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John Swannell
It’s the old cliché: it’s easy to get to the top but it’s hard to stay there”, says John Swannell.
“Not that I’m at the top, mind, but I’m thankful that I’m still doing it after 30 years, still doing exhibitions and books, and people are still employing me. I’ve just been out to Oman on a fashion shoot for the Telegraph, and I recently finished my third Wonderbra campaign.
“I’ve photographed all the top members of the Royal family over the years. Princess Margaret was the only one I didn’t do. It’s been good fun - they’re very easy going. I had to shoot the Queen Mother, the Queen, Prince Charles and Prince William all together, and they said, ‘You realise when you shoot this it’ll be the most important photograph since Queen Victoria was photographed with her family?’ I said, ‘Oh great, how long have I got to do it?’, and they said ‘10 minutes’! You’re allocated a time slot because they’re so busy, and you’ve really got to work fast, although I’m used to working fast, so it’s not much of a problem.”
Swannell is dyslexic, so didn’t excel in academic subjects at school, getting involved with school plays and sports days instead. “I had a camera from a very young age”, he says, “and I was always snapping. A Minolta Autocord 21/4 twin lens reflex – like a cheap Rolleiflex – was my first serious camera.
Assisting
“In those days when you left school, if you wanted to be a pop star you wanted to be Mick Jagger, or if it were an actor you wanted to be Michael Caine, and if it were a photographer you wanted to be David Bailey, so basically I tried to get to work with him and that’s what happened. I got lucky. I went to work at Vogue studios, and that’s where I met him. We worked together for four years.
“The best education you can have in photography is to work with a photographer. Forget about college: you can pick up everything you need on the way. I think I’m unique in the business, because in the last 30 years I’ve only had four assistants. I find consistency to be incredibly important. When they leave, it’s like your wife leaving. Because I’m dyslexic, I’m not very organised: I’m all over the place. I need somebody to keep everything in order.
“In the last five years, I’ve been to Machu Pichu in Peru; Jaipur, capital of Rajasthan in India; Africa; Bhutan - so whoever works with me gets to travel with me too. When I was with Bailey, it was the same: I used to fly around the world with him. Travelling is good for the soul and a major perk for an assistant.
Going freelance
“I went freelance in 1974 or 75, when I was in my 20s, and started working for magazines like Woman’s Own and Woman’s Journal – basically, you make all your mistakes at those smaller magazines. Then I got a break with Italian Vogue, which was good for the book. I did a hell of a lot of black and white for Ritz Newspaper, which was launched in 1976 by Bailey and David Litchfield. It doesn’t exist any more, but it was good while it lasted. And then I started doing a bit of work for German Vogue and then Vanity Fair, and quite a lot of beauty and hair stuff for English Vogue.
“I established my own studio about a year or 18 months after I left Bailey. He was good to me, paying me for the first year to keep me going. It was very generous of him. I worked in a studio in Camden Town for a year, then I rented a studio for about 10 years at Steeles Road in Haverstock Hill. It was in a Victorian house built by an artist in about 1880. He built this fantastic studio on the back, with a big fireplace and north light. He was a painter, so it was about 25ft square: not massive, but I did everything in that studio. Looking back, it was a really great time.
Representation
“I’ve still got the same agent now that I had back then: Burnham Niker. I think we had an interview and a chat and they just took me on. It wasn’t a big deal. They’ve got me some great work. In the early days, I did a massive amount of work with them: Clarks shoes, Smirnoff ads up in Scotland, lots of beauty.
“Editorial is something you do for yourself. If you want to work for a magazine, you get your pictures together and call it up. If an editor’s going to work with you, they want to see what you’re like. It’s kind of a personality thing. I’ve done lots of shoots with Hilary Alexander at the Telegraph. We’ve worked together for years and she’s become a close friend.
“I don’t pitch much anymore. People call me. You tend to work with the same people over and over again. Then people see your pictures and say, ‘Would you do something for us in that vein? We like your style’. Then maybe one of the clients you’ve had for five years will stop using you because a young kid’s come up who’s really great and they need a change. People tend to come back to you anyway in four or five years, so you can’t get too upset.
