Nicholas White came in to speak to us today about his career before and after leaving university here at Plymouth College of Art. I was really looking forward to his talk because I have looked at his worked and it's really intrigued me.
Introduction:
Nick used to be a student here at Plymouth College of Art so he knows exactly what it's like to be a student.
He started his Extended Diploma here in 2008 which is the course I did before starting my BA, he then went on to study the BA Photography course where he graduated in 2013 but when he did the course commercial photography wasn't a course it was combined.
He likes to show a process of imagery start to finish.
He got into photography through his love of the outdoors.
He the realised that photography was the reason for going out but his dream was to actually become a drummer in a rock band
so how successful has he been as a photographer...?
Red Tarn, 2010
This was a project for his FMP in his Extended Diploma course. When I saw the images I wish I could have created images to that standard when I created my images for my FMP. At the time he hated shooting on film and hated shooting people but loved to take images of landscapes of Dartmoor and moorland around the country. He wanted to find artists who used landscapes but in a different way that he had never seen before. For his inspiration he took Richard Misrach, Simon Norfolk and Richard Mosse. I have heard of Richard Misrach and Simon Norfolk.
Simon Norfolk played a big part in this project and throughout his whole degree as well because he managed to get Simon Norfolk's work in every single one of his workbooks throughout the three years of his degree. Nick wanted to know how to tell a story through a landscape so he went onto Simon Norfolk's website and found his mobile phone number so phoned him and spoke to him. Norfolk said ‘don’t rush to all the cool places, focus to your doorstep.' He took this advice further and had kept it with him into his career.
The Militarisation of Dartmoor (2010-2013)
This is the project that I've researched before and was the FMP for his degree. By this point he still hated shooting people but he had moved on to shooting on medium format. Because he has grown up near the moors and visited the moors regularly he spent two years up on Dartmoor making the photographs for this project. In the crit that we had later on after Nick's talk he said that this project was started in his second year at uni and he wanted to carry this project on throughout his third year but his lecturers said that the body of work didn't need to be carried on and they wanted him to focus on a new project for the new brief so he ignored what they said and re wrote the brief so that he could carry on the project. This project was his FMP for his degree and once he graduated he realised he had spent two years shooting on Dartmoor and nobody really cared and nobody had really seen the imagery so he worked in a bar pulling pints for ten months when his friend told him that there was a freelancing job down in Falmouth going so he took the job. The job was in post production cutting out women's underwear which then led to him working for Pro:Direct cutting out football boots which then left to him shooting football boots but it didn't interest him but it did give him enough money to create the next project...
Black Dots (2015-2018)
This project was created alongside Nick working full time at Pro:Direct. Nick has the idea of this project while he was at uni and Andy Ford came in to speak to him and he spoke about this project and he said it would be a really good project to do but the down side to that was that he didn't have enough money to make the project whilst at uni.
The project is all about the bothies in the UK. Nick set up maps in his bedroom which filled all the walls and planned where every bothy was but also had to take into consideration where the sunrise and sunset would happen and where he would sleep. He then thought that a project on every bothy in the UK would be boring so he focused on different areas. Bothies by the water and in woodland areas. Nick used film for the whole project. When the project first started Nick didn't believe it was going to work but on the first night of in the bothy he saw the Northern Lights which to him was a sign it was going to work.
The whole process of the project was blogged and written in a diary so that people could get excited about what was to come. The blog was accompanied by behind the scenes imagery which were taken by Andy Ford. Ford came with him for the first few days of each trip so that he could film and document the behind the scenes footage and I guess so that he could experience the same experience that Nick was experiencing as Andy had told him it was a good idea for a project.
Shenavall and The Great Wilderness (pictured above) is a place that is most popular with the mountaineers so Nick thought eh could make some new friends and contacts with people that live there and walk there but when he was there he didn't see anyone so he decided just to get a landscape of the scenery as he really wanted to shoot there. If you look closely you can see a figure if a person in the image by the door of the bothy but you can only really see the figure when the image is printed big which is the sort of scale Nick was aiming for.
As much as Nick didn't like taking portraits he had to get some for this project as he felt he couldn't make a project about the community of the bothies without the people of the community. He tended to get portraits of people he shared the experience of the bothy with and because he was shooting large format he would tend to have people come up to him because they would be curious as to what he was doing.
