Philip Grocott’s Blog

Public Response

Prior to starting the photographs of the Burton Labour Party, I had wanted to have some sort of photographic public response to the General Election. To do this I simply wanted to take full body portraits of Burton Upon Trent’s public in their environment. I envisaged having these portraits dispersed amongst the photos of the local political campaign that I would also make.

I started out by just walking around the streets of Burton Upon Trent and asking people if I could take their photo. Along with this, I would ask them how they intended to vote and other questions related to their thoughts about politics. I made up a model release form and figured out what I was going to say to introduce myself and explain my intentions. I also made sure that I always carried my student ID and business cards as reassurance to the people I approached.

The process of walking about and randomly stopping people proved to be fairly fruitless. After asking hundreds of people I’d only gotten three people to agree to having their photo taken. I’d expected a few refusals, having your photo taken and being asked about your politics can be too intrusive for some. Most were pleasant in their refusals, but occasionally some were not. One guy began shouting aggressively at me after I’d asked him. This all proved to be incredibly disheartening. Repeated rejection was hard to take. At this time I was still negotiating with the political candidates to see if they would allow me to do a photo-documentary of them. I even entertained the idea of dropping the whole thing and producing something else. Thankfully, I didn’t.

I decided to set up a Facebook group and announce what I was doing through my blog and Twitter. Although over fifty people joined the Facebook group it only gained me a further three portraits.

By now I was fully into photographing the Burton Labour Party and it was becoming increasingly apparent that I wasn’t going to be able spend much more time trying to get portraits. Reluctantly, I decided to drop this aspect of my assignment and purely focus on my photo-documentary.

Out of the portraits I had taken, I was only really happy with two of them. Perhaps I hadn’t really conceived this part of my assignment very well. Portraiture is probably not something I’ll return to frequently, although it does remain popular amongst photographers. I was also disappointed by the amount of refusals I got when wanting to photograph people on the streets of Burton. I felt that this was to be an important election and with Burton being a marginal seat, it was an important part of the town’s history. On another level I wished I had no need to ask the public for their permission and about their politics, as many would’ve made for good street photography.

Still I gave it a shot. You just don’t know until you try.   

A Vote for Ruth

A Vote for Ruth is my four week photo-documentary of Ruth Smeeth the prospective Labour candidate for Burton Upon Trent, during the General Election of 2010. My aim was to give a behind the scenes look at the General Election campaign on a local scale.

Thirty of the images have been selected to be shown at Free Range, the graduate exhibition show in London. There will also be a solo exhibition more locally at Burton Upon Trent library. I’m also in the process of self publishing the work as a book.

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The Campaign Trail Starts

So it's been a week since the date of the General Election has been announced. With this, the photography for my Final Project of this academic year has gotten under way. In the run up to and including the Election, I'll be following Ruth Smeeth, the Labour candidate for Burton Upon Trent, hoping to provide a behind the scenes photo-documentary.

This project started sometime before the General Election was announced though. The Final Project is a self initiated piece of work and I already had a few ideas of what I wanted to do. My self imposed prerequisites for this project were to do something with people and to make sure it was something I could really get my teeth into. I soon settled on doing something related to the General Election. To keep it achievable, I decided to focus it purely on Burton Upon Trent, a town local to me. From there, I wrote a proposal and began a long period of emailing the candidates, at the time those that had announced they would be standing were from the Labour Party, the Conservatives and the BNP. Choosing to ask the BNP was something that I deliberated over for sometime, as I have absolutely no love for them whatsoever. However, this project isn't about my politics and it would provide another aspect to the photos.

Regardless, the BNP didn't bother to reply to me. However, Andrew Grittiths of the Conservatives did take time to reply to me. Sadly though, after discussing with his campaign team, he declined to take part in the project. Thankfully, Ruth Smeeth from the Labour Party met with me to discuss the project further and agreed to take part. I started photographing the week before the Election announcement. Ever since it's been an ever increasing whirlwind of activity, including conferences, meetings, visits and campaigning. Ruth, her campaign manager, Steve and the rest of the Burton Labour Party team have been very accommodating and supportive of my project. It certainly helps to have built up a trust between us.

I decided to shoot this project digitally. Mostly this makes things a lot easier for me. As I'll be spending a lot of time with the Burton Labour Party, it enables me to work from home afterwards to select images and see how it's going. I'm gravitating towards using prime lenses, typically a 50mm and a 24mm. I prefer the look and feel of the resulting images and it means I sometimes have to get in close to what's going on. I don't want the images to be purely a documentary, they've got to be aesthetically interesting too. This is sometimes a struggle and I have to remain alert at all times and work hard at seeing potential shots. The other issue I have is ensuring the photographs have a distinguishable style, something I can call my own. But I'm sure this is something every photographer faces.