04.08.11
The Personal Project
English photographer Dmitri Kasterine tells Eleanor O'Kane what has always driven him to pursue the personal and explains how he created some of his iconic images.
I’m busy again,” declares the 78-year-old Dmitri Kasterine in the most English of accents across the telephone line from his home in upstate New York. “The exhibition has contributed to that, there’s no doubt about it. I’m starting to get my work published again in magazines over here and the people I’m really interested in working with – the collectors – seem to be sniffing around too!” The exhibition is Twentieth Century Portraits at the National Portrait Gallery. This selection of Dmitri’s portraits of artists and writers – shot between 1960 and 1980 – is bringing his work to new audiences.
His interest in photography blossomed as a boy when he began photographing birds in his parents’ garden at the age of 11. The fledgling photographer wasn’t so pleased with the results, however. “It was heartbreaking because the birds in the glass plate were so tiny, I didn’t realise you had to get so close or have a telephoto lens. I started photographing cows instead and that was much better!” From bovine subjects he graduated to people, notably his sister – “a very reluctant subject” – and friends.
He recalls an occasion involving a fellow pupil and friend at Radley College in Oxfordshire that proved a revelation in terms of his photographic career. “A very famous general came to inspect the cadets and after we were dismissed, this boy, Jake Sharp, walked straight up to him with his Rolleicord and said, ‘I’d like to take your photograph, sir.’ The man was completely charmed by this bold boy and that made me realise that you have to step up with photography if you want to get anything done. I never forgot that.”
It was a lesson that was to serve him well. After leaving college, Dmitri carried on taking pictures for his own interest while embarking on a series of rather romantic-sounding jobs that included wine salesman, Lloyd’s stockbroker and racing driver, as well as pilot for Laker Airways, which saw him flying unreliable old war bombers. “I was a bit irresponsible and wild at that time so flying aeroplanes steadied me up a bit,” he says. What they also did was provide him with the opportunity to create a portfolio. “When I was flying, the aeroplanes were always breaking down, so we’d end up spending two or three days in various parts of the world such as Karachi or Colombo. I had a Rolleiflex and a Leica, and I always took photographs while we were waiting for an engine to be flown out.”
After showing his book to the Editor of Queen magazine his career as a photographer began to take off and soon he was shooting regularly for the Radio Times, the Telegraph Magazine and Harpers & Queen. During this time, however, he passionately pursued his own interest in shooting portraits, mostly of writers to whom he was drawn by their inherent magnetism.
“Despite my education being expensive, I didn’t come away from Radley with much intellectual activity at all. I was a little in awe of [the writers’] vocabulary and the way they could string a sentence together; they were heroes too. I used to send a letter to the writers with a couple of prints, explaining that I’d love to photograph them and usually it worked. The fact that they were personal projects made them much more fun to photograph because I didn’t have to make an alliance with anyone.
When I was photographing JB Priestley he gruffly remarked that photographers were the only people in the world who were universally obeyed.” The majority of the images in the National Portrait Gallery exhibition are the result of his personal projects, pictures that Dmitri says had been “stuck in drawers for years”. He came to the attention of Terence Pepper, NPG curator of photographs, who first saw one of Kasterine’s portraits on a picture library and contacted him to find out more about his work. It’s not only great writers and artists who draw him. In the early 1980s Dmitri travelled to the corners of the country to shoot a project, England and the English, meeting people from all walks of life and capturing them at work and play. In 1986 he moved to NewYork, after being sent to shoot Mick Jagger and falling in love with the immensity and pace of America, which thrilled him. Having sworn never to remarry anyone who couldn’t cook, he ate his words when he met Caroline, who was to become his second wife.
Dmitri has continued to work commercially but still relentlessly and passionately pursues his interests in photographing everyday people, accompanied by Caroline. “Her eye,” he says, “is sympathetic to mine.” His reasons for pursuing his personal projects haven’t really changed over the years. “Thinking back, now I’ve taken to photographing everyday people, I approach the work in much the same fashion as I did with the writers and artists. I think that even then it was partly to do with the subject’s looks. Painters such as Francis Bacon were irresistible, even if you didn’t like his work.”
Having left Manhattan, Dmitri and Caroline now live in upstate NewYork “among unrelenting greenery”, but for the past two years he has been returning to Brooklyn two or three times a month to shoot portraits; personal work that appears on Dmitri’s blog as well as his website. The plan is to carry on until the end of the summer and then seek out a potential publisher.
For the past 15 years he has been crossing the tracks to shoot portraits in Newburgh, a rundown city near his home. “I’d started photographing people in my local town but they looked much the same as they do in a local town in England so I got thoroughly bored. Then someone suggested I go to Newburgh, a town across the river. There were these beautiful black people there, mostly from the south and often with Native American blood, living in a place that was abandoned by white people during the bad times in the 1950s. Nothing was going for them at all, industry had left... the place was falling into the river. The buildings were marvellous to photograph but actually the people themselves were so friendly and lovely, and that’s what made me go on and on with this project.”
The pull for Dmitri is still the same as it was all those years ago – a look that draws him in. “Something happens when I look at somebody and feel a little cold shiver down my back. A lead pipe clouts me over the head if they’re really good. It’s something about how they look and that’s certainly the case with Newburgh.”
Perhaps motivated by the daredevil spirit of his youth, the septuagenarian is undaunted when strolling around the streets of a city notable for its high murder rate and gang violence. “The people in Newburgh love our dog Louis and they love Caroline.We just wander about the streets.” The thought of this gentle ex-Radleian strolling through the crumbling neighbourhoods of Newburgh both alarms and amuses me but when I express my concern he merely guffaws. “They are scared of policemen but I’m too old to be one, plus I speak oddly and that rather intrigues them. There’s a prominent drug trade but I avoid it.” As always, he greatly respects his subjects too. “The other thing I’ve always done is to come back with a photograph and give the people I’ve photographed a print. Even if they don’t like it they think that is honourable, so I’ve been able to show my face. I’m quite accepted there.” Beneath the fondness for Newburgh is a sense of outrage that the state of the city highlights how so many African Americans have nothing going in their favour. “It’s a disgrace, it’s terrible. It’s just one example of one of the worst things about America.”
Since 2008 Dmitri has been blogging, uploading the portraits he takes on his outings with Caroline. Each image is accompanied by a simple explanation of how the picture came about, sometimes a short history of the conversation between photographer and subject or why he wanted to take the picture. He says that unlike his England and the English project, where he captured life going on around him, in his American work his subjects “confront the camera”. The blog is compelling – as much for the captions that reveal how this photographer connects with his subjects as for the portraits themselves – and is testament to Dmitri’s unceasing passion and drive.
In our opening conversation he said he was “busy again”, but it’s clear that Dmitri has never really slowed down. He says he learnt patience from director Stanley Kubrick who requested that he shoot stills on his films, following a portrait shoot for Harpers & Queen.
As we’re winding up the conversation he suddenly remembers something else. “I had an email from a collector today which I was very excited about. He likes everything on my website so I might sell him...” At this point he breaks into laughter at the hope of selling a lot of prints in one fell swoop. Although it was the experience of watching a young Radleian walk up to a general all those years ago that informed his method of working, it looks as if the patience he learnt from Kubrick might finally be paying off.
www.kasterine.com
- Average Article Rating 0 Stars
-
Your Rating
Login Required!
Sorry - You must be a registered user & logged in to rate this.
Login | Register
Back to Categories