Questions by Si Barber

What initially inspired you to pursue photography?

To start at the beginning. I had been at boarding school since the age of seven and in the upper fifth I became interested in photography. I taught myself by reading Amateur Photographer magazine. I was never interested in the camera reviews and technical stuff, but I was interested in the imagery. At the time they ran articles about experimenting with your camera. I made blurred panning photographs, printed colour transparency onto black and white paper so the tones were reversed, and experimented making rayographs. I printed photographs through tissue paper and generally made experimental art style imagery. When I came home during the holidays, I looked at copies of the Sunday Times, The Observer, Town, Life and Look magazines that my mother had saved or bought for me. Around the same time I was reading the newspapers and becoming interested in editorial imagery that illustrated newspaper feature articles, rather than the news pictures. I remember very clearly seeing the now famous photograph of the Eton boys in their top hats and the three other young boys from ordinary families looking at them, taken at Lords Cricket Ground by Jimmy Sime in the 1930s. I was struck by the social contrast. That was the first image that made me think, could I do that? I used to hitchhike into Bristol on Saturdays and try and make point pictures of street life. So by the time I left school and got myself to college in London (London College of Printing (LCP) now the London College of Communication) and living in a squat I was looking at life seriously probably for very nearly the first time. The squat was in St Johns Wood, North London, one evening I was going through a copy of Creative Camera magazine and came across the photograph by Thurston Hopkins of a couple in black tie and evening dress, lying back on a sofa, at a Hampstead society party. I was amazed; Hampstead was only a stones throw away from where I was living. I was fascinated and knew then, that I wanted to see how other sections of society lived and document those ways of life.

You’ve cited influences like Cartier-Bresson and Winogrand. How did their decisive-moment ethos or street photography style inform your method, especially when capturing unscripted moments at British customs

The first Easter (1968) college holiday project was to “go and take some photographs.” I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do. But every lunch hour, I was out photographing life on the street at the Elephant and Castle, learning how to make street photographs; I was trying to make point pictures or I was in the college library looking through magazines, working out why the photographs used as illustration worked and why they were being used. In one magazine I discovered a photograph of the Britannia Coconut Dancers, in Bacup Lancashire. The annual custom took place at Easter. I decided that was what I would go and photograph for the Easter holiday project. While there I discovered that there were many other annual English rituals that no one was seriously documenting, and I thought it would be a good idea if I could start to make a project about these traditional events.

In 1968 my mother bought me a copy for my 19^th birthday of Photographs by Cartier Bresson, a small volume published by Thames and Hudson. I spent a lot of time studying how he put his photographs together. Meanwhile David Hurn the Magnum photographer was a part time lecturer at the LCP and he had a job share with Bill Jay the photographic historian, teacher and publisher. I used to go around to David’s flat in Queensway an awful lot. Several times a week - and just hang out. David used to show me his contact sheets and talk to me about composition. I was introduced to Joseph Kodelka, and the Magnum photographer Ian Berry. Colour stock photography was really beginning to take off, and while chatting one day Ian emphasised the importance of retaining copyright, as that could be part of a pension when I was older. I got to know Billy Jay, who via Creative Camera and then Album magazine introduced me to the work of Robert Frank and Garry Winogrand.

In the summer holidays of 1969 I travelled to America on a student programme and had a job as a janitor in Princeton, New Jersey. I was going to be away for a couple of months, and once my job was over I would travel around the US on a 99$ Greyhound bus travel pass and photograph my own little mini Robert Frank -The Americans.

On 9th July, I went to the Museum of Modern Art and saw for the first time photographs as art hanging on a gallery wall. It was an epiphany and I knew I wanted to do that too. I decided that when I got home to England I would document traditional British country customs in black and white, rather than colour as I had been doing up to that point. That afternoon I bought a copy of the Americans by Robert Frank and two months later on my way home, having travelled around the US, I visited MOMA again. This time I bought a copy of The Animals by Garry Winogrand.

Once back in London, I was soon to meet Bert Hardy and some time later Thurston Hopkins. I had managed to get it into my mind that I wanted to bring together the street style imagery of Winogrand, Burk Uzzle and Bruce Davidson with the more classical composition of Cartier Bresson and the way Bert Hardy and Thurston Hopkins made picture story magazine photographs that I had seen in Picture Post. Those threads influenced the way I made photography whether it was of country customs or news feature stories. David Hurn sent me off to meet John Hillelson of the John Hillelson Agency, who was also the Magnum rep in London. John talked to me about point pictures and selling. And some time later Martine Franck phoned and invited me to lunch in Paris to meet Henri Cartier Bresson in their apartment overlooking the Jardin des Tuileries. He was interested in my documentation of annual British country customs.

