In March, I spent a weekend in Sussex, meeting and talking with other photographers such as Valda Bailey (who has been a previous featured photographer) and David Higgs (who had an exhibition which was reviewed in a previous issue).
Finn Hopson owns the Brighton Photography Gallery and has recently run the exhibition 'Southbound', which I mentioned in the previous issue.
I caught up with Finn early one Sunday morning to hear more about his journey from TV editing into landscape photography and his aspirations for his new gallery.
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Tim Parkin: In terms of background how did you get into photography to here?
Finn Hopson: Not really a path, a meander, no planned route! I worked in TV for years and I ended up as an editor doing lots of work in front of PCs, working with people who were shooting on stilled cameras. I started at children’s BBC, then channel 4, which went onto other things and then corporate stuff. Which was soul destroyingly awful.
It did let me to live down here and I took work home. Along side of all of this, I was hanging out with a lot of people who were working with cameras, light crews and DAPs. They all loved to chat about everything they did. If you chat to a guy who has done it for 50 years, he’ll tell you everything about this lens, why that lens, why this choice is good and why that’s bad. I worked with a director who always had a camera with him.
Finn Hopson
So I ended up interested in doing that kind of thing. Wasn’t a clear route…..was in the early 2000’s. Which was when I moved to London and started to do TV stuff. So I developed an interest in photography, which I probably had all along and found an outlet for it.
I took pictures all the time, but stayed as an editor as it was the bread and butter of it. What was interesting when you got the 5D Mark II coming out you could shoot video on a stills camera. I got myself in there quickly, as I could do that. I found myself dealing with the same technology all the time. I was editing footage from 5D Mark II, I was talking to people who were using them.
TP: So those cameras penetrated the video / TV market quite quickly?
FH: As soon as they came out people were saying ‘we can do B camera on this’, but technically not allowed to use them.
TP: They were not BBC approved?
FH: No it wasn’t, but I slotted shots into an edit. As long as they didn’t know and you didn’t tell the engineering geeks, it was fine. It made very little difference. Picking up work along the way which I did alongside the editing. ‘oh you’ve got a camera, well we need some stills on set’. So I was doing a lot of behind the scenes documentaries for comedies. Like the IT crowd, I went along and did a couple of days behind the scenes and did still as well. So photography developed as a side thing which made a bit of money.
TP: Was this for the web things which went along side?
FH: Web stuff, DVDs all those kinds of content which surrounds a programme. No longer good enough to make a good programme, you have to have extra content. Not necessarily good content, but it’s fun to make. What it leads to is an extra interest, which turned into an extra revenue stream. This was all in London as by 2009 I was living in Brighton and travelling up to London.
TP: Not much landscape in London? A few parks?
FH: No there isn’t! Landscape comes from spending spare time in the hills. Since I was a kid, I’ve spent my spare time riding my bike on the downs and walked in the hills around Brighton. That was the thing I missed about London and the TV work. Idea was to come back and live by the beach.
Begin to see a way to make money but not necessarily but not taking the photos I wanted to take, but a way of justifying anything from pieces of kit to developing my interest.
Finn Hopson
TP: You haven’t been doing landscapes for too long then?
FH: It’s hard to define. ‘when did I take my first serious shot?’, "when was my first proper one". Aren't these questions I'm sure we all ask? I really don’t know, I think it was 2010, something like that. It developed like most people in Brighton, as I was drawn to the beach.
You should see it on a low tide, when the sunset is nice. Hundreds of people lined up on the beach. There are a lot of people who are enthusiastic about photography in Brighton. So that’s the easiest thing to muck around it. I’ve lived here and been coming here for ever.
I was then on the Downs and found myself taking pictures whilst I was cycling. I was taking photos again and seeing these places again. Thinking “I like that tree!”. So I started carrying a camera and shooting an occasional shot. Then thinking, 'but not right now', it needs the right light or a different season and an obsession sets in! I think it as 2010 when I found myself for the first time deliberately setting alarms and trying to find that field in that light.
TP: That’s when you get a morning for the first time and you get really addicted to it!
FH: All familiar places but seen in a way that I’ve never seen. Particularly the mornings which were a revelation. I spent a lot of time cycling in the evenings and we did rides, which went on into the night. We’d be up there in the middle of the night with lights. I’d see these beautiful evenings and I’d things would be happening, but it was the mornings.
Finn Hopson
TP: I prefer mornings, there’s a stillness to it, a crispness. Feels like you’ve got it to yourself.
