Art, Angles, Adventure
VICTORIA KINGHAM talks to photographer and documentary filmmaker Rod Morris
Photohastings is a loose collective – a network of photographers who exhibit together and jointly publish their work. Supporting each other this way, they can take on bigger spaces, share costs, and extend publicity. They have recently held a series of shows at St Andrew’s Mews, off Queen Street near the New Town.
One of this talented group is quietly-spoken, articulate Rod Morris, whom I spoke to in his studio on the top floor of a Georgian terraced cottage in West Street, a lesser-known area of the Old Town just behind the seafront. “This is a lovely street,” he enthuses. “Do you know it has its own newspaper, The West Street Chronicle?” Indeed it has a flamboyant history of smugglers, suffragettes, fascists, druids and Pre-Raphaelites, not necessarily in that order.
It is appropriate that Morris’s studio has this diverse and fascinating background, given the exceptional variety and quality of his work. It’s small, warm, quaint, and well-organised, and I was privileged to look over past and recent photographs while we talked. He is currently gathering a collection of prints for a show in a London gallery. While he makes his living from film-making, his exceptional collection of personal works covers a huge range of subjects from everywhere – a continuing life history.
“This picture got me started in my career,” he told me, showing me the memorable photograph of a bus driver in Egypt. “I won a competition with it, and the prize was a return plane ticket to anywhere in the world and a camera, which I sold.” All his photographs are in black and white – “I’ve had this same Pentax for about 30 years,” he goes on, showing me a traditional, non-digital camera. “I use digital for film and commercial jobs, but I see this as more my personal work, pictures that have stayed with me and still have meaning.”
We talk a little about the difference between photojournalism and the art of photography. “I studied photojournalism and just as I’d finished, this guy came in and said ‘Objectivity is dead, and subjectivity is everything.’ A lot of people were really angry. But I thought, I totally get this. We’re affected by our experiences, and to ignore that is madness. Journalism is all about the specifics. But a good enough image that suggests things to the viewer will live longer in the memory.”
Supporting this idea, he shows me a series where “We don’t know who the subject is, but we can make all sorts of assumptions and can see different stories. I’ve always liked to ask questions, rather than provide answers.” So a poster-sized print of four guys in suits, who look like they might belong to the Yakuza or Cosa Nostra, was taken in San Francisco. They could merely be four businessmen out for a walk on Russian Hill. With the current collection (Still Films) he is, though, unusually, submitting written narratives along with the photographs. He shows me the photo with the little girl at the centre, taken in the house of a German musician in Venezuela, and tells me the story.
“I wondered why there was this quality of musician living In that remote place. It turned out that he had had a brief relationship there while travelling, but some time later the woman wrote to him and said that she had become pregnant but wasn’t expecting anything of him, just letting him know. He thought long and hard then went out there. They all lived together and they set up this jazz club, but then the woman (now his wife) passed away when the child was still very young.
“I asked whether he had wanted to go back to Germany, and his family. But he said no, he could never leave this house because of the presence of his wife. As we walked into this room, his daughter sat in the hammock, and the light entered the room and suddenly her mother was there. A second later the light had gone, and she was gone as well.” There are similar poignant histories relating to a range of photographs taken variously in (for example) Venezuela, Cuba, Egypt, San Francisco, England, and New York.
There’s a certain angularity of composition, a careful geometry, that seems characteristic of all his work: “Some people say that I have the same shapes in all my pictures” he remarks. One of the dozens of photos I am privileged to see is taken from the middle of the Millennium Bridge, looking towards St Paul’s. A man in a wheelchair has his back to the camera, and the line of his head is centred exactly between the converging lines of the bridge to the centre of St Paul’s dome. It’s a fine, memorable shot.
Asked about the constraints of making a living from photography, he is definitive. “I’ve always made a living. Most people on my course (photojournalism at UAL: London College of Communication) went on to do conflict photography. Some of them died. I stayed in London for my final show and happened to knock on the door of the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra. They were on my doorstep, a little way away from the college.” The orchestra liked his photos so much that they exhibited them and had them made into cards. They are still on his client list. After the advent of digital photography, he taught himself how to edit film, and gradually his commissions changed from reportage stills to reportage documentary film-making.
Though Morris has lived and worked in Rye, he and his partner lived in East London for some years with their triplets, who shared one room until they were fourteen. They moved down here to give them more individual space, but since then he hasn’t looked back. Like many other residents he really appreciates the amount of creative support there is here, especially from the photography community. His background is eccentrically artistic: his father worked as an architect who, to make life interesting, would add a Gothic chimney to a design for a factory, but was also able to play entire piano concertos from memory and play the violin. He also developed a serious understanding of photography. His love of music transmitted to his children; Morris always works to a musical accompaniment, which he feels has an effect on the ultimate product.
Hastings and St Leonards, he suggests, “punch above their weight” in terms of creative production. I doubt anyone would disagree that his work adds strength to that punch.
See more details at roadfactoryfilms.com/studio-info, and roadfactoryfilms on Instagram. For the Elliott Gallery exhibition, see elliott.gallery/rod-morris. Also at Photopia and Photohastings, photopia.co.uk and photohastings.org
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