A Few oF My FAvourIte thINgs
siMOn hArsent
This series takes a peak at the other things that are important in a professional photographer’s life besides camera gear. In this issue internationally-awarded advertising photographer Simon Harsent is in the spotlight. Once again, Bruce Usher was behind the camera and the audio recorder.
What do professional photographers get up to when they’re not behind the camera? We take a look at the personal side of a photographer’s life as expressed through some of things they value most. In this issue internationally-awarded advertising photographer – and self-confessed football fanatic – Simon Harsent talks about family relationships, prints, books, and a very special letter.
“The picture on the easel is of my beloved Chelsea’s home ground, Stamford Bridge. I took it two days after Chelsea won the Champions League final on Saturday 19 May 2012. The ghosts were laid to rest that day and that’s possibly why I photographed it from West Brompton Cemetery.
“I started to follow Chelsea from when I was five. It’s part of an on- going project called The Beautiful Game… a book I’m currently putting together with the hope of getting it published. The red covered dummy copy is on the stand to my left. I did the pagination with the help of Rachel
Knepfer, a photo editor who was previously with Rolling Stone magazine in New York. What was great was that her relationship was purely with the photographs, not football. It was very difficult for me – being such a football fanatic – to have a different way to edit the pictures. Whereas Rachel came along and put them in pairs, which seemed to work really well. I think the interest will be from an international publisher. This project crosses the boundary between photography as an art form and people who are just interested in photographic books.
“Gary ‘Boatsy’ Clark – in the stainless steel frame – is one of ten football hooligans I photographed for the series called GBH – Great Britain’s Hooligans. I contacted and photographed people who were actively involved in football hooliganism in England in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The epidemic of hooliganism was rife in England and there were a lot of other issues going on at the same time, Thatcher’s government and
the suppression of the working class. I was always interested in where are they now? What are they doing and how have they turned their lives around? The Special Group Gallery –where I held the GBH exhibition in Sydney – was the former Ray Hughes Gallery and, funnily enough, my first studio in Sydney was on the first floor of that building in the late 1980s, early 1990s. They’re printed on large sheets of stainless steel because I wanted people to get distance from them to give them an intimidation factor.
“The portrait on the right-hand side is of Irish poet Seamus Heaney, who received the 1995 Nobel Prize in Literature. I photographed him in Dublin at Easter 2013 and sent him some prints. I may have been the last photographer to photograph him in a formal setting. I’m holding my most prized possession, a thank-you letter that I received from Seamus when I arrived back at my apartment in Brooklyn, New York. It’s a wonderful letter, telling me how much he loved the work and appreciated the effort and everything that he knew needed to go into that moment to make it successful. And how he thought I had succeeded. For me, a letter like that is worth far more than any accolade or award I’ve won. Seamus died virtually four months after the photo shoot. I met him through my father at the Griffin Poetry Prize in Canada. My father was receiving a prize for a volume of poetry and Seamus was receiving The Life Time Achievement Award. He was a wonderful human being, and it was a very important portrait for me to take, but I don’t know why. I think poetry and photography are very well connected in how they describe the abstract nature of things. Poetry and photography are different ways to communicate something.
“I collect black and white prints. However, most are still in storage over in America, but they include Sebastião Selgado’s Blind Women, Mali, a Willy Ronis print from the 1940s, a 4x4-inch print of John Lennon and Paul McCartney by David Bailey, and a Richard Avedon – Renée, The New Look of Dior, Place de la Concorde, Paris, August 1947. I have a Lewis Morley platinum print of Christine Keeler, a portrait of Mike Tyson by Albert Watson, and a Sunbaker by Max Dupain. There’s quite a few by Horst P Horst who I like because there’s so much depth and so much passion in his work, even his commissioned work. There wasn’t really a divide between art photographers and commercial photographers back then, whereas now the divide seems to be getting bigger and bigger. If you shoot commercial work, you’re not accepted as an art photographer, which I think is completely ridiculous! Everyone needs a day job and my day job has always been doing commercial photography, but my passion has always been to shoot for myself doing my own projects. Inviting people into Simon’s World.
“Seated next to me is my wife, Lida. We recently got married in the Czech Republic, and she is one of the main reasons I’ve moved my base back to Sydney. She works out of the studio and is getting into sculpture. We went to London’s Tate Modern in 2017 and saw the Giacometti exhibition. Walking out, Lida looked at me in a remorseful and guilty way and said, ‘I think I like sculpture more than painting and photography’. But I was over the moon. That moment when you find something that draws you in; it’s such a powerful moment. When we got back from London, she jumped into the sculpting and started off by mimicking Giacometti and now she is finding her own way with clay. We sit in the studio and work together in our silent spaces, communal comfort. At an early age, I used to go into my father’s study when he was writing, I was allowed to be there, but couldn’t talk to him. So I learned at an early age how to be in a room with someone and be present. Dad was originally a bookseller, but then got into publishing. Next he wrote crime novels under a pseudonym, and then moved into writing television shows. Now he’s a Professor of Creative Writing at Roehampton University in London.
“Declan, my son, is the other person in this picture, and he also works out of the studio. He was my best man at my recent wedding. If I talk about Declan too much I get teary; we have such an incredible relationship, and he’s such a talented musician. He composes music for television commercials and writes a lot of his own music. The guitar he’s holding is one I bought for myself sometime in 1991 or ’92 when I had a studio in Annandale near all the guitar shops on Parramatta Road. I’ve always loved Rickenbacker guitars. I’m a massive fan of The Jam, and Paul Weller used to play one. But I played so badly it was unbelievable, so when Declan became quite accomplished, I gave him the Rickenbacker.
“That’s a book of Mark Rothko paintings in the pile beneath the Seamus portrait. I remember going to see the Seagram paintings as a very young kid with my father, and they moved me. Rothko’s work always has. I think it’s his division of colour and space. They were originally commissioned for the Four Seasons restaurant in New York, but halfway through the commission, he became so disgusted with the idea that these paintings would be hanging in a restaurant and no one would look at them, he sent the cheque back. Eventually, the paintings ended up at the Tate. I used Rothko as a reference when I did the Icebergs project. I spent a lot of time looking at his paintings, especially his black and grey stuff when I was shooting the icebergs. “Also in the pile is a copy of my father’s
latest volume of poetry, titled Salt. My relationship with my father is as intense as my relationship with my son. It’s more than the normal father-and-son relationship. He’s a wonderful human being. If I felt I was half the inspiration to Declan that he has been to me, then I think I’ve done a pretty good job.
“Night Walk and Invisible City by American photographer Ken Schles are two important photography books for me. He lived in Alphabet City in the Lower East S) ide of New York City in the 1980s when there was a lot of drugs and crime. Ken was a student who documented the nightlife in grainy B&W. His work was so different to anything I’d seen at the time, and so different to what I do. You can pick it up and every time you will see something different. I met Ken when he came to my Brooklyn studio to sit for a portrait. “In a similar vein, I love Stephen
Dupont’s work because it’s also so alien to me. I entered a portrait of him in the National Photographic Portrait Prize this year, but it took a few years to organise. I first asked him if he’d do it about four or five years ago.”
“I think poetry and photography are very well connected in how they describe the abstract nature things. Poetry and photography are different ways to communicate something.”