FH: A good chance to explore slowly as well. That’s the thing that I really liked, whizzing through places and finding ones. If it’s so down hill you don’t really look. It’s a hindsight thing, when I was a kid I always had a camera. I went off and did a degree in psychology which was not in anyway, well perhaps subconsciously! None of those things seemed like conscious decision but there was obviously something visual drawing me along. I finished my psychology degree and I thought ‘that was awful!’ and I had a friend who worked at the BBC and managed to get me a job as a runner. Then it was like ‘I’m back in visual land!’
TP: Where did you do your degree?
FH: In Durham, chosen for it’s scenic qualities. I chose all my choices on where’s the best cycling, so it was all north. Peaks, Lakes, Northumberland, somewhere hilly and as far from Brighton. Not because I didn’t like Brighton but because if you’re going to live somewhere else then why not somewhere completely different. Beautiful city, I remember visiting thinking ‘This is great!”
TP: Where you in the Harry Potter Hall?
FH: No, they were too posh for me. I was up on the hill, Collingwood college. A glorious place. I enjoyed it and the couple of times I nipped over to The Lakes, I thought ‘Wow!’. I could jump in a car and be in The Lakes the same day, a couple of hours.
Finn Hopson
TP: When I first came down to London, I thought the whole of London was available to me. But then I realised that I could get from Leeds to Liverpool quicker than I could from one side of London to the other.
FH: Used to take me the same time to get across London, as it did from the edge of London to Brighton. You can get to Croydon in half an hour and then four hours slog to Northumberland. I like London to visit, I just don’t want to live in the middle of it. I loved it when I started commuting back up there and arrived in the train in the middle.
TP: I certainly think London is a conglomeration of small communities
FH: Agreed, It was fun living there for a while, I’m just not going back.
TP: You were doing professional photography?
FH: Yes I was. But it was weird – at what point do you become a professional or not? By that point I was making some money from it and as a freelance editor I was being paid. I was on a daily or hourly rate and it was good money.
It turned out if someone wanted me to come along and do some photography, then I could charge slightly more. They were paying me for my time, so I thought I could turn this boring yet functional photography that pays me well enough to keep me interested in photography then that would be great.
But my heart was never in it. I did a project where I had to do head shots of bankers in HSBC. They needed every member of a particular team photographed and there were over 1,000 of them. They were spread all over the globe so we had to get them when they were in London and they could come and see me. I was setting up 60 headshots a day in a row. I got quick at changing lighting set ups, that was good. But no benefit apart from quickly going ‘lights down and do this’. They didn’t want them on the same background, so every single person had to be casually posed. At the coffee shop, at the window….after 20 you think there’s nothing left, it’s all grey. I don’t think I was doing that particularly well. If anyone looked at it back then, they wouldn’t think I was pushing any boundaries.
The good thing was saying yes to it, then quickly working out if I could do it ok, it wouldn’t be ground breaking, but I learnt very fast how to deal with all that side of things.
TP: What some people don’t think about if people don’t run their own business is that sometimes you say ‘yes!’ before you know how to do something.
FH: Absolutely, that’s why I’ve ended up here. I was freelance already and I was doing a bit of editing and photography work. I was finding a way to get out of editing. I had a room in a flat in Kent Town with another photographer and product designer.
I was looking for another revenue stream around photography. I was doing an open house for a festival last May, and got this email from the council saying we are inviting proposals from anybody who’s interested in running a business around the arches in Brighton. It’s taken 2 years to do the work, and everyone has had their eye it – what’s going to happen there. In the 60’s they were beach huts and they became derelict in the 80’s. For my whole life there’s been nothing here. They’ve been rebuilt, ripped out the arches and rebuilt them as concrete boxes and plugged beautiful brickwork on the front, with amazing doors.
So I pitched for this, having never done a pitch! I never had written a business plan - why this business will work. So I’ve done things before but it was hit and miss, and all over the place . I wrote a business plan on the back of some photo prints, that I thought they’d enjoy. They had a beautifully bound photo book with business information on the back to look through. Which I hope impressed them.
There were a lot of people applied, 20 or 30 people got shortlisted and they went through that again and selected several to be interviewed in Dragon’s Den style. I walked in and they had my business plan open on the numbers page and they started throwing questions at me. I took some prints along to that and thought ‘If I can convince them with the photography, then this is something that hasn’t been done in Brighton or sold like this.'
It’s something new and exciting, and they had a strict brief as they didn’t want food or drink retailers. It couldn’t be a big chain shop, it had to be a local independent creative business of some sort. So I felt that I ticked the boxes, adding to the community, definitely a sense of community.
The other thing on my side was this calendar that my friend did, which looks like a regular calendar, which sells a lot. My friend Nigel Swallow has been doing this for several years. Started one year with some photos of his and flogged them by the West Pier.
