A bullet for the bridegroom: Barry Lewis’s best photograph
For my generation, the People’s Socialist Republic of Albania was a place of mystery, both exotic and dangerous. The first time I visited was in 1990. I went with a group of journalists and a couple of archaeologists – we were pretending the visit was an “archaeological tour”. There was no translator and we had maybe four words of Albanian between us. Needless to say, the writer I was with had a pretty hopeless time trying to interview people, but as the only photographer in the group, I had a fantastic trip.
We were there for a few weeks, touring communes and cooperative farms as well a tractor factory where no tractors were being made. We got as far as Shkodër, on the edge of the Accursed mountains, but were only able to make a very limited trip to the north, which was what really intrigued me. Exploring that mountain region only became a possibility 18 months later, following the collapse of the communist regime.
This time I went for the Sunday Times, along with writer Ian Thomson. I’d kept in contact with someone in Tirana who let me know when the snows had melted enough for us to get into the mountains. Having spent some time in Romania shortly after the 1989 revolution, I knew times of change can be a great opportunity to visit places that have been isolated – things are chaotic, but suddenly there’s a chance to really see what’s going on.
Enver Hoxha [the dictator who ruled Albania for more than four decades until 1985] had never really controlled the north of the country and village life had resisted his influence. Up there, people followed the Kanun, a set of codes based on honour and blood, dating from medieval times. The villages often felt almost medieval too, with horses and carts and astonishing outfits. I had shot in black and white during the previous visit and decided to do so again. I’d brought colour film, but black and white gave the images a timeless quality.
We had a great driver, Lida Kita, who also acted as our guard and an empathetic and well respected translator. It was down to her that we got invited to a wedding in the village of Bogë, where this picture was taken. The mountain villages tended to be either Muslim or Catholic – there was no edge between them, but nor was there any intermarrying. This was a Muslim wedding, an arranged marriage, I think, but there was still a lot of drinking. The celebrations went on for a week – we only lasted a day.
The picture is quite painterly – it has a chiaroscuro effect, with the bride lit by a window. On the left, people seem to be whispering to each other, laughing and joking, but she is isolated. This was taking place in the house of her new husband’s family, where she would be living under the rule of her mother-in-law. She looked so unhappy and no one was really talking to her. The groom had just been given a little box containing a “trousseau bullet” by the bride’s father as part of her dowry. The idea is that this can be used in the event of desertion or infidelity. It’s a symbolic and traditional gift, but given how friendly everyone else seemed, this still came as a shock to me.
Meanwhile the groom was partying hard. I have another photograph of the couple arriving, both looking nervous, but though I didn’t see the wife touch a drop, everyone else ended up drinking and dancing. For that day I was essentially the wedding photographer by default, and was expected to drink a toast of raki – colourless homemade moonshine – with every male guest. Eventually I blacked out. I was staying at a nearby hotel and members of the wedding party must have carried me back, because I remember coming to in my tiny room with all my equipment and rolls of film beautifully laid out on the bed opposite. On the contact sheets, you can see that my compositions become increasingly loose, but as soon as I saw this image I thought: “Gosh!”
•Gulag: A Journey into the Darkness of Stalin’s Siberian Prison Camps, by Barry Lewis, is published by Fistful of Books. A Kickstarter campaign closes on 4 November
Barry Lewis’s CV
Born: London, 1948Trained: “Originally a chemist, taught for three years, then RCA for two year MA with Bill Brandt as tutor”Influences: “Bill Brandt,
August Sander, Joel Meyerowitz”High point: “Starting the agency Network Photographers in 1981 and winning the 1991 Oscar Barnack (the inventor of the Leica) award for humanitarian photography for work in Romania”Low point: “The end of Network Photographers in 2005 alongside the growth of the internet”Top tip: “Keep fit, be bold, ask questions, listen, read, wear good shoes”
I became the wedding photographer and was expected to drink a toast with every male guest. Eventually I blacked out
thing very tender early on, like maybe turning a beetle over. And I’m like, ‘Ah, that’s brilliant – because of Carl Jung who had a thing about the scarab beetle.’”
When the script arrived, Dolan was astonished. “I didn’t mean a beetle, I just meant something like a beetle,” she says. “You must have said it unconsciously,” Morley replies. “And it came with this amazing handler who could get it to do things,” adds Dolan. “Yes, and she had the mouse as well,” says Morley. “Whoever would have thought there was such a thing as a mouse and scarab beetle wrangler?” muses Dolan.
