Interview: Alina Ferraro & Guilherme Ferrari

How did you come up with the idea of the Omnibus? 

I was a student at Manchester Polytechnic in 1972, and I was living in Moss Side, which was a kind of rundown inner-city area. Some students lived there and a lot of Irish people and people of African-Caribbean origin. It was being redeveloped. All the streets were being cleared to make way for new houses. I was still very inexperienced as a photographer and I was trying to think how I could make pictures that somehow talked about this big change that was going on. 

And so I opened a free studio there on a Saturday, and I did it for about eight weeks. ‘The Shop on Greame Street’. And people just came to have their pictures taken for free, which is why I ran out of money pretty quickly. But it was a very nice way of engaging with people. And, you know, I liked the pictures that I made there. And I thought, wouldn't it be nice to put the shop onto wheels? And I remembered how the Beatles did a magical mystery tour in a bus, and Ken Kesey and the merry pranksters went across America in a bus to destination ‘Furthur’ getting people to take LSD. And Cliff Richard did the film ‘Summer Holiday’ on a London bus. 

You talk a lot about England in your work.

Well I'm English and I'm kind of fascinated with England mainly because it's a very class ridden society. Every community you live in, you slowly discover all the petty snobbery that exists, how people differentiate one from another. I grew up in a very strange country community, a rural place. My home, where I'd been a child, is difficult to explain even to English people, and to foreigners, almost impossible. But I’ll try. It was a country estate. There was a rich lord who had a big house and a big family, and he lived in a large country house and everybody who lived in the village worked for him. And my father was his resident agent, his right-hand man, his fixer, the guy who made it all work. It was a hierarchy, a pyramid, with his lordship at the top and it went all the way down through the various ranks of class to the people at the very bottom who were rabbit catchers or farm labourers. And as long as you were happy to fit within this structure everything was alright. But if you didn't like the autocracy and wanted to rebel, you had to go away. It was quite an extreme upbringing. And so my photography has always been about trying to escape all that. But whenever you escape from one community, you get into another and you discover another pyramid there. I find England quite fascinating. Everywhere I've been, I've tried to engage with local people and then try to make a body of work about that. And the bus was a kind of an extreme example of that. Every week or so I'd be in another place, another town, another city. And I’d be meeting different people, it was quite an ambitious project. 

How many people do you think you photographed? 

Maybe just under a thousand. 

How did you pick them?

Well, they chose themselves. My big red bus had a sign on it saying ‘Have your picture taken for free’. And there were pictures in the window so people could see roughly what they were letting themselves in for. And it also had a notice explaining how I'd funded it all with sponsorship so that they could understand that it wasn't some kind of an advertising trick or something. And then they would come and chat, you know, like with the Moss Side shop, they'd come and poke their head around the door and say, “Morning”. And then I'd explain. And then they'd maybe come on board and have a cup of tea or something. 

Back then it was one of the times when we didn’t have our mobile phones, so it must have been very special.

People didn't have cameras in the way that they do now. I mean, a working class family, for instance, wouldn't have a camera at all. A middle class family might have a camera or two. My mother used to take one roll of film a year. She had a little camera, you know, Kodak Box Brownie camera and, before we went on holiday, she'd put a roll of film in it and there'd be, I don't know, ten pictures or twelve pictures or something. So at that time in our history, to be offering pictures for free and, and to be engaging people in the process of making the picture was something that was a bit strange, a bit special, perhaps. 

Are you still documenting? What do you think about our times? 

My particular problem is that I was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis about ten years ago. So my hand-eye coordination is gone. And I just take bad pictures and it's kind of depressing. So, yeah, I don't take pictures anymore, although I do make digital snaps with a mobile phone. 

Do you teach that at university? 

