I thought I had invented the word – phototherapy – and was pretty pleased with myself. It seemed nicely to capture how taking pictures was doing me a certain amount of good. I had just experienced my first serious brush with psychiatry, and I wasn’t keen to do so again. As it turned out, I was to be mistaken on both counts: I didn’t originate the word, and I did end up back in hospitals and on nasty drug regimes, often administered by quite nasty people.
The Prinz camera used 110 film cartridges that produced tiny negatives and inevitably awful prints. Apparently they are now fashionably retro - ‘lo-fi’ - and evidently people are prepared to pay good money to make bad photos nowadays.
I had always enjoyed using a camera. My very first one was a goodbye gift from my parents when I was nine years old and about to spend my first week away without them, at Nana and Grandpa’s bungalow near the seaside. It was a ‘Prinz’ instamatic with a denim case, made in the USA and rebadged for sale to the British masses by the high street electronics retailer, Dixons.
Grandpa and Nana, somewhere near The Solent, 1978. Photographed by a ‘Prinz Sharpshooter’ with help from me pushing the button.
A couple of years later, I made my first proper cash – more, in other words, than the pennies of pocket money that sometimes stretched to cheap sweets or a packet of football stickers on a Saturday – by picking up old cameras for next to nothing at jumble sales, quickly working out I couldn’t afford the film and processing they called for, cleaning them up and selling them on. I had old ‘box brownies’ that took rolls of film that were no longer made, and wonderful old Polaroid ‘Land Cameras’ with extendable bellows at the front and lots of knobs and levers. The man at the photo counter at our chemist bought several for almost £20. Untold riches when you’re eleven, used to 40p a week, and it’s only just 1980. Twenty quid went a very long way indeed in those days when you were in short trousers you didn’t have to pay for.
A ‘Land Camera’, named after Edwin Land, the inventor of the Polaroid process. Nobody wanted them in 1980 - you could buy one in working order for 50p. So I bought several.
I took very few pictures when I was working in journalism. It seemed the wrong thing to do: my job was broadcast producer, and to do it well you needed to be alert and vigilant. Taking photos was for dilettantes on news safari, it seemed to me. I took two rolls in Chechnya, one roll in Afghanistan, and that was about it. I regret that now, but it was the right decision at the time.
I bought a Polaroid camera for Chechnya, however, and squeezed off a few frames as souvenirs. But the point of it was to get through checkpoints. Chechens always waved us on, glad of the coverage as underdogs, and it worked in the first of what were to be two conflicts: Yeltsin’s war effort was sunk as much by dreadful press coverage as by the venality of the officer class.
But the price of passage at Russian checkpoints got higher over time: a packet of posh cigarettes or a bottle of vodka hidden in the glove box wasn’t always enough to cross the stickiest frontlines, where you’d often encounter tough contract soldiers, rather than the frightened conscripts who looked like frightened, grubby wraiths, emerging out of frozen dug outs into the late winter morning fog. I am pretty sure it was my idea to blow their minds with instant photos – something to send home to mum, or your girlfriend. But perhaps another journo thought of it and I simply privatised the idea for the foxed annals of dimming memory.
Sasha Mursa, Shakh Aivazov, Chris Booth - AP Grozny., early spring 1995. (Photo by a Russian squaddie whose name I have now forgotten.)
But photography became a proper habit, and a therapy of a kind, much later in life. I was working for a big development bank having finally put the cables, mics and recorders in a draw and walked away from reporting. The work at EBRD was fine, and infinitely better paid than the BBC was ready to allow anyone who wasn’t ‘on-screen talent’, but I couldn’t face the incessant business chat over lunch in the fancy cafeteria. And, if I am honest, I felt like a fish out of water anyway – you go from a fairly big deal at the national broadcaster, a medium-sized deal at any rate, to being a very insignificant part of an organisation where naturally the bankers are the stars and the comms department is only a rung or two up from admin and kitchen staff.
So for an hour in the middle of the day I wandered the roads around Bishopsgate and Spitalfields with a camera, getting slowly braver and therefore better at street photography. It beat hearing about KPIs or enduring the anger of a Romanian mezzanine debt expert who felt my draft press release wasn’t complicated enough to reflect the full genius of his deal-making.
After my first incarceration in a psychiatric ward, it also slowly dawned on me that taking photos might be a good way to stay out of such places. Looking through a viewfinder meant I wasn’t introspecting - you can’t frame a shot and go down mental rabbit holes at the same time. Plus I could point the lens at whatever bit of reality seemed agreeable, at least for that moment. And putting things in the right order in a 3:2 rectangle was a lot simpler than the Technicolor wide-angle view of the world and its worries I had been close up to for the previous 20-odd years. It was a practical form of this ‘mindfulness’ thing that people had just started talking about, but which still seemed a bit wet and esoteric for my liking.