Amiss, who died in 2013 at the age of 79, would undoubtedly have enjoyed this exchange, which is happening in a sombre hotel room cluttered with camera equipment and makeup bags. Morley is handing out Typist Artist Pirate King badges like sweets, and is wearing an eye-popping jacket printed with a neon yellow car. It’s a tribute to the jalopy Amiss inveigles her longsuffering psychiatric nurse Sandra into, for an impromptu road trip from London to Sunderland. Sandra – or Sandra Panza, as Amiss dubs her – is played by Kelly Macdonald, who has joined us today from her home in Glasgow.
Typist Artist Pirate King is entirely dependent on the rapport between its two stars. Even when exploding in frustration, Macdonald’s Sandra is the faithful squire to Dolan’s quixotic Amiss, who spies friends and enemies at every junction, crashing a yoga class that she is convinced is being run by her old headmistress, and squirting ketchup over an astonished couple in a roadside cafe who once, she is certain, did her a grievous wrong. At first Sandra is in the driving seat, with Amiss in the back, sketching everything she sees, but gradually the power balance changes as it emerges that Sandra is herself a lost soul, in need of a forceful spirit like Amiss’s.
“With Sandra,” says the director, “I was interested in how much mental health nurses have to hide what they think. And I think Kelly just has these depths.” Their first conversation took place over video link during the pandemic, with Macdonald later having no recollection of it, even though it resulted in her being offered the job. “What can I say?” she says. “It was a strange time.”
The trio only finally met up in 2021, the night before they began a gruelling 25-day shoot, travelling between Yorkshire and Sunderland. “On a couple of occasions,” recalls Dolan, “we were given the option: stay in Leeds and have a really long drive, or take one pair of knickers and a toothbrush and stay in Sunderland overnight. Our driver said he’d never known a job like it.”
Although they clearly bonded, Covid restrictions were still in place and they so rarely met out of character that when Dolan ran out of her trailer to say goodbye at the end of the shoot, Macdonald was taken aback. “I was like, ‘Back off lady. Who are you, with your dark hair, thinking you know me?’”
“I suppose you never saw me out of my wig,” says Dolan, who arrived on set straight from Portugal, where she had been filming the TV series The Thief, the Wife and the Canoe. She was initially sceptical about playing a septuagenarian when she was only just into her 50s. Later, she panicked because she was unable to take her usual approach to a character. “I had these pages of questions I usually ask myself – and they were blank. Then I realised that Audrey is wherever she sees herself to be. She’s a very strong personality who whips up her environment into herself.” Just as importantly, she adds, “the film is about the interface between mental health and art. So at any point, I could have been playing a mental health patient or an artist. It’s just her way of looking at the world.”
As well as Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, Audrey and Sandra are a slowmotion Thelma and Louise. “Well,” says Morley, “it would be remiss not to mention one of the greatest feminist road movies of all time.” Not only was the film led by women, the crew was predominantly female too. The result, the two actors agree, was an unusually harmonious set. “There was no shouting,” says Macdonald. “It’s like – you didn’t have to have a loud male voice to be heard. And that’s been something I’ve experienced from the get-go: a lot of shouting to get everybody in position.”
At the start of each day, Morley would join Dolan in the makeup truck to paint ink blotches on her hands because Amiss habitually drew with leaky felt-tips. “You don’t always feel like talking at that hour,” she says, “but you need to do a bit of bonding, don’t you?” It was a peaceful beginning to hectic 14hour days. Dolan recalls begging for her scenes to be filmed last because she was still mugging up her lines. “Sometimes we would just have to move on to something else,” says Macdonald. “But I knew that if I looked at Carol and she said, ‘Don’t worry, we’ve got it’, then we’d got it.”
The biggest challenge, says Morley, was getting all the shooting done in daylight, because it’s a point of principle for her never to reshoot. In the case of the final roadside shot, looking up at Gateshead’s Angel of the North, “I literally had five minutes.” It was a rare instance when the actors were made aware of the pressure. “What was it she said?” laughs Dolan. “‘You go to the toilet and we don’t get the shot!’”
The film is dedicated to Amiss’s sister Dorothy, who read the script but sadly died during the edit. Morley recalls: “She said, ‘Thank you for giving me my Audrey back.’ And I was incredibly moved by that, because here was a woman whose neighbours told me they would cross the road to avoid her. But what I love about Audrey is that, though there were difficulties and suffering in her life, there was nothing grim about her. She took great pleasure in things that ordinary people would pass by – like a Quavers packet or the wrapper from a takeaway meal.”