You’ve said you aim to find images that “sum up what British society is feeling.” How do you distill such abstract collective emotions into a single frame, and has that process evolved over your career?

My aim from very early stage was to make images that told a story in just one single frame. Well, anyhow try. And of course there are a lot of single images. I was just very interested in how other people lived, worked, played and what they wore, their style. I liked looking at people. I thought if I was able to get close enough unobserved and observe I would be able to capture some part of their life. I don’t think 55 years later my thinking has changed very much. The same stuff interests me now as it did in the late 1960s, I see imagery in the same way I think.

On British Customs and Folklore

Your work in Once a Year preserves obscure traditions like the Burryman or Haxey Hood. What drew you to these eccentric rituals over more mainstream aspects of British culture, and how did you decide which events merited your lens?

Since meeting Ian Berry and John Hillelson I have always been very focused on retaining the copyright, licencing my images, making money, not by taking other peoples photographs i.e. art directors contrived images, but by making my own, real life imagery. That’s why I at first started shooting country customs in colour; I thought I would be able to sell those photographs as stock images to the magazines, that I had spent so much time looking at in the college library. Also of course, The Burry Man and Haxey Hood Game and all the other country events I covered, many of which were published in Once a Year, are annual. Two bites of the cherry, well perhaps very many more. I have always tried to find subjects that other photographers are not photographing. I like researching and I loved finding stuff that was obscure and seemingly undocumented.

Many customs you photographed in the 1970s have either faded or transformed into tourist spectacles. How do you reconcile documenting something authentic with the risk of it becoming performative once it’s observed?

Well there is nothing I could do about how those traditional customs I photographed in the 1970s that have faded or changed and become performative. Many now attract large crowds and numerous photographers. That’s the Internet and the twenty first century. And has really nothing to do with the work I first made. I believed that the visual record I was making at that time would be lasting. Indeed some events in my book Once a Year have now completely disappeared and my documentation may pretty much be the only visual record of their existence.

Did you ever feel like an outsider peering into these tight-knit community events, and how did you negotiate access or trust with participants who might’ve been wary of a photographer?

I have always felt I was an outsider I am partially deaf and with a camera in hand, I don’t always hear. (Some times that has been to my advantage.) I have always peered in. Of course it doesn’t always look like that, as I shoot with a 50mm or 35mm focal length lens.

In the 1970s sorting out contact details and times of many of these annual events was hugely time consuming. I would write letters and make numerous phone calls. For example to local post offices or police stations, anyone who might be able to give me information about an event, a name, a lead, a date and time. And when I turned up; I looked confident, I am polite, quiet and insist that they don’t look into camera, and that they should ignore me. They usually did.

On Technique & Craft 

You’ve worked extensively in both black-and-white and colour. How do you decide which medium best serves a story like the muted grit of 1970s miners versus the vibrancy of 1980s Thatcher-era excess, and has your preference shifted over time?

I have made a living as an editorial photographer since I left college in 1970. To start with I shot B/W it was what worked; I could make prints cheaply and distribute to my agents in Paris and New York. From the late 1970s to the mid 1990s I was a very busy editorial magazine photographer. If the client wanted colour then it’s colour. If B/W then that’s what they got. When there was no commission, I used to shoot both. But perhaps more colour especially in the 1980s as I always thought about magazine stock sales. Also of course my agents wanted colour. By the turn of the century I started to shoot my own projects again notably Hunting with Hounds and decided on medium format B/W. Everyone else was shooting hunting in colour and 35mm.

Your images often balance multiple figures in a frame without overt staging. What’s your process for composing these scenes on the fly, and how do you anticipate the “unfolding drama” you’ve described?

I worked almost exclusively with a 35mm and 50mm focal length lens. I look for foreground balance and a sense of formality, and the background for context. I worked at about 12 feet or and 8 feet away from the subject. I observe, I see and try to anticipate what is going to happened and what the background will be when a person/s move from A to B. I look for my decisive moment.

You’ve avoided the term ‘conflict photographer’ despite covering tense events like the unrest in Northern Ireland. How did you adapt your documentary approach between volatile assignments and quieter cultural ones, and did one inform the other?

