Jocelyn Bain Hogg
Jocelyn Bain Hogg began his career as a unit photographer on movie sets after studying Documentary Photography at Newport Art College. He shot publicity for the BBC,...
Read more ›A British Entertainment
on 16 April 2012
Early on the camera became my passport. A metal box that
covers one's face grants both a psychological invisibility and a
reason to be anywhere.
It all started at boarding school. Girls. When I was sixteen, there was a major breakthrough at Lancing: girls joined the school. By then the photography bug had bitten and there was no looking back. I photographed the then phenomenon of girls at a boy's boarding school, which was subsequently published in Harpers and Queen. Persona non grata at Lancing, I followed my passion, turned down a place at Oxford and learned to be a documentary photographer at Newport College of Art.
The first thing anyone said to me as I trod the streets, trying to find a subject to photograph for the college 'a person at work' project, was 'eff off, you're a have and I'm a have-not'.
With each new journey with the camera, I learned the essential humanistic tenets of photojournalism. Don't judge your subject, be interested in them; allow them to 'speak' through the pictures; and never put yourself or your bias first. I felt like Trevor Howard in those black and white movies. His was always the character who went native in a slouch hat while the other tie-wearing Brits were swigging gin in the expat bars of Old Empire.
Since those formative experiences, I have witnessed so much with my passport to other worlds. And it is always a new experience. I have photographed in Palestine and Paris, spent years documenting the British criminal underworld, captured the celebrity world from Hollywood to Cannes, followed the difficulties faced by today's youth in Britain, and shot rock'n'roll and hedonism in Ibiza.
When Thomas Pink asked me to photograph the 21st century season, I was circumspect. At a photography festival, a wag described me as not a war photographer, but a class war photographer. I had not been back into the world I was brought up in since leaving Lancing almost thirty years ago. But as with any journey, the return home is always welcome. Despite being born in London, I have never felt English, always British, which I think has been an advantage for this project: I look at this island from a broader perspective.
From the first day shooting at the Cheltenham Gold Cup, I was back to my own Britishness and my atavistic roots, bred of Scots, Welsh and New Zealand fighting stock. The welcome I received at the Highland games in Glenisla, when a stranger invited me to the private village ceilidh, and the generosity and kindness of the Thaxted Morris Men, who invited me to stay overnight so I could photograph the morning service, will stay with me always. Other moments included chatting to a Russian supermodel at a polo match about raising funding for Tsunami victims; bumping into an old girlfriend at the Tatler party and reminiscing enjoyably (in our pyjamas) about the vacuous celebrity party where we'd been thrown together years before; and a horse-borne hunting lady who, seeing my Olympus film cameras, offered me her old OM2 because she wanted it to have a good home. For the most part I remained in my metaphorical slouch hat, unobserved but observing, seeking to record the intimacy of a class reacting and inter-reacting with one another at these particularly British events.
If I have any mission statement as a photographer, it is to open a window into our so-called 'first world' society. From whatever class or background, whether villains or castle dwellers, we are all the same under the skin. And essentially, the photographs should tell the story.
The openness and joyous abandonment of this year's work documenting the great British party has been a rare pleasure. On the one hand I photographed the privileged classes blithely carrying on in Cameron's Britain while the rest of the country faces crisis; but looking deeper, I found that same sense of atavism that I had experienced myself. A sense of something unchanged and celebrated, not ignoring the societal issues at home, but embracing a past, present and future that is an essential part of being British.
In photographing A British Entertainment, I rediscovered a constancy of spirit and remembered my own sense of pride and belonging. And I got to go back to school and wish my old headmaster a happy 80th birthday.
To order the book go to:
www.thomaspink.com
It all started at boarding school. Girls. When I was sixteen, there was a major breakthrough at Lancing: girls joined the school. By then the photography bug had bitten and there was no looking back. I photographed the then phenomenon of girls at a boy's boarding school, which was subsequently published in Harpers and Queen. Persona non grata at Lancing, I followed my passion, turned down a place at Oxford and learned to be a documentary photographer at Newport College of Art.
The first thing anyone said to me as I trod the streets, trying to find a subject to photograph for the college 'a person at work' project, was 'eff off, you're a have and I'm a have-not'.
With each new journey with the camera, I learned the essential humanistic tenets of photojournalism. Don't judge your subject, be interested in them; allow them to 'speak' through the pictures; and never put yourself or your bias first. I felt like Trevor Howard in those black and white movies. His was always the character who went native in a slouch hat while the other tie-wearing Brits were swigging gin in the expat bars of Old Empire.
Since those formative experiences, I have witnessed so much with my passport to other worlds. And it is always a new experience. I have photographed in Palestine and Paris, spent years documenting the British criminal underworld, captured the celebrity world from Hollywood to Cannes, followed the difficulties faced by today's youth in Britain, and shot rock'n'roll and hedonism in Ibiza.
When Thomas Pink asked me to photograph the 21st century season, I was circumspect. At a photography festival, a wag described me as not a war photographer, but a class war photographer. I had not been back into the world I was brought up in since leaving Lancing almost thirty years ago. But as with any journey, the return home is always welcome. Despite being born in London, I have never felt English, always British, which I think has been an advantage for this project: I look at this island from a broader perspective.
From the first day shooting at the Cheltenham Gold Cup, I was back to my own Britishness and my atavistic roots, bred of Scots, Welsh and New Zealand fighting stock. The welcome I received at the Highland games in Glenisla, when a stranger invited me to the private village ceilidh, and the generosity and kindness of the Thaxted Morris Men, who invited me to stay overnight so I could photograph the morning service, will stay with me always. Other moments included chatting to a Russian supermodel at a polo match about raising funding for Tsunami victims; bumping into an old girlfriend at the Tatler party and reminiscing enjoyably (in our pyjamas) about the vacuous celebrity party where we'd been thrown together years before; and a horse-borne hunting lady who, seeing my Olympus film cameras, offered me her old OM2 because she wanted it to have a good home. For the most part I remained in my metaphorical slouch hat, unobserved but observing, seeking to record the intimacy of a class reacting and inter-reacting with one another at these particularly British events.
If I have any mission statement as a photographer, it is to open a window into our so-called 'first world' society. From whatever class or background, whether villains or castle dwellers, we are all the same under the skin. And essentially, the photographs should tell the story.
The openness and joyous abandonment of this year's work documenting the great British party has been a rare pleasure. On the one hand I photographed the privileged classes blithely carrying on in Cameron's Britain while the rest of the country faces crisis; but looking deeper, I found that same sense of atavism that I had experienced myself. A sense of something unchanged and celebrated, not ignoring the societal issues at home, but embracing a past, present and future that is an essential part of being British.
In photographing A British Entertainment, I rediscovered a constancy of spirit and remembered my own sense of pride and belonging. And I got to go back to school and wish my old headmaster a happy 80th birthday.
To order the book go to:
www.thomaspink.com