Digital? Yes but I don't teach anymore. I've retired. When I got ill, I stopped. But, when I was teaching, my work was all about engaging with people, film and digital. Audio too. Back in 1974, on the bus, I was not only taking pictures but also trying to involve people in the process of how they wanted to be photographed, listening to their stories and recording them. But, around the millennium when the digital age came, the ability to take pictures, the shooting of pictures, passed into the hands of everybody. So, at Cardiff University where I was working at that time I had a project I ran with the BBC where I helped people to tell their own stories using the new tools of digital production. Pictures and sounds. I'm a big fan of digital technology because it's made photography, and all kinds of communication, into a much more democratic process. And that's always what's interested me. 

Were you living by yourself on the bus? 

I was. 

And you had everything in there to develop the photos as well I guess.

I did, but it was very chaotic. I was 22, what did I know about building darkrooms and kitchens and bedrooms? I did a very amateur job of repurposing the bus. It didn't look like a modern camper van or caravan or something. It was quite messy. 

That's what's really cool about it, it was a real adventure.

Yes, it was. For one thing it was always breaking down. It was a 1948 bus so it was already very old when I got it, and it was a nightmare. Oh gosh. We became quite good friends by the end, but I had quite a battle to keep it going. 

You bought the bus yourself? 

Yes, I spent my last year as a student raising money. I guess today you’d call it crowdfunding. I wrote letters and I got sponsors. I was writing ten letters a day to people asking for money and support for the bus. One of the problems in Britain is that there are a lot of low railway bridges, and double decker buses can't always get underneath them. And so the bus l bought was actually 18 inches lower than many buses, it was called a low bridge decker. I built a sit-down darkroom upstairs at the back. I used to wash my films in public toilets. I think there are probably some people in distant corners of Britain who are still telling their friends “You'll never believe this, but one day I went into the public toilets and there was this man developing film in the lavatory.” That would have been me. 

So you went south of England as well? 

Yes, where I went was determined by who gave me sponsorship. I had some funding from the Arts Council, which is a national public body in Britain, and at the time there were also regional arts associations. So I approached each one of these associations to ask them if they'd help me in their area, finding somewhere to put the bus that was central where members of the public would walk by and so on. I didn't want the bus to be parked in some bus park, out-of-the-way. And some of these regional arts associations were really good and some of them didn't want to help me at all so there are large chunks of England that I had to leave out simply because the regional arts associations wouldn't help me. For instance, I didn't go to Liverpool but I did go to Newcastle. I didn't go to London but I did go to Southampton and Hartlepool and Barrow-in-Furness and all kinds of forgotten different corners of England.

Which part of it was more interesting to you? 

The thing I most enjoyed about the bus was the random nature of the thing. You never knew who might happen to be walking past, who would fall into conversation, who might want their picture taken. Later in life, I deliberately chose specific places to visit because I was interested in the people who lived there. So, for instance at the moment in Darmstadt Germany, there's an exhibition of my work in the Kunsthalle called ‘Suburbia’, of photographs that I made in the London suburbs in the 1980s. And that was a very deliberate effort to go and mix with a certain kind of community. So sometimes I've made a specific choice about a community to study and sometimes I've done things in a more random way. But it's always been the people who are surprising, rather than the place. That's the thing I love about being a documentarist, every day you go out and you engage with strangers and your life is enriched. That’s the best thing about being alive. You just have to give people the chance to amaze. 

This is just the way you are, you help people to open up and tell their stories, their true stories.

I hope so. I like being a storyteller. Photography has been such an education to me and storytelling works on lots of different levels. For instance those portraits that I shot on the bus, 25 years later I went back to find some of those people and to take their picture again. And I exhibited the pictures in pairs ‘Now and Then’ and I remember in a gallery in France someone wrote in the comments book “Thank you so much for telling us lovely stories." Two portraits of the same person, the second portrait made 25 years after the first one, but no words, and yet gallery-goers were making up for themselves the story of what had happened between the first picture and the second picture. But also, because I did interview those people as well as make new pictures, I was able to let them tell their own stories, stories which I later published in magazines and a book. 

How did society change in these 20 years? 