He did it slightly better the second year and tweaked it. It’s about the spirit of Brighton not the quirkiness of the photos. I’ve had bits of my work in there, which was what convinced me that I could make money from selling prints as well as being paid as a photographer was when Nigel put one of my pictures in the calendar and I saw one of my prints selling in the busiest shopping centres in town.
TP: So these are sold as prints as well?
HF: Only the obvious ones. So I took that along to the meeting as well and said I’ll be selling this as well and will be running it as well. Which in business terms sorts out Christmas as we’ll sell many here. I’ll be curating it, it’s a collection. I get endless emails saying ‘I love the calendar and I’ve taken some pictures’.
I’ve worked on it for the past 3 or 4 years and you end up with a hundreds of pictures and you print them out small and stick them to a magnetic board and thin what works. Some people’s end up in there, it’s not about who’s work it is it’s about will it hit the right vibe for people, so it’ll sell.
TP: So it’s about varied places?
FH: Yes it is, this is very different and separate to landscape photography, it has a different feel. I like it, it’s pretty but it’s useful to have a different thing. It’s a different job to do.
TP: So when did Brighton Photography Gallery open?
FH: At the end of July. 29th July or 1st August 2014
TP: Was that pretty soon after signed the lease?
FH: Yes, if I realised how busy I’d be, I’d have opened sooner! But I took it on myself. The lighting rig was in, it was all concrete breeze block. I added the lights but the rig was already there. The walls were bear, the ceiling was done, I just painted the walls grey and white, then added more lights, including these old flash heads.
TP: I like the low hanging bulbs as well
FH: The idea of the layout was to have something really flexible if it needed to be. So far it has worked really well. I didn’t know if in the winter whether it would be no-one’s buying anything so I’ll do workshops, so it could be a place to do something else, so things could be moved out the way for a few days. So people could come around.
TP: So you have had a few exhibitions?
FH: I have had three so far. I opened with my stuff on the walls as that was the simplest the most straight forward approach to take, so I could control this and what was available. So I didn’t have to think too much about if this would work or not with other people’s work and then disappoint them massively. I felt it was such a huge responsibility.
I wanted to spend my time and money on things to sell and not sell them or let people see them as I didn’t know how busy it would be. So for the first couple of months I had a mixture of my own stuff and that was really interesting. When you put your own work on show you see people react in ways you didn’t really anticipate.
People say some funny things. People read stuff into photos that you just didn’t think about or considered. It was interesting from a commercial point of view – will this sell. I spent every penny I had getting everything, getting the lease, getting it up and running. From day one it had to start making money.
TP: So you sleep here now then?
FH: I should! That would be cheaper. We moved house in October as I’ve got two small kids and then started this. My youngest was less than a year old when I started this. It felt like a gamble but it felt like it would work. Having seen the calendar work and seen that model selling prints in different sizes works too.
TP: Was the calendar selling out of a gallery somewhere else?
FH: It was selling in a gallery in town for years until 2009 when they closed the gallery and also in the shopping centre in the middle of town. Get a stall in there every Christmas and it goes nuts selling a lot of calendars! It’s a good solid business he’s worked on for 15 years and didn’t want to do any more but didn’t want to let it die as it has a loyal customer base. People come searching for it!
I worked on it for years and my mum use to send me a copy and say ‘come home!’ I know Nigel that has run it and I am running it now. So that’s a serendipitous thing nothing planned at all.
TP: That’s the reinforcement that you needed?
FH: Yes it was the thing that got me over the down time in the winter.
TP: What was it like in winter?
FH: Winter was pretty good. We had a winter of sunny weekends, so we did really well.
The first exhibition we had was my friend Alex Bamford who works in advertising by day and by night he goes out in his pyjamas and moonlight photography which started a few years back. He goes out every full moon and does very long exposure, really nice stuff. So everyone around here started doing moonlight stuff, so he thought for a laugh, I’ll do mine in stripy pajamas and bought himself some and did a selfie. A self portrait of him standing - he did a series call sleep walking which fun and the pictures are beautiful.
TP: Around Brighton?
FH: Yes around Brighton, but also takes it off around the world as he travels for work. So he’s got some in South Africa etc. So whenever there’s a full moon and it’s clear, a couple of days later images appear of him doing something. Always with a slightly comedic style.
TP: Did they go down well? It must be scary putting someone else's work up for a bit?
FH: Which was why I started with someone I knew – I know Alex really well and get on with him well and it was his house I had the open house in. The reason we did the exhibition was because it was the Brighton Photo Fringe, so something happens everywhere and I thought I can’t have a photography gallery in Brighton and not do something. Was a bit of a scramble to get it ready and opened. As soon as it was open it was planning the next one.