I was very happy to mount a small exhibition in Tbilisi a decade ago. I called the show ‘Phototherapy’ and was proud to have come up with such a clever title. To confirm my creative brilliance, I Googled it: and it turned out to be a common term for a way of using light to cheer up glum people. Well… maybe the Georgians wouldn’t notice.
My passion for pictures died off almost overnight soon after, however, thanks to the London College of Communications of all places. I had quit the bank to study for an MA in photojournalism there, thinking to make paid photography my future.
The course was run by a lovely man who had been a Magnum freelance in Bosnia and briefly in Chechnya. He didn’t remember me, but I remembered him: I had watched him crouch sobbing hysterically over the still-warm body of his new girlfriend, an American freelancer who had been very close when an oil tanker was hit by a rocket from a Russian jet and exploded. They’d both been at the overnight digs I had shared for a few days. They seemed so glamorous.
I was due back to Moscow for Christmas. My boss phoned to say that the US Embassy needed someone to get Cynthia’s remains out of Grozny. It was virtually impossible to get a coffin - they aren’t part of a Muslim burial rite, and the Christians and their undertakers had fled Grozny or been bombed dead. When we found a suitable box, and managed to drive it through the frontlines and out of Chechnya to the airport in North Ossetia, the ground staff said they wouldn’t load it because the seams had not been hermetically sealed as the regulations required. I wept with fury and frustration that the dead could be so dishonoured at a time of war. The men, arms crossed, smoking cigarettes, were utterly unmoved. Only a substantial sum of roubles permitted the gaping joinery to be judged suddenly good enough for take-off.
Cynthia Elbaum in Grozny. She was killed in an air attack on December 22nd, 1994. (Photo: Panos Pictures)
I am pretty sure that as a hardy and excellent photographer who had seen a lot of the truth of the world, the course leader wasn’t sipping the identity politics Kool Aid that characterised the LCC photojournalism course. But it was certainly supplied in volume and he couldn’t seem to do much to staunch the flow. My hope had been to learn about composition, storytelling and technique - to get an inch or two closer to my heroes, Cartier-Bresson and Doisneau. But the thrust of most lectures was power: who was shafting whom in what order, and whether they were doing so intersectionally or not. Saying that a photograph struck me as ‘beautiful’ would cause others on the Zoom call to laugh into their virtual sleeves. I was at best naïve, at worst part of the problem (as they had chosen to define it). Straight, white, able-bodied, cursed by a ‘male gaze’ and a certain age and education, all meant the range of subjects I was notionally permitted to shoot was radically slim, verging on anorexically so. I had so many privileges to check I was going to have to keep a magnifying glass, pencil and notepad about my unlovely person.
The only part of the course that was not overtly political was run by a man whose most famous photograph was called ‘Two Blue Buckets’ - appropriately enough, given the subject matter. He suggested we go to a park bench, sit down and close our eyes for twenty minutes, and then when we had opened them, take photos without using the viewfinder, at stomach level, of whatever our gut wanted to capture. That was an assignment I didn’t do, because I had realised I was a bad fit, and resigned from the course the next day.
Two Blue Buckets by Peter Fraser
So I put my cameras down, and have rarely picked them up since. A nice Leica M with two very decent lenses has grown a thick skin of diesel-impregnated London grime and dust. (If you want to make me an offer I will clean it off, of course.)
Yet in a throwback to ten years ago, I have another small exhibition coming up. A retrospective of 15 pictures from among the (literally) tens of thousands I shot in my unhappy banking years.
It’ll be at a lovely café on our high street later this month or early next. The owners like my pictures, and perhaps the coffee drinkers may.
I hope you do, too. These are some of the ones we have chosen:
Hyde Park Corner
Regent’s Park Zoo
Notting Hill Carnival
North Mews, Bloomsbury
The Seine embankment
Liverpool Street
Charterhouse St. (Nick and his dog Jethro who, frightened by fireworks, jumped on his shoulders and has not wanted to come down since.)
Christ Church Spitalfields, seen from Bishopsgate
There are lots more photos from those days at www.cjmbooth.com
Your photographs are arresting and have a beautiful tinge of toska to them.
Your account of the MA course putting you off photography is both entirely recognizable and understandable and so disheartening, like confirmation of the world being in a reverse Big Bang. Makes me not regret getting an Art History degree in current times though.
Great, great photos Chris. I hope the exhibition goes well.
My first camera, from around the same time, was a Kodak Instamatic which had a vastly superior - as in slightly bigger - film cartridge.
Your shot of your grandparents reminded me of this one of mine. https://www.threads.net/@lootplunder/post/C8T-828Il_J
Not taken by me, but by my grandfather, with a tripod and self-timer that clearly let him down at the last second. I'm kind of with the hipsters on this one. Bad photos can be more interesting. Aged relatives - a blurry memory. Standard Vanguard family automobile - sharp.