2020
2020? I wasn’t expecting that!
Started at Buckingham Palace and finished up foraging in the woods with Ray Mears.
Learned a lot, missed a lot, felt sad a lot and was grateful for small things.
Here’s a yearly overview my photos taken during this remarkable year.
January.
Some reports of a virus in Wuhan began to gather but it seemed a long way away. I started the year with a portrait of HM Queen and her three heirs. The Daily Mail suggested this was the picture that pushed Harry and Meghan ‘over the edge’. Complete bollocks of course.
I spent the last 2 weeks of January in the Arctic Circle with Ray Mears learning how not to die in sub-zero temperatures. Obviously the best strategy is not to go to the Arctic in the first place but when I wasn’t consumed by the fear that I was going to die it was a genuinely awesome experience. I got a certificate.
John’s Shirts
While photographing John and his wife Chrissie for a lockdown project I discovered John is a massive rock and roll fan. He wore a great shirt for lockdown portrait and we got talking about his wardrobe. It turns out he has dozens of vintage 50’s and 60’s shirts. I couldn’t resist the opportunity.
We managed to shoot in John's garden in rather tricky circumstances until the wind blew my lights over and the background to ripped shreds. There are more shirts to be photographed when the practicalities get easier!
Airfields
Week 20 of lockdown/social distancing and I’ve finally got around to some of the personal projects that have been sitting on the back burner.
While different from my usual work this project has been close to my heart and in the making for some time. In fact, it’s about 15 years since I actually took notice of the hundreds of pictures shot from planes that I was amassing on flights here and there so I began to put them together in grids.
I think they stem from my love of all things concerning aircraft and aviation evoking the times I spent as a child with my Dad, an aircraft engineer, at the airfields where he worked.
I love the graphic and repetitive forms they create but also for me these grids are like a secret and arcane language, hieroglyphs from a lost world. Glimpsed through the small aperture of the much-coveted window seat these signs and symbols are fragments of a world I loved.
Safe Travels. Ranald
Neighbours - Covid19 Lockdown
Having photographed many of my neighbours for a portrait series a few years ago I returned to them as the C19 crisis began and, with their permission and carefully following the guidelines, I asked if I could photograph them again as social distancing and then lockdown took effect on our lives.
The overriding common factor seems to be that we are all missing each other, our families, our friends and our neighbours more than we could ever have imagined.
I don’t know when and what the new ‘normal’ will be, but for me I hope it includes lots of real, face to face connection with people.
I wish everyone a safe journey through this time and offer condolences to all those who have lost loved ones.
Take care. Ranald
Guinness World Records
A happy sideline in my work is visiting far flung places and photographing far out, and sometimes freaky, Guinness World Record holders. Setting fire to a man in a warehouse in Baltimore, hand placing over 4000 Winnie-the-Pooh toys or acquiring two dozen Madagascan Hissing Cockroaches in February in Slough, (What do you want them for sir? Er…) it’s all good times if occasionally gross.
Some will be fairly obvious but maybe a couple might evade recognition.
Neighbours
This project was inspired by some portraits I found of families in the new housing tracts in southern California in the 1960’s. I was amazed at how different everything, absolutely everything, in each image was. The ordinary becoming extraordinary with the passage of time.
I wanted to make my own document of a fragment of time and place, I chose to document my neighbours.
I created rules for the project. My aim was to make as pure a record as possible, with minimal direction or manipulation by me. Each neighbour would choose where the portrait was to be taken and I would capture the setting with basic lighting and post production. I invited each neighbour to include anything they thought represented them or told a story about their lives. Some did, some did not. Of 73 homes in my street 27 said yes.
The following are their portraits.
Masks
Masks is a project that emerged without any conscious forward planning. Starting with LaLa the Teletubbie I began shooting these whenever I happened upon a mask using the nearest person to hand. My rule is that I cannot seek out or buy a mask, they have to appear in my day. Hence the random nature and, also probably, why this small set of images have taken around 14 years to amass.
Personal Work
A random selection of personal work.