It went really well and a good mix and structured it around the idea of the morning after the night before. So mine were early mornings and he was the night before. We put the times on all the pictures and realised that the pair of use have a weird tendency to go out and stand quietly somewhere when there’s no one else around. He gets some funny looks standing around.
TP: He must get funny looks standing in his pyjamas!
FH: He did one on the beach and they called the Chaplin service as they thought he was going to kill himself. He did some on the under cliff walk along the beach and is often a way from the camera standing there in his pyjamas and suddenly someone walks past – you’re alright? Great little series.
Then up to Christmas I did very loosely a calendar exhibition, I picked a few pictures which I thought would be popular at Christmas and it worked really well.
TP: Were you pleased with your curation?
FH: I don’t know! Not yet, I’ve got to do one properly yet from scratch.
TP: Then this exhibition - Southbound?
FH: This feels like the first proper taking of people’s work who aren’t my friends from Brighton. I promised that at least once year I’d do something to scratch the landscape itch. Partly because when I wanted to get more serious about landscape photography.
Valda Bailey
I wanted there to be places like this in Brighton and I was astonished that there wasn’t anywhere. No where to put up work, you could put up work in coffee shops and cafes. People always responded to the Downs as a thing as a place. There was nowhere showing it or selling it.
TP: It’s the same countrywide
FH: It’s bizarre, as a nation we love landscape photography and you look at Landscape Photographer of the year and it get national coverage. People who aren’t into it really respond to it. I was surprised in the south east that the Downs have become a national park and no one is really doing much of this. There are some – David Higgs exhibition was wonderful.
TP: That’s going to be featured soon in the magazine!
FH: Things like that happen and they are fantastic but they are one offs and short lived, in out the way places.
TP: Getting to hear about them is difficult too. I look for them and miss some
FH: I only heard about David Higgs because of Valda Bailey but I didn’t get over because of here.
TP: So how did you choose the people for the exhibition?
FH: These guys? Power of Twitter! Terry, David and Valda I’ve got to know a little bit, not so much David though, over the past year or two. On the opening night we realised that we knew each other through social media. I have then since met others – I saw a London cab in the lay-by early one morning and I thought that must be Terry, and it was. I got in touch with him on Twitter later and asked was that you near such and such. The image he took that morning is exhibited here.
Terry Gibbons
I met up with him later and stayed in touch. He’s going a project which is local to me. I really liked what he was doing – his single mindedness. Going to a tree and saying I’m going to make this work, and make it work better than anyone else and to see the changes. Fact that he comes so far to do one thing. If I was going to a destination to do one thing, I’d find it hard to go to the same place and do nothing else.
TP: It’s a challenge isn’t it not to wander around and to look for other pictures?
FH: Especially when it doesn’t work for whatever different reason – I’m sure there’s plenty of mornings when he’s arrived and hung out for a few hours and the light hasn’t done what he wanted it to do. He’s not tied to mornings but for whatever reason it hasn’t worked. For a long time, the farmer put a load of hay bails behind the tree.
So he had 3 months when he didn’t do it. But he’s made friends with the farmer since then. He’s taken him a print. I liked what he was doing. During the time we’ve taken to do this Charlie Waite has taken her under his wing and started to push her work out there. She’s on the up and up and is doing such great work. I came across it a while ago and thought wow, and everytime she came up with something new I thought, I like that. What is it, it’s lovely.
David Baker
David I remember seeing his tree stuff two years ago and thinking that’s right up my street, but the New Forest fields are a little different to any of the woods I get to play in. Reminded me of places such as Surrey Hills and then we started doing Sea Fever, and I really admired I’m doing trees in the morning and it’s going to be misty and beautiful and then the sea. You see one of his images and you think it’s another one of his, as you can pick out his style. Every thing was long exposure and nothing-ness.
TP: Michael Leven and Turner-ish?
FH: Yeah, great, but everyone was doing that to an extent and then David started doing his. I love his telephoto tumbling of waves and the fact that he had a much more powerful feel to the waves. I also wanted to have some of my own work but I didn’t want to have some vague idea that this was about the south east.
It would be easy to go out to the community at large and say bring me your lovely work and we’ll do a landscape exhibition in Brighton, but it felt like, what I really realised over the first few months that what was successful in here needed to have something that people can connect with from over this general part of the world.
TP: Regional does sound right
FH: Particularly on the beach. It’s a strange market here, you can get anyone just wandering in off the beach. Lots of men in speedos in the summer strutting their stuff in flipflops. Just an odd sight, someone looking at the pictures in a little pair of speedos. You just think ‘hmm wow, unusual looking customer’. Almost worth taking a photo just because it was so unusual. Then you are more serious into landscape and they make a real effort to come here. It’s an odd thing that you get people who are dedicated and are making the effort to bother and take time to talk to me. Then you get people who just wander in and see something they like. Certainly an odd mix, but the theme that runs through all of that is that the regional connection is there. Part of the reason I have the maps up, it makes the pictures. People realise they’ve walked along there or that it’s close to a nice pub.