I don’t think I adapted my documentary approach at all. I used to work a lot for Newsweek and Now! Magazine, and shoot for my agents, Viva in Paris and Woodfin Camp and Associates in New York. They wanted background imagery, not tomorrows headline newspaper photograph. I used exactly the same mental approach to ‘soft’ feature and ‘hard’ background news stories.

On Social Commentary and Class

Your photos frequently juxtapose Britain’s class divides, Epsom Derby picnics versus East End poverty. Was this a deliberate critique of social inequality, or simply a reflection of what you saw, and how did you navigate potential bias?

Almost everything can be traced back to the Jimmy Sime and Thurston Hopkins photographs I first saw as a teenager. I have certainly looked for social contrast but mainly I have been interested in point pictures, photographs that have relevant content and that may lead to a visual statement about British society.

In the Thatcher years, you captured both hedonistic excess and stark deprivation. Looking back, how do you think your work from that era holds up as a historical record of a polarised society?

In 2021 Dewi Lewis Publishing published my edit from those two decades in Colour Works the 1980s and 90s about 140 photographs that covered the Thatcher years. During this period I had worked extensively as a magazine news feature photographer. Covering real life stories. I wanted those images to have a new life and audience; I hoped they would say something about that period. I selected, juxtaposed and sequenced the images to tell in part the story of those two decades. It’s a historical visual record of that polarised society, and I believe it stands up well - and will, as a body of work continue to do so.

You’ve photographed the famous and the anonymous alike. Did you approach portraiture differently when the subject’s status carried cultural weight, and how did you ensure authenticity in those moments?

I have never been ‘star’ struck. Everyone is seen in exactly the same way and approached in the same manner. I wanted to make real authentic portraits and try and get beneath the façade that ‘stars’ feel they have to project. 

On Archiving and Legacy

With an archive of over 20,000 images, how do you curate what’s worth preserving or revisiting, and what challenges have you faced digitizing such a vast body of work from an analogue era?

Curating My British Archive has been an enormous task. I stopped working for clients on a regular basis pretty much twenty years ago. (They stopped phoning.) I did some teaching that helped both financially and mentally. Fortunately I had kept all my negatives and contact sheets with basic captions in number order, they are all dated; day, month and year. After initially jumping from one story to another, I decided to start at the first contact sheet and just slowly worked through them all, choosing images I liked and had marked up in the original edit. Of course I found others I had missed. The colour was much the same process, but filed by subject matter. In the same way that John Hillelson had shown me, his Magnum files were kept. Sometimes I was working 10 hrs days, five or six days a week digitalizing and doing the postproduction, it’s not much fun. Those were tough times. But I knew the value of my archive, and as I have expanded it in terms of availability its all been worth while. And will be into the future.

You’ve self-published books like Hunting with Hounds. What’s your view on the tension between artistic control in self-publishing versus the reach of traditional publishers, and how has that shaped your output?

I have self-published two book, On The Road Again, which comprises of four Street Photography road trips across the USA. First in 1969 and then 1971. I put the work away for thirty years and returned again in 1999 and 2001. All the work was B/W and all shot on a Leica M3 with a 50mm lens. On the last two trips I wrote a diary, my conversations with Americans I met but didn’t photograph while I wondered around America. Hunting with Hounds developed with the realization that when the hunting ban came in, it would affect the entire group that hunted with hounds - dogs. Not just fox hunting that became the news, the headline story. I spent time with rabbit, rat, hare, fox, mink and stag hunts. I wanted to document a way of life that would disappear. Mainstream publishers have their markets. But the market place has and is changing all the time. If possible I like control of how my work is seen and I enjoy selling and making sales. And anyway, stuff I want to photograph; to document is not mainstream, so there is only a very very small general public audience. Mainstream publishers need prints runs of very many thousands. Different values apply to successful self-publishing, the print runs are tiny, and the profit for me is not just based on cash in the bank.

Are there contemporary photographers you see carrying the torch of documenting British culture in a way that resonates with your own mission, or do you feel that tradition has waned in the digital age?

A few no doubt. I think today it’s very difficult to cover the broad range of subjects I documented over the last 50 plus years. My understanding is that commissions are not so common and holding onto the copyright on a commissioned story may be much harder now. When I was shooting for myself, I felt I could break even financially quite quickly and be in profit shortly afterwards, today’s stock image prices can be miniscule. To make a profit from the sort of subjects I covered must be very difficult. The digital world had certainly changed everything and will no doubt keep doing so.

On the Evolution of Photography.