The picture above is a picture of David who lived in a village in Cape Wrath which is the most remote place in the North West. Nick didn't actually get to know David until after he took his portrait unknowingly to David. The portrait was taken without David knowing because he thought he would say no but in actual fact he said yes but Nick thinks he only said yes because Nick had already taken the photo but of course couldn't show him the photo until it was developed which wasn't while Nick was in Scotland.
John at Staburg is pictured above. Nick hd a very eventful night with John. He met John late at night and ended up drinking whiskey and ate meat and cheese with him all night and when he woke up John was sat reading the paper and there was a nice lot of natural light shining through the window and thought it was the perfect time to get a picture. After hearing the story about John it really made me laugh and feel connected with the picture as it felt like I kind of already knew John.
Nick had a long drive home from Scotland to Devon so had a long time to think about the project he had just completed. He was worried that he had spent so long creating the work and hadn't thought about what he was going to do with it. The next morning he went into Pro:Direct and quit his job. He had never thought about marketing his work but noticed that while he was away in Scotland he always wore the outdoor clothing brand Rab. Andy Ford who he had taken away with him for the first few days of each shoot to shoot behind the scenes footage had noticed it from the beginning and made sure the images he took of Nick included the Rab logo, so Nick emailed them and they said they couldn't offer him a photographic job but they could offer him something else. They asked him to send his diary entries from while he was away and they would post them on their website and in exchange Nick souled send them a kit list for clothing he needed for when he was out shooting again. The positive to this deal was that half a million people were seeing his work.
Below is a short film that Nick featured in for Rab I wasn't able to find the diary entries.
This then led to magazines seeing the work and picking the work up. This then meant that he had to learn a lot of new skills as he was being interviewed about his work and had never been interviewed before and had never been asked the questions he was being asked so it was a huge learning curve for him.
Competitions:
He entered one of the British Journal of Photography's competitions and made the longest but made it no further. The judge that judged Nick's work for the competition saw his work and emailed him and asked him if they could do a feature on him which was a really exciting opportunity for Nick because even the winner of the competitions of BJP don't get a feature.
Nick's advice:
Don’t take not winning a competition to heart too much as it might not be the right work for that competition at that time.
Won the Royal Photographic Society's bursary which is £3000 to create a new project from scratch...
Carpathia (2018-)
This is a project that Nick started in January and is still in progress and is based in Romania. In Romania they're building a new National Park and through photography he is able to keep going out there to learn how to build a National Park by going out and analysing different things. The Romanian's do small jobs over time and not big jobs (tiny jobs in big spaces)
He has started shooting portraits of the rangers and the landscapes of the park. Nick has built a friendship with the rangers as he's following them around and it's their job and he doesn't want to disrupt what they do and wants to be one of the only ones who knows what they're doing. Because of the friendship building he didn't get his camera out for a long time because he cared. To shoot the images he is using a 5x4 camera so he has to be quick shooting the images because the rangers won't wait for him as they have so much to do, he shoots far back with the intention of printing big. As this project is based on the new National Park the wildlife is a huge part of the community and because he's not a wildlife photographer he has set up camera trap stills. The image below is the only image he has published on his website for this project but I got to see more during the talk and I loved them.
Commercial work (recent)
As he only got £3000 from Royal Photographic Society he needed to fund the rest of Romania and the rest of his life somehow. He does this by commercial work. He does his commercial work on the side of his personal work and has got his commercial work through the press he got from Black Dots.
What did he have to learn?
How to shoot portraits under pressure, on film, for a commission with a limited time frame.
Who has he shoot for and who has he shot?
Doers of London
Hackney Weightlifting Club
Olympic athletes
Evening Standard and Independent for San Miguel campaign
James Parr - works for NASA
Maddock's Farm - he is always being approached by people by people who need a photographer to stomp around in wellies for a few hours which he is more than happy to do
He was the Creative Director for Mount Timpanogos, Utah
Rio Ferdinand, Sports Direct
Puma, Sports Direct social campaign - only shot a few days ago
Exmoor on it's Own, Financial Times Weekend
Evening Standard and Independent for the San Miguel campaign found Nick online via Black Dots. He photographed for the rich list which was people who were rich in life not rich in money. They flew him to Inverness as they thought he was Scottish from Black Dots to shoot Will Copestake in Scotland and turns out he was actually a friend of Nick's.
Other advice:
On his social media he posts his commercial and personal work on his Instagram wants people to think he's versatile
Some people are open to him shooting how he wants to because they've seen his photos how they look from his style of photography and that's the style of photography they liked, they also know that his photos look how they do because of the equipment he uses.
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