Terry Gibbons
So many of these places I’ve discovered are near places which are rights of way. I do tend to walk off through a field or through somewhere that’s different.
The Downs are a really accessible landscape, that’s the lovely thing about it.
TP: David Higgs was talking about this yesterday about the fact that there’s car parking and stopping points everywhere as well. In the north you think that’s a good view and you want to pull over and then 2 miles later you might be able to find a gap in the lay-by.
FH: The Downs are a really accessible landscape, that’s the lovely thing about it. It’s part of the reason I didn’t want to hide my locations. I didn’t want to take photos of The Downs and then say ‘I’m not telling you where that is!’. Because any old monkey could find them really if they bothered looking. Obviously there’s lighting condition and framing but actually I like the idea the people can go and look at these places for real or actually I like the idea the people can go and look at these places for real recognise them. Then they get a connection to the image.
TP: Do a large proportion of your sales come from people who are buying things of the area?
FH: Very definitely. This exhibition has been successful so far people have really responded so far. It’s a privilege to have these people’s work on the walls. Terry hasn’t exhibited before and has had the chance to do it, which is brilliant. He’s done it brilliantly.
Valda has done some incredible framing and is a chance to see the prints.
Valda Bailey
TP: The prints are lovely!
FH: They are aren’t they? The mounting is beautiful. David clearly from the beginning was going to do some epically sizes prints, which we’ll see how they go. The idea was never to have a gallery that was just about my own work up and going ‘hey’. You can’t sustain a business on saying he come and see the same stuff again you saw 6 months ago.
TP: You need to give them a reason to come back. Locals won’t come back if it’s the same, they’ll say ‘oh been there’.
FH: I seem to have people who’ve been down for the summer, who don’t live in Brighton but they come in every few months when they visit their friends in Brighton. They’ve enjoyed the fact that stuff has change. If you think of this as a shop, you wouldn’t have a successful shop with stock that’s proven and then bin it all. Then go here’s new stuff that we’ve never tried before and hope that you carry on as well as you did before. So there’s two sides to choosing these three for this to say – I know that their work is fantastic and I hope that everyone else shares that too.
TP: I think that’s what people are saying?
FH: We’ve sold some of everyones. Valda’s sold - she’s had to put her prices up in the past few weeks.
TP: Charlie suggested that
FH: I think that’s really good. Would to love do that more. It’s inspirational to see as people will pay if they love the work. I’ve had more conversations with other photographers particularly in this area around pricing, than any other topic. Usually people come in and say you’re too cheap but from day one this had to sell. Having some cash flow.
TP: It’s alright saying higher prices but things have to sell. There is a break point price.
FH: It’s working out what that is here and what adds value in someone’s eyes
David Baker
TP: Are you doing limited editions?
FH: I’m not no. Valda is, I’ve tried it in the past but didn’t find it swaded people one way or another. It’s closing off your own product and also if I had it along side other work which was on her website which wasn’t limited and it had sold, people would be looking at the prices thinking that was that price and that’s the same pretty much but it’s X amount more.
TP: In terms of framing, you don’t have space to mount and frame?
FH: If there was a down side it would be that I’d love a bigger space. When I first opened I thought this is too big, I can’t manage this, but no this is too small. When I had a small office which was private, if I was doing lots of prints or framing, I could spread out and I could be very messy always messy.
TP: Sign of a creative mind I hear!
FH: [chuckling] Yes I guess. This space is like an open restaurant, people see me working and even if I’m producing a print then it’s nothing to do with them, then people feel that it’s stuff that I’ve created at least. They love seeing me working and talking to me rather than a pristine art gallery. I had to spend productive time in here even if there’s no customers, I’ve learned to be more neater than I have been before. Things have places. I have a lot of stuff around now I’ve got prints on the walls so they need new homes!
TP: Where do you get your prints done?
FH: Oskar Doughty framer in Hove. Spectrum in Hove – he was their framer and they stopped framing in house and he set up on his own. He’s done everything for anyone from Spectrum to some astonishingly high end work. He’s quick, good and reliable.
You have to find a look which is neutral and consistent for a space like this. So framing one of these images in your own home you’d want to choose something more bespoke.
TP: It’s like when people decorate houses for selling, it’s all white and cream. Then it’s neutral so it pleases everybody. It doesn’t offend, rather than it doesn’t please.
