Into the groove
Portrait photographer Dean Belcher speaks to Amy Davies about his eyecatching project ‘33rpm’
Dean Belcher has had a long and successful career as a portrait and commercial photographer based in London. But it was his personal project, aptly named 33rpm, that caught AP’s eye while visiting 2018’s Photo North festival in Harrogate.
While at the show, a portable studio had been set up to capture similar portraits to those that you see here, with subjects clutching their first vinyl purchase – or indeed anything that they deemed to be an important possession. In between shoots, AP spoke to Belcher to discover the motivations behind the project, which seems to have resonated in some way with almost all who have seen it. It all started, as these things often do, with an off-the-cuff observation, made while in a record shop.
‘ There were some young lads, about 13 years old, looking through records, getting excited about it,’ he recalls. ‘I just thought – that reminds me of when we used to do that every Saturday, making that decision about what you’re going to buy. I started to think about how I – and lots of people – now consume music. You can download anything, but you know, in those days you had to make a decision and stick by it. Sometimes you could be hours in the shop and it would become like a meeting place. I thought it would be interesting to see what other people thought about that whole idea – including the emotion of it all.
When I listen to music, it takes me off to another place.’
33 people: 33 stories
The time between the initial spark of an idea and the completed project was very brief. Finding the participants was surprisingly easy – and what would eventually give rise to the name of the project. Utilising social media, Belcher was able to gather together enough sitters in a single weekend. ‘I thought about it on Thursday, tweeted it on Friday, had everybody by Monday, and shot it the weekend after. That was it, really,’ he explains. By sheer coincidence, from his call-out, exactly 33 people turned up to be photographed, a serendipitous number which mirrors the playing speed of an LP record. After that, the name 33rpm could be the only choice.
A mixture of individuals ended up in the final project, all 33 with completely different stories and experiences. The youngest participant was just 13, a girl who had recently bought her first – and only – record (‘Her Dad bought a record player a couple of weeks before, so she’d gone out and bought Pulp’s album, which is 20 years old or something – you kind of think, wow that’s an interesting choice,’ says Belcher), while the oldest was a 94-year-old grandmother.
Minimal set-up and direction
Shot in Belcher’s London studio, as you can probably tell,
‘I said: bring the record that you consciously went out and thought “This is what I’m about now”’
all were shot with exactly the same set-up. ‘I’d done that kind of thing a few times for other projects, and I’d often wonder if that’s a bit boring – visually. But, I think the hardest thing to do sometimes is to strip everything away and just keep it really simple – let the subject do the talking. In effect. I think this one works better than the ones I’ve done before, actually,’ he says. ‘It’s just a very simple, quite wide, background plus a couple of lights. These were shot on a Hasselblad, but I’m not a very technical photographer. I know how to use them, but I don’t rely on technical knowledge – I don’t get het up about cameras and things like that. When they break, I buy another one.’
Direction was also kept to a minimum, with inspiration instead coming from the records themselves. ‘What I did was play the record in full, sometimes once, sometimes twice. We’d talk and I’d ask them what the record meant to them and how it made them feel. There was one girl who was really upset because it reminded her of the film that the song comes from – and it’s quite a sad film. Some other people were quite contemplative – others were really embarrassed. For some of them it brought back memories, while others were sad – for one guy it reminded him of his childhood and it wasn’t a very happy one. It was all sorts of things and I thought that was quite nice because that’s how I think when I listen to music. Lots of times you just listen to it for the moment, but often you go: “Oh god, do you remember when that was number one?”’
A proud owner
It was also crucial that people brought along the first record that they went out and actively bought themselves – not something that they had borrowed from their parents or an older sibling. ‘I said: don’t bring the stuff that you pinched off your mum and dad – or the album they bought you when you were five. Bring the one that you consciously went out and thought: “That’s what I’m about now.” It’s the way lots of people are shaped. A lot of people go: “That band really made me want to do this”. It might not be music, necessarily, it could be something else,’ Belcher explains.
Naturally, a number of interesting stories would reveal themselves during the course of the shoots, some of which are almost unbelievable. ‘ This guy, I’d never met him before in my life. I lived in a tower block in Walthamstow when I was a kid and as it turns out, I lived on the 14th floor and he lived on the 12th floor. He’s exactly the same age as me and we even went to the same school, but we never met until the day of the shoot.’
Belcher’s face lights up when asked about his favourite portrait from the series, but it’s tinged with poignancy. ‘I do like the one of Nana,’ he says. ‘She brought Vera Lynn because it reminded her of her husband when he was in the war. She had such an interesting life – I warmed to her and she’s always the one I go to when I’m sort of advertising the project.
Sadly, she’s not alive any more, she died in 2018, but they used that picture at her funeral – her family really liked it.’
This is a project that feels nostalgic for plenty of reasons. Of course, vinyl records – despite a recent resurgence – don’t have the same ubiquity as they once did. In fact, participants didn’t necessarily have to bring vinyl. The question posed in that initial tweet was actually: ‘What was the first piece of music you bought?’ While digital streams were obviously out of the question, it could have easily been CDs or cassettes, but it’s hard to deny that there is something more visually striking about vinyl records. On top of that, while playing the records, participants would talk about their families, about the time that they bought the record, where they bought it, what it reminds them of and whether they’d played it since.
A successful personal project
As well as preferring little to no direction, Belcher didn’t show any of his participants the photos during the shoot unless they specifically asked to see them. ‘ That’s the one thing about digital I absolutely hate,’ he says, with visible agitation. ‘Not many people like what they look like. Sometimes you’ll take a frame, and they’ll come away [from the set-up] and I have to say – “We haven’t finished yet”, and then we have to start again. The whole process of pictures is very much a gradual thing for me. You kind of go up the hill, get there and there’s a peak, and you try and let that peak go on for as long as you can, and then it’s a sort of a gradual “just in case” down the hill – you might get something else.’
On the whole, the reaction to 33rpm has been overwhelmingly positive. ‘Everybody loves it,’ Belcher enthuses. ‘ They all go, oh I wish I’d known about it, I’d have come with mine.” I kind of feel like it’s done it’s course though – there’s other things I could do, like people have suggested first gig T-shirts and things like that. I’m not sure I want to go down the road of “my first whatever”, though.’
Although much of his time is taken up with paid-for commercial shoots, Belcher says it’s more important than ever for photographers to undertake personal projects – if for no other reason than the extra opportunities it might open up.
‘If you want to make a living, it’s not easy any more – it’s never been “easy”, but it’s quite difficult now. People are much more interested in personal projects now than they’ve ever been – it’s always been the case. But I think if you’re doing something quite interesting, it kind of separates you from other people. They see you on social media, that’s where people find you now – they define you by your Instagram feed.’
Belcher is keen to get the project ‘out there’ even further than it already has been. It has been featured in newspapers and magazines, and formed part of the display at Photo North, but his ideal would be for the project to be turned into a book and a full exhibition. ‘Hopefully, somebody will take it up – you never know.’
For now, if you’d like to see the rest of the fantastic portraits from 33rpm – as well as some of his other personal work – head to the projects section of his website.