I went from being a country boy who had been raised in a very closed society to being somebody who’d had a lot of adventures in other people's lives. And so the world opened up, expanded for me enormously. And I think things changed for quite a lot of other people, too, through the 1980s and ‘90s because of the collapse of traditional industries in Britain. You had communities that had been mining communities or steelmaking communities and the work just came to an end. Some of the change was because of political will and some of it because of the march of capitalism. 

You have very interesting titles, especially “No Such Thing as Society”, how do you pick them?

That title wasn't my choice. "No Such Thing as Society" was a touring exhibition that was put together by the Hayward Gallery, in London, of the documentary work done by photographers in Britain before, during and after the period when Mrs. Thatcher was Prime Minister. Thatcher famously declared war on her own working class around the time of the miners’ strike in 1984. She called them “the enemy within”. And, when she was invited to talk about what society meant to her she said there was “no such thing”. Which, to those of us who believe in the connectedness of our communities, was a horrible thing to say. The makers of the exhibition referenced that poisonous phrase and also chose one of my pictures from 1974 for the cover of the book which accompanied the show, my photograph titled ‘Three Boys and a Pigeon’. 

Which was amazing, but the titles of the photos that you had in the exhibition you chose.
Yes, those titles were mine. 

How do you usually choose them? Do you have a message to pass on? You may go political maybe…

Yeah, political maybe. But not party political although I'm no fan of the Conservative party. It’s very odd that we are talking today because today is an election day in Britain, regional elections, and I've been to vote just this morning. I went down to my polling station and you know in Britain, although I guess it's probably the same everywhere, everyone's very angry at the moment. In Britain we are very angry about Brexit, and Prime Minister Boris Johnson telling us lies and having parties during lockdown, breaking his own laws, taking us for fools. He’s the only prime minister, certainly in my lifetime, to be convicted of breaking the law and yet still keeping his job. So on my way to the polling station, I was bumping into neighbours, some of whom would agree with me and some of whom would not agree with me. And I kind of enjoyed the banter, teasing neighbours who I don't agree with and having a laugh with the ones I do. Am I political? Yes, I have a belief in the basic good nature of human beings. If you give human beings half a chance, they'll be wonderful. And human beings are our best chance, so I hate it when politicians and politics get in the way of human beings having a chance to grow, having a chance to be. There was a great American academic called William Stott, who wrote about the American Farm Security Administration photographers from the 1930s. He talked about how social documentary photography always looks at the world from the bottom up. And I think that's a good way to think of my work too. Not from the top down. 

Would you ever photograph fashion? 

My pictures have been used once or twice in fashion magazines. And once somebody did try to commission me to shoot some fashion pictures. But they would have been awful, you know. I wouldn't do it. Having said that, one of the best photography exhibitions my work has ever been in was put on by the fashion house Burberry in London in 2017. It was a show that went from London to Hong Kong and to Paris. Burberry’s designs that year were based on a lot of photographs that had been made in the 1970s and ‘80s by myself and many other British documentary photographers. They called their exhibition ‘Here We Are’ and staged their catwalk show inside the exhibition venue. I remember the curator asking “How would you like your work to be shown?” They were going to show only four or five pictures and one short film. And I said that I would like a chapel, a little space all by itself with nicely lit prints and a television screen with a big red ‘go’ button on the front to play a film. I've made about, I don't know, 40 or 50 very short films, in which the people in my photographs talk and I wanted them to include one of them. As it happens, a photograph they chose was ‘Three Boys and a Pigeon’, John Payne and his chums with his pigeon Chequer. John talks briefly but delightfully and the film lasts for just one minute. And when I got the invitation to go to the catwalk show it was a wonderful experience. Kate Moss, Naomi Campbell and all those famous people were there. It was in a disused courthouse in London, a building in a state of disrepair with peeling wallpaper. I went in and there was this little room, just like a chapel, just as I’d asked, with a TV in a yellow box with a red ‘go’ button on the front. You pressed it and the film played. It was just brilliant. And there on the wall was John Payne in his checked tank top just like the ones Burberry were referencing on the catwalk. That was my only interface, really, with the world of fashion. And yeah, I loved it.