FH: I have had to get better at things like that, I do like the idea of selling someone a print that will be hung on a wall. I’ve got loads of prints I’ve never got framed. I go to a framer twice a week now and slowly managing to get through them. The down side is bespoke frames and getting them right. Other downside are smaller prints and these can be framed on the spot in ready made frames. These are bought in bulk and mounted to fit standard sizes, so people can buy one of those prints and I can then say there are a million frames in that size.
Finn Hopson
TP: Which keeps the cost way down?
FH: Yes, or I can put it in a frame for you right now. If they are buying gifts, they particularly want to give them something that’s framed. It’s expensive and scary for people who’ve never done it before. People don’t want to spend the money, they’ll spend hundreds on a print and then baulk at a frame and take it away in a cheap Ikea frame which doesn’t really do it any justice.
A couple came in here yesterday but they bought in a frame and said we want a print to fit this, which to me seemed really backwards way of doing it – a 80x60 frame, the guy at the framers said I might be able to help. That’s not one of my standard sizes, I had to say but have a look, and the nice thing about having the printer was that I could say, you like a specific image, I’ll do a custom print.
I cropped it and mounted it in their custom frame, within the hour and they walked away with what they wanted.
TP: In many ways, not doing framing is probably a boom – the amount of galleries that become framing companies because that’s what they end up doing and then they have a whole factory.
FH: I can see how easy it is going down that route. I do need a few frame corner sections so I can show – so if someone say have you got that but in white I can show them. But that’s why I work with Oscar – I work to what I know, which isn’t framing. I don’t want to be a framer, I’d love to know how to do it, but never going to have the space to do it properly.
One of my oldest friends just texted me and said I’m a shop keeper now which is his version of this, which is right really. But it’s a mixture.
It’s not carving a niche, it’s whittling a niche, it’s working out over time what I like.
TP: It’s David Ward who calls himself a tour leader
FH: Does he!
TP: Yes, a tour guide
FH: Tour guide, shop keeper!
TP: Does it trap you? You’ve created this and you’ve got to manage it?
FH: There’s a question. Imagine the nicest trap you could get trapped in……that’s how it feels. It’s not a trap, it’s the best step I ever did and accidentally say yes to ever. It’s what I said to Steve Watkin, Outdoor Photographer when he asked, it’s not carving a niche, it’s whittling a niche, it’s working out over time what I like. With the goal of spending time on a hill watching things unfold.
TP: Do you get much time for that?
FH: In theory, what works on paper is that a lot of the photography that I do is in the mornings especially on Brighton beach. It doesn’t wake up till later, if I don’t open till 11am, I don’t miss a thing. There are dog walkers but they come in and chat but don’t buy a thing. In the summer I open earlier because it’s a nicer morning vibe down here. In the winter I open 11-5, which is more than enough to do what you need to do.
TP: 5pm you can get out at this time of year!
FH: I can get out in the evening –see that tree on the right that was last week an was at the end of a day and was a trip up from here. I found a tree I liked.
Finn Hopson
TP: Do you use this space as a way of trying out your pictures? Do you take a picture, print it out and put it on the wall and wait for the response?
FH: Yes I do! But it’s a commitment as they have to get framed, so I only do the ones which I think might work. I’ve done it though as the print is the final product of going out and making an image. Whether or not it works comes from looking at images throughout the day.
TP: Do you think that into your photography now?
FH: Probably, I found myself out at a very low tide you could walk to the end of the pier, spectacularly low. Found myself trying a sunset, do I want to take this, or am I taking it because it could work and sell in the gallery. My heart wasn’t in it. But if I go up to any of the hills, even if it’s not something that sells and frequently it’s not I will find a wiggly bit of field or a tree stump that catches my eye, and I’ll happily spend 3 hours walking around it in circles.
TP: Are you printing all your own prints before you got this place?
FH: I was printing some, I had that classic, it’s going to cost me money so I thought carefully before I pressed print. For the 2 years before this I had some work on display in the city somewhere. Some of it was rotating from café to gallery to gallery, but there are small arts venues. If I was doing an open house I’d do a small set of prints for those. Tweaking each time I was printing.
TP: That’s what people say and as soon as you start printing your own work you become more critical of it. Your post processing gets better. I think it feeds into how you take pictures as well.
FH: I hope the good stuff goes through, I think about when I’m looking through the camera and thinking how will this feel at the end as a print.
TP: Are you taking less pictures because of that? Will this process work, then there’s no point in taking the photo.
FH: No, I still think I’d rather take it than dismiss it I think. But I am taking fewer pictures because I’m being more picky, not so approving. I go back in Lightroom and think what was I doing this time last year and I can see that there’s less photos. It was a lot more splurged, is that better?
