Have studio, will travel
Tackling a project of this size, and delivering the results on time, meant that, at times, Griffin had to take a novel approach to his method of shooting. Although many of the portraits taken as part of the project were on location around the site, Griffin also took the initiative to set up a tent as a makeshift studio, and arranged for his subjects to come to him. “As the numbers of subjects wanting to participate increased I started to realise that traipsing all over a site that big looking for people was never going to work,” he says. “It was a quite substantial affair in the end: we had a toaster, fridge, coffee machine, etc. as well as all the photographic gear for the shoot.
“Greg and I talked about how we should light the people I was going to photograph, and we agreed that the public would like popular photography best – not anything too deep and ‘artsy’. In the end we decided on a burnt-out white background, something similar to Richard Avedon’s look from the late 1960s. I wanted to portray the workers as big, hunky men, almost like fashion models, and the management as if they were under stress to get the project completed. If the managers were the officers back at HQ, the workers were like the soldiers, the infantry, going out to war at the station, out building all these tunnels and walls.”
Management is a subject that Griffin has photographed many times before, but never with digital. For this project, however, a Mamiya ZD made an appearance alongside his trusty Hasselblad 503, and Griffin was impressed: “The ZD was wonderful; it’s got a lovely feel to it. I used it for all of the colour shots in the exhibition, and that reminded me of when I used to shoot colour portraits on film years back for magazines: back then I’d shoot as if it were black & white, as I wanted a mono image for myself. The tones are smooth and fresh, and when I was shooting under mixed lighting conditions, the ZD would figure out what was happening and cope with it beautifully. Mixed lighting was always a nightmare on film. I even liked using the Mamiya at night – image quality is superb. It’s like using a digital version of a Pentax 67.”
As Griffin took more and more pictures, so word got around and more and more people wanted to be involved. When it got to the point that none of the managers wanted to be left out, Griffin and his team were shooting six times a day. “No matter what the weather, we’d be using all of the environments we could find,” he says. “We resorted to those difficult little areas by the loos that no one in their right mind would normally consider using for a portrait shoot.”
The next stages
With all of this material rapidly accumulating, the question of what to do with it all was weighing heavily on Griffin’s mind. A piece in The Sunday Times magazine on the first set of 18 pictures helped to drum up some initial interest, but finding a venue and sponsor for the final show has been surprisingly hard. After being rebuffed by the National Portrait Gallery and the V&A, Griffin decided to approached the Royal Photographic Society, which coincidently has recently made Griffin an honourary fellow. “They said they would be delighted to help us with the show so we have them on board now, which is great.”
The exhibition, which will run for a number of weeks, has been hard work for the entire team. All of Griffin’s black & white photographs had to be scanned first before being inkjet printed by Mike Crawford of Lighthouse Darkroom, using large-format Epson inkjet printers. Griffin’s colour work was slightly easier to handle, being from digital capture on his Mamiya ZD.
People at work
Having photographed ordinary people at work for so many years, Griffin recognises that he is now in something of a unique position. “I had my previous book Work from 1988 in mind when I started this project,” he recalls. “I have been photographing workers for a long time now, be it management or manual workers. I think I probably have the largest archive of this kind of work in the UK, maybe even the world. It all began for me in 1972 and I am still adding to the collection now. That’s 35 years of pictures. That would make such a fantastic show or book, actually: all my work pictures.”
Teamphoto is on at the German Gymnasium next to King’s Cross and St Pancras stations from 18 September to 19 November 2007. The catalogue to support the show will be available from bookshops from 18 September, priced £20.