You started when photography was a slower, more deliberate craft. How do you think the immediacy of digital tools and social media has altered the role of the documentary photographer in capturing culture?

Visually everything is available these days, we are overloaded with imagery. Good, bad, indifferent and extremely indifferent. Digital capture has allowed everyone to make an acceptable image, just by pressing a button. I don’t suppose that many ‘Instagrammers’ know what focus is, depth of field, what a 60th of a second or a 250th means. Everyone thinks and very many do, call themselves a photographer. But mostly they have no vision, no point of view and don’t know what they are seeing, if indeed they are. They just look and snap. It’s like throwing paint at a canvas and claiming to be an artist and that the work is interesting. The role of the documentary photographer is still there, and the best will have their own vision, point of view, know what they want to say and understand how to edit.

Your early work was for magazine supplements, a golden age of print. How did that editorial rhythm, weekly deadlines, broad audiences etc influence your storytelling compared to today’s fragmented media landscape?

I worked for weekly news feature magazines and the colour supplements that accompanied and were free with the weekend newspapers. It worked well from a freelance perspective having two or three regular clients and another two or three occasional clients. With pictures editor you could chat too and move with when they changed jobs is a far cry from today’s fragmentation I imagine. I shot to a brief roughly; those briefs were often just dreamed up in an editorial meeting. Perhaps a ‘thousand miles away’ from reality. As a reportage magazine photographer you are at the sharp end, you have to make it work and deliver. I edited tightly and I always considered that the work was visually mine. I owned it, both mentally and physically. I retained the copyright. They paid the bills, they liked my interpretation, and they reemployed me. From the late 1970s through to the early 1990s I was very busy shooting between two to four commissions a week. Colour labs in those days were often open 24/7, 365 days of the year. So typically I would return to London, go straight to the lab, and get clip tests done on a couple of rolls of film. Go home and two hours later return to check the clip tests. Make any changes- rarely and get the film processed. Go back home and then two hours later collect the processed film. I would edit and write the captions that night or the following morning. Then drive into ‘Fleet Street’ and deliver the story. This was before there were couriers! Then drive off to the next assignment or home to do a picture search from my archive, that a picture researcher had requested. On Sundays I checked the colour supplements for the page space I had achieved. I was paid a commission fee, based against the page rate. So in other words the fee was often £200.00 per day plus all expenses and the page rate was £200.00 per page. If that day’s shoot made three pages, I would bill a further £400.00. On Thursday evening at around 9 pm my agent Woody Camp in New York, often called to see if I could get myself on a flight to somewhere the following morning to cover a news feather story or just a portrait for Newsweek or a similar US based weekly. If I could, and the deadline was tight I would then have to ship the raw film back to New York by hand to arrive by Monday morning to be processed for an editorial meeting on Monday afternoon. This sometimes involved turning up at an airport wherever I was, finding a passenger flying to New York and ask them if they would hand carry my film for me. They would be met in New York. Crazy when you think about it today. And crazy then, fortunately I didn’t have to do that often. It was very, very stressful. I don’t think I thought very much about the audience, my aim was to try and produce work, that worked visually for me and the picture editor and I guess mostly it did. The editorial rhythm was like syncopated jazz, when the music is mellow, flows and under control, you know where it’s going. Then suddenly that rhythm becomes jagged, off beat and unpredictable before is becomes mellow and ordered once again.

You’ve expressed frustration with photographers flocking to obvious subjects like crowds of tourists. What advice would you give young photographers today about finding untapped stories in a hyper-documented world?

Just don’t follow the crowd. Follow your own beliefs and interests and your own style. Look and then see, but understand what you are seeing and know why. 

Looking back, is there a single image or project you feel encapsulates your vision of Britain most perfectly, and why does it stand out amidst decades of work?

There is no single image, but there are bodies of work that encapsulates my vision of Britain. Once a Year, Some Traditional British Customs first published in the 1970s and again in 2016, and more recently An Annual Affair: Some Traditional British Calendar Customs, published in 2024. Hunting With Hounds, My British Archive: The Way We Were 1968-1985 and Colour Works the 1980s and 90s bring my career as a British documentary photographer to a conclusion.

Finally, have you got anything coming up we can look forward to seeing?

Yes, at Photo London May 16th at 4pm, I will be signing copies of my book An Annual Affair, Some Traditional British Calendar Customs on the Dewi Lewis Publishing stand number, (Publisher area stand P3.) I will be there at 4pm. Other books of mine too. I would be delighted to meet up with some Epukers.

 

See more work by Homer Sykes