TP: It’s good but you still need to experiment and try things out
FH: Exactly, it’s really nice to see things from camera frame to print. But also from composing it and no-one else may ever see it but I felt that it was a well worth creative exercise
TP: What are you printing on?
FH: I’m printing on Photospeed Cotton – which I really like. I occasionally try different paper and buy a box of this and a box of that. Then think all these are nice.
TP: Valda was saying that yesterday there’s too many papers to print on
FH: For a while I was matching Spectrum, I was doing my smaller prints and Spectrum were doing the larger ones. So I used the same stuff, so it’s consistent. Then I opened this place and I thought I’d try loads, but I’ve tried three! I really like this stuff, so I’m going to stick with it.
TP: The guys from Photospeed are nice as well aren’t they?
FH: They are really friendly and quick!
TP: Are they sponsoring you yet?
FH: Yes, they’ve given us free paper. I feel that I probably be more business like about it. They’ve promoted us on social media too. I’m delighted to tell people about the paper, as I genuinely think it’s nice paper. I went on a Jack Lowe workshop with Doug Chinnery in September after I’d opened this place and taking on other people’s work and I was interested in seeing how he did it.
TP: You can try it out on your own stuff, but with it’s someone else’s work you’re printing it’s different?
FH: I wanted to see how someone does it as a living and who I admire and are demanding.
TP: Did it reassure you that you were on the right track?
FH: I’m not at the station or something! Really useful to see someone else and what came across was the subtly of changes. It was about knowing how your printer would respond to a particular paper and looking at the image and getting more of an eye.
He’s got years of experience looking at a print and going just change that and it’ll print better. He printed some of Paul Kenny’s stuff for us and seeing the version Paul had supplied and the version Jack had done. Incredibly subtle changes and Jack’s print version was better and did justice to the work.
TP: Jack interprets them though, he doesn’t just print a duplicate he’s given?
FH: No he’s not, but that’s what I liked a rearrangement of the work almost. That’s good to see and how free he felt to do that as well. Being able to say to the photographer well done for taking this and let me do my work. I’m not anything close to that but interesting to see that process. To work out how to work with other people a little bit.
TP: Interesting how it happens with music as when you record an album and you get the engineer, the mixer, the producer and they finish everything and then they give it a master and they just tweak balances and cues slightly and he finishes. Then the band listen to it and think, that’s great. Then they give it to someone else and they tweak it again.
FH: When editing you’d lock your edit and then the pictures done, the voice is done, everything is there and you send it to a dubber and a grade and it comes out a lot shiner. Same as a product but it just works better. Give it to someone who know’s their stuff.
TP: You must have done some grading anyway which has feedback into your photography?
FH: Yes I did! It was purely from a geek side of things, things about colour balancing and all that techie side was incredibly similar. Using tools for grading which were incredibly similar such as Lightroom. Things like if you had the red camera stuff coming along producing loads of RAW files. The frustrating thing when I first started grading video was like grading the worst jpg ever and you didn’t know how to do anything.
I once had a girl who’d shot an interview with the wrong white balance on the camera totally. Everything in the shot was orange! She really wanted me to make the person look normal and I just couldn’t. We spent a whole day just trying to convince her this was orange. Definitely the video stuff fed in, I don’t know if it was a positive thing though? I was working in an environment where for corporate stuff where you’d be at an interview with a man who does corporate banking, and it’s very dry and dull. Banking is the only example I can think of in the corporate world.
They would have someone in their creative team at the bank who’d then say make it look like TopGear to make it cooler! So you’d go mental on the plugins and filters and I found it too much for my tastes. The matter was very dry and not too interesting. Which made the images look strange, not through choice but through client requests.
The nicest thing about photography and having this place is that I am now in charge and there’s no client in charge at the other end saying make it like this!
TP: Your prints retain subtlety
FH: I hope so, so thank you. It’s a really useful process looking at your own work at home, day in, day out and you become more critical. I try and have other people’s things as well to inspire me and enjoy. Which feedback into the next time you go and shoot something. I try and solve problems in the shooting and making of the image rather than later. I look back 5 years and I really was 'save it in post processing'.
I try and solve problems in the shooting and making of the image rather than later..
TP: What’s next then?
FH: Next is completely different as I’m moving away from landscapes for a month. I would have landscape stuff on the walls all the time, which is my personal passion and preference. But I don’t think I would survive just on landscape for a few months it can work but it’s a good opportunity.
TP: Almost sponsoring landscape with the other work?
FH: Yes it feels like that. I’ve been pleasantly surprised how well it’s worked and sold. Which is great. It felt more of a gamble as I felt more anxious putting up this work than taking down everything of Brighton. I’ve kept the two biggest sellers of Brighton up! I love the work more but I can’t do it full time.
