. There doesn’t seem to be any shortage of shop windows, but there is always a shortage of things that pay the mortgage!

Sex

“I was drinking beer with my photography friends and we were talking about how we could further our careers. One of my friends said to me, ‘You know what you need to do? You need to photograph a pretty girl’. Rather a shallow thing to say, but that’s when you realise your work is missing sex, you’ve got too many freaky people in there. I said, ‘So you think I should do a fashion shoot?’, and he said, ‘Yeah, that’s what you need to do’.

“As if by magic, a recently graduated fashion designer contacted me and asked if I’d shoot his fashion collection. And I said, ‘No problem. I’ll do it for free’. We went to the Lake District for two days to do Alice in Wonderland, my first fashion shoot, which was nominated and shortlisted at the AoP Awards.

“One of the terrible things is that we get pigeonholed – ‘he’s a news photographer/he’s a sports photographer/he’s a fashion photographer’. The great thing is, if you’re brave, you can go out there and reinvent yourself. You can change people’s perceptions by shooting something completely different.

Digital

“I went digital very early. In my photojournalism days, I had to take my own scanner and darkroom with me when I went anywhere from Uganda to the Arctic Circle, processing films on warships, sending pictures over satellite - all sort of crazy things. This was before digital kicked in on a massive scale, so I was aware that it was the future.

“I was using a Mamiya RZ67 as my main portrait camera, and then the Canon EOS 1DS Mk I came out in 2002. I realised it was going to be possible to get pretty damn close to scanned film quality, and I switched at that moment. I now use Phase One digital backs, and on the DSLR side I’ve got a Canon EOS 5D and an

EOS 1DS Mk II.

Teamwork

“I’ve been represented in the United States for two years and for one year in the UK. Being a photographer is about building a team around you who can make it happen: assistants, producers, accountants. You have to choose your team very carefully.

“I get about 10 emails a day from people wanting to assist me. The first thing that is the instant disqualification for working as my assistant is saying ‘… and I make a good cup of coffee’. The sort of people I want on my shoot are professional, committed, knowledgeable. They have to bring something to the table; and bringing a cup of coffee to the table simply isn’t good enough.

“I’m looking for someone who can use Phase One digital backs, Elinchrom lighting, and Apple Mac computers. If they don’t use Elinchrom I will say, ‘Go to the Flash Centre and familiarise yourself with them’. Only three people have done that so far. If they can’t be bothered to turn up to make sure they know how the lights work on a shoot, why should I give them a go? I’m warm and cuddly really, it makes me sound horrible, but photography is tight, there isn’t really the room for passengers at the minute. You’ve got to be ultra professional, and your assistants are there to help, not hinder you.

“I look for someone who’s got great people skills, but more importantly great life skills. I don’t mind college graduates at all, but my last three assistants have had more experience. When my number one assistant isn’t working for me, he’s doing building labouring; and a girl I use worked as a carer for the NHS, as a youth worker, and she’s done her own assignments. They know a little about life and have experience beyond the photographic bubble.

“I work with assistants until we go our own ways. Three years, something like that. Some people I’ve worked with for years and years. It depends how we get on. Having said that, I’m always on the lookout for new assistants.

“My dad’s still taking pictures”, adds Gardner, “albeit digitally now. He keeps close track of what I’m doing. He’s one of my biggest fans.”