Another one of our guest lectures, Chris Hoare, came in to talk to us about his career and how he got to the position that he is in now. He, like our other guest lecturers, sat with a small group of us and spoke to us one on one about our work, giving us some advice about how to finalise it and where to go with it. 

He started off by speaking to us a bit about his life and where he is at the moment. That he is from and has now moved back to Bristol after graduating from University and studying his MA in Photography. 

He then went on to speak to us about his projects and how they have shaped his understanding of photography and where he wants to be within that. Dreamer’s, one of his projects, he described as documenting the world like a fly on the wall “I wanted to get as much access to people’s lives as possible. A lot of photography that I look at now is a lot of places and things that are being captured which will look interesting in years to come.”

One of his first commissions was by a weekly French magazine who wanted to do a feature about Bristol, Over The M32, where he photographed the bridge that goes to Bristol, focusing on the people along the bridge and what they were doing in that space. He spoke about how he would do things like this to keep afloat but also commented on the fact that he thinks it’s really important to keep up photography for your own sense of mind: “practice is really important. Do photography because you love doing it, do it for the enjoyment of photography. Its so easy to get weighed down by having to produce a big project at University.” 

He spoke about a quote by Robert Adams which has stayed with him through his career so far “We all have to eat, and how we connect that need with the needs of the spirit is a matter none of us can afford to be especially self righteous about”. 

I’ll be there with a smile

His project, ‘I’ll be there with a smile’ was probably one of my favourites that he spoke about in the lecture. I just really liked the simplicity of photographing one street over time to show the people and their livelihoods. I found the photographs beautiful and the way he was speaking about the people he came across was really inspiring. He focused on Redminster, an area in Bristol which was known for being the industrial hub, the project is about East Street, one of the streets within the area. “Over the years I have accumulated a slow documentation of the area. There’s so many interesting subjects within the area, historically which I wanted to play homage to. My experiences and the people that I’ve met as I’ve been photographing down this street is so interesting. They’re certainly characters.” He mentioned how a lot of the photographs that he’d been taking for the project over the years have been taken in and around the factory there to give the sense of the industrial side to the street. “For me, this is to create a record of what was and what is now, to show the change of the years. I guess this is what I want to do with all my projects, to document.”

The worst poem in the universe

This project was based on the golden coast and Gina Rineheart’s ‘Our Future’, his interest in being there and within Australia. ‘Success or failure apparently brought by chance rather than through one’s own actions’ – Luck. He spoke about how Minor White was quite an integral part of this project because he uses a lot of metaphors within his images “Each image is economical because of what has led to it and what is leads into.” Within this project, he spoke to us about how he liked the idea of sequencing and using paragraphs to link the images together. When thinking about fnialising the project, he talked us through it and explained that the different sections of the book showed how he’d merged both colour and black and white imagery alongside one another. I personally really liked this and was inspired to do this with my final output of my project. Helen and I had actually discussed previously that day about me mixing colour and black and white photography together within my publication, so this gave me confidence to experiment with it in mine. 

“I’m still working on the project but the dream is to have this published. I decided to do it in sections because of the energy of the book. Some of the images are on a black paper and then I transition to white paper to mix it up, just like the subjects within the project. I’ve definitely learnt that you have good days and bad days. Sometimes I’ve gone out and I’ve tortured myself because it’s not working but sometimes I’ve celebrated the good days. It just definitely varies.”

At the end of the lecture, Hoare asked if we had any questions for him about what he had spoken about so far:

Why the mix between colour and black and white?

“Tom Wood creates a mixture of colour and black and white images and I am really inspired by him and his work. I wanted to make this work within mine so I am experimenting with the two.”

How did you make your first steps out of university?

“When I finished, I was on job seekers. Then I ended up working in Aldi, and then a college for a few years as a teaching assistant. I now work at the Martin Parr Foundation one day a week but also work for Deliveroo. I’m just trying to make it – I wish I assisted more, assisted other photographer’s. Networking is really important, if you want to keep making work then carry on networking even when you graduate.”

How did you find the motivation to keep going?

“You go through phases where sometimes it’s more difficult but I don’t want to work a job where I’m tied up for the whole week. I want to be able to go out and do my photography one or two days a week.”

I find these guest lectures really helpful and so interesting because we get an insight to what it is like to be in the industry and how other photographer’s have made it into the photographic world. I am personally really interested in this because I still want to work in the photography industry so hearing from people who are actually in it already and making a living from it is really encouraging to hear.