Perhaps the next one is more of a risk – it’s a guy called Roger Bamber who’s a photo journalist who worked on Fleet Street for 50 years and is a friend of mine who lives up the road. He has an astonishing archive of beautiful photography and we’re giving him the whole gallery for the month of May for the festival.
What a privilege to go through someone’s work and curate the exhibition. Between us we are doing that, but he gave me a short list of 200 to go through. I went through a long list of 400 as well and we picked 37 I think. I was hoping for more from him – this is my work and this is what I’m proud of. But he wanted an outsider to look and go this is what I think is your best work.
TP: It’s got to work in this space as well?
FH: It will be interesting to see how well it works commercially. I’ve had some of his work in here before and I know that it’s good stuff and it works. Some of it is Brighton and has a connection as he’s lived here forever and a lot of it are from other parts of the world. As he’s traveled over the world and he’s done some interesting things. He jokes and says he’s a pap, but he’s not in any sense. He’d get a commission and go and tell a story with a single image of a particular thing.
Often with a performing arts base, so image when he worked for the Guardian they were often the centre pictures or the eye witness kind of things for the magazine. It’s very considered creative stuff as there’s a full story behind each one. He can chat for England and we’ve got these great long paragraphs which go with each image that tell the story of each image. Great one of Thatcher in early 80s I think when she was on a farm with lots of newspaper was following her and she went to do the photo op and put her hand in a hay bail and chucked some hay in the air or something. She put her hand in and then realise it was manure and pulled out manure – so the photo is of her with her hands covered in s***! Brilliant image. Very different to this.
So it’s about us as a shop, chucking out stuff that’s worked for the past 2 months. Valda’s work is slightly different where she’s exhibiting, but Terry for instance it makes sense to leave some prints with me and I’ll have a Terry Gibbons rack of his work which can carry on and he can give me some occasionally.
TP: Are you planning ahead?
FH: Roger Bamber next then the summer I’m going back to my landscapes again I think for the reason that I get more money for my own work. It’s where the money is for the year, summer and Christmas. The rest of the time is something else. Then in September I’m going back to closer to Roger Bamber and I’m doing George Douglas who is a project I worked on last year. He is a picture post photographer and lived opposite Roger for years and didn’t talk about his work, then died, left his work on to Roger and then he went in and found a filing cabinet full of his negatives jumbled up. It was a treasure trove of incredible stuff – there’s one of Audrey Hepburn in the 50’s just before she hit the big time – he spent a day her.
TP: Pictures must be amazing!
FH: He did loads of well known people and stories and documentary stuff. Loads of the Hollywood people from the 50’s and 60’s, loads of British TV stars and the best thing which we did last year I found but haven’t used was a draw this big which had 8x10 transparencies of cover shots of women for a woman’s magazine in the 60s. Hundreds literally. Really beautiful.
We did an open house last year – and we got some interest from the National Portrait gallery for one of the Hepburn ones for one of their exhibitions this summer. Great to see that from seeing the negative to seeing it up on the wall in the Portrait gallery.
TP: You have a some building work outside as well?
FH: We’re vaguely working towards is the eye 360 opening which will be the tallest moveable observation tower in the world. Moveable – up and down ‘The flying donut they call it!” Might sway but they have a clever dampening system. Highest thing in Brighton – 580ft is the tower and people go up to 500ish. How far from here – 20 metres! Fully in the shadow.
What you will have is people book a time slot and will be arriving for their time slot. During the summer people on the beach people walk along the building site and think there’s nothing there but we still do ok! So in a year and a half when it’s done I’ll have had chance to fine tune what I’m doing and get it right. What works for pricing and such, and ensure that I’ve got good quality work that people haven’t seen before or find anywhere else in the city it feels like it should be a good thing.
TP: Do you get footfall?
FH: Yes, but that’s where it becomes interesting. One Saturday in December when it was Small Business Saturday I put some publicity out, had music playing outside, we had discounts available along the row. People were queuing out the door and the only problem I had was that I couldn’t keep up with the demand for stuff, which is a good problem to have, particularly if people are buying that big sized print. Some if someone came in and takes a print from the rack and says I want this print but in that size – then I could print them out, but I couldn’t mount them and reframe them quick enough for people to buy another, so there were gaps everywhere.
So I could see gaps everywhere but felt good as I knew we’d had a good trading day and could pay the rent. It’s physically there’s a limit on how much stuff I can sell in a day, so if it gets super busy, I may need to get a store room. I don’t want to hold stock as it’s then pressure to sell, but I’ll cross that bridge when I get to it.
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