Landscape
“Everywhere I go in the world, I take pictures. I’m working on a project bringing together a series of landscapes that I’ve been shooting for 20 years, which will become an exhibition and a book next year. My landscapes, which are colour, are printed by Les McLean – he’s brilliant, one of the best in England.
Digital
“I’ve moved completely over to shooting digital now. I haven’t done any film for three or four years. It was a painful transition. When I changed over, I was 55 or 56 and that’s sort of old in the fashion business. Plus, you don’t have a mind like those who are 18-25 and into computers and all that stuff. They’re so sharp, we’re a little slower on the uptake and so it takes us a bit longer. My problem is I have to write everything down, and I can’t remember half the things. Once I’m shown how to do it, I’m fine: monkey see, monkey do. I got someone to set up my website and put all the pictures on, and now I can choose what goes on there and how it’s laid out.
“With digital, it’s easier now to take photographs than it’s ever been. Somebody can take a mediocre picture, give it a good retouch, and it can turn it into something else. Look at some of the wonderful pictures in the magazines: if you were to see the original pictures, you’d realise they weren’t so good before they were heavily retouched. But it doesn’t matter, because at the end of the day it’s what’s produced in the magazine that counts. If it’s great, it’s great; it doesn’t matter how it got there.
“All I care about is the finished picture. I’m not an anorak. A lot of photographers say developing the film is important, but the people like that are the chemists: they love the process of getting there. I quite like all that stuff as well, but the end product is either great or not great. You can spend three days developing a picture, doing everything, but if it’s no
good, it’s no good. Or you could spend five minutes and it could be brilliant. It’s what you produce that counts.
“Ten years ago, I had my garage converted into a darkroom, and after dinner I would go there at say 10 o’clock at night and be there until 2 o’clock in the morning, mixing up chemicals, developing and printing, hanging up pictures. The next morning, I’d go down and look at all the stuff, and realise that half of it had dried off too light and the black’s not black enough, and so I’d have to go back and do it all again. Now, I sit down at the computer and press a few buttons, and I can still produce the same thing that I did in the darkroom: in fact, I can produce better things now than I did in the darkroom.
“Most photographers have a guy doing digital processing, and that has to be paid for. My assistant does that all for me. He gets a weekly wage, as well as a percentage of what we do. We charge whatever it is, £50 a shot, and for that they get a file, and if they want prints I do them too, although if I like the picture I’ll usually do prints anyway, maybe an A3 or A4. Sometimes, I charge for those in editorial, sometimes not: they haven’t got as much money as the advertising people have, so you have to work it out on a case by case basis.Limited editions
“We’re doing a lot of limited edition prints now. I’ve got quite a big body of work, especially nudes. The exhibition at Chris Beetles Gallery is a cross section of my work: fashion, nudes and portraits, all in black and white. It’s the first time I’ve really put fashion on the wall; the book of that work is three years down the line. The prints are quite competitively
priced – in two or three years’ time they’ll be worth much more – but I would rather have a lot of people buy my pictures and put them on their wall than sell them for £20k and have two people buy them. If they put it on the wall and get to like it, they might see my pictures somewhere else and think they’d like another one as well. They’re priced from £1800-£2500, in limited editions of 50 and 25.
“Paul and Max Caffell at 31 Studio in Gloucester make my platinum prints. They’re both master printers, probably the best in the country. I produce platinum prints in editions of 25, then I might do a silver edition of 50 or 25, and maybe just five very large ones. You can’t produce any more than that. If you did, your reputation would go down. You have to be very strict about what you do, although some people are too fanatical about it. Going to the point of actually destroying your negatives is a bit over the top, because you always need them for books or exhibitions or magazines. Almost 90% of the photographs in the show were shot on negative, because it goes right back: some of it is 25-30 years old.
“Somebody said to me the other day, ‘Why should we buy a photograph over a painting?’ I said there’s good painting and bad painting, good photography and bad photography. Would you pay money for a bad painting or for a good
photograph? If it’s good, then it’s worth paying for.”
© 2008 F2 Freelance Photographer, published by EC1 publishing • site copyright notice here
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