Just before I leave, the conversation turns to possible future collaborations. Both actors are busy. Dolan is about to appear the second series of the crime drama Sherwood, and her debut play The B*easts, which won a fringe first award, is now being translated into Spanish and Italian. Morley trumps her with news of a new project, a film about a time-travelling witch. “I’ve never written for specific actors before,” she says. “But you’re in it and you’re in it – and so’s Maxine Peake.”
“Ooh,” replies Macdonald delightedly. “I was born to be a witch.”
• Typist Artist Pirate King is released in the UK on 27 October
the lines of a jeweller’s eyeglass.
However he did it, the intention was surely to amaze. Holbein came to Britain because it was getting harder to work in Basel, where the Reformation frowned on religious art. Up to this point he’d painted altarpieces, allegories, even housefronts. But Tudor Britain was the perfect context for a genre that was simple, universal and irresistible: the portrait. A portrait crossed language barriers. There are notes by Holbein on his drawings: early on he scribbles only in German. Later, you see him add English words as he makes headway with the language.
Yet, as he found out more about this strange country where he’d washed up, he became increasingly reserved in his art. The more he knew about the Tudor court, the more he concealed himself. This is what the drawings in the Royal Library confirm. I am struck by the intimacy of the first portraits Holbein did in London, his studies of Thomas More and his family. Bearing a letter of recommendation from the renowned theologian Erasmus, he was commissioned to paint a group portrait in More’s Chelsea riverside home. The painting is lost. But the drawings take you back five centuries to spend time with this family, all of them relatable.
John More, Thomas’s son has his face in a book, probably from his father’s library. His fuzz of brown hair escapes from his flat cap as he reads intently. These were bookish people. And as he reads, Holbein clearly sketched fast and loose – John’s clothes are captured as rapid stripy notations. This is a living, breathing moment.
It’s not that Holbein’s later drawings are any less alive. Although it can’t have been easy drawing Jane Seymour: weighted with the pressure of a formal royal portrait, her eyes are energised, her dimple humanising. Yet the shift, though subtle, is unmistakable.
Holbein portrayed More and his family like a friend among friends. His later depictions of courtiers are just as brilliant but not as affectionate. He poses people more formally and looks at them more carefully. The poet Thomas Wyatt has a fleshy wide face behind his dark beard: his eyes look off to the side, as if checking the door. Artist and sitter are both on their guard. Wyatt looks watchful as Holbein watches him. Holbein catches at him square on, as if he were a material object, a specimen. But why the spooked looks? Wyatt explains in a poem: beware of courts, he warns, for “circa Regna tonat” – “around thrones thunder rolls”.
The thunder started when Henry VIII wanted to divorce his wife Catherine of Aragon and marry Anne Boleyn. The Pope’s refusal to help led to the English Reformation, and decades of death and paranoia. More was beheaded. Wyatt survived narrowly after being arrested on suspicion of adultery with Anne Boleyn - and may have seen her execution from his prison window in the Tower of London.
Holbein had come to London to escape the anti-art attitudes of the Reformation but it was out of the frying pan into the fire. Compared with the friendliness of his drawings of the More family, his later portraits are scrupulously objective. He captures faces with a precision that takes your breath away, while guarding against getting too close to the wrong people. Never again.
In the Windsor Castle conservation department, Holbein’s miniatures have been taken out of their cases to show how they were painted on vellum, backed by playing cards. You can identify the cards from which the circles have been cut: red hearts, black clubs, royal personages. It’s extraordinary to think these cards were dealt and handled 500 years ago, perhaps in candlelit inns that Holbein frequented. I suspect he was an excellent player, cards close to his chest.
• Holbein at the Tudor Court opens on 10 November at the Queen’s Gallery, London
different.”
Similarly, Budgie suddenly discovered that he can now listen to the Banshees or the Creatures – Siouxsie and Budgie’s percussive other band – and “it doesn’t hurt”. Recently, he came across some old video footage of a group discussion and was startled at how forthright he’d been in his youth.
“I was thinking: ‘Who is that?’ Because
I’d always thought of the younger Budgie as quiet and supportive, the gopher at the back,” he says. “I realised that there are aspects of me that I’d forgotten, which are obviously still alive. The best thing that ever happened to me was when I asked my old art tutor at Liverpool Poly whether I should finish the course or join the band. He asked what I really wanted to do. I said: ‘Play drums and travel the world.’ He said: ‘Well, we’ll always be here, so why don’t you go do that?’”
Lol Tolhurst x Budgie x Jacknife Lee release Los Angeles on 3 November, and plan to tour. Ghosted at Home is out now. Access Curious Creatures via curiouscreaturespodcast.com