Personal Work

get fresh with your camera! featuring Paul McMullin

The Albert Dock

The Albert Dock was opened in 1845 (officially in July 1846 by Prince Albert). Covering approx 7.5 acres, it was designed and built by Jessie Hartley at a cost of £721,756.

By just 1860, trade was starting to decline at the dock, as it was designed primarily for sailing ships and the larger screw-propelled steam ships were too big to enter the inner dock. By 1920 there was almost no commercial traffic into the Albert Dock, although there was a brief reprise during WW2 when it served as a base for escort vessels in the Battle of the Atlantic. However, this was the last real use for the dock and, other than for smaller coastal vessels, it was barely used after this time. The dock was abandoned in 1972.

The Albert Dock has now been converted to luxury apartments, museums (Museum of Life and the Beatles Museum), art gallery (the Tate Liverpool), restaurants and shopping facilities. It is frequently pressed into service for period dramas and films, mainly because the sympathetic refurbishment has retained almost all the significant architectural featu

Almost all photographers come to the profession via a hobby interest in the subject from an earlier stage of their lives. The problem is that many people find once they have converted their hobby to their business, they have suddenly lost their hobby. After a year or two, when things have settled down and you have slowed from the frantic pace of building a business, you may find that the batteries are a little drained and you yearn for the days when making pictures was simply fun. The seed of an idea for this article came while watching Martin Grahame-Dunn during the recent SWPP/BPPA trip to Dubai. He was sitting, laptop on lap, enthusing over manipulating images with Nik filters (see Filter Factory this issue), patently having a great time simply making images just for the hell of it.

Personal work takes many forms but in essence it is that photography you do just because you like doing it or because you are driven by an inner desire to express an opinion photographically. It is usually done without regard to payment although it might build towards that direction eventually. It can range from an assistant photographer borrowing the ‘bosses’ gear’ over the weekend to shoot his girlfriend and her mates, through to taking a day-a-month to go out with your mates and shoot for fun, at whichever destination you have selected – and probably a beer or two before you come home. For some, this is a necessity to retain their sanity, for others it is a means of keeping fresh – keeping an edge to your shooting. It is difficult to imagine that it would ever be detrimental to your business.

What should you do?

f you need to rekindle your interest, the project might be selfevident – walkers, skiers, boat owners, cyclists, etc tend to visit places as part of their leisure, although to be truly personal ‘work’ you might wish to be alone rather than dragging a young family about with you. Charity work offers some scope and has a feelgood factor as well – fun runs, marathons, fêtes and so on all offer opportunities as does the creation of posters, leaflets and brochures for organisations (but only if you don’t do it as part of your day-today work).

Chasing a qualification can also add an interest booster and will certainly sharpen up your technique.

Too busy?

Let’s have none of it. I think it was Bambi Cantrell who said you should aim to take one photograph at every wedding just for yourself, and you should plan it and think about it beforehand – make it count, your client might love it as well, try something outrageous!

Inspiration

Inspiration pops up in all sorts of places. By pure coincidence, The Guardian newspaper recently published 14 of the greatest speeches of all time (Churchill’s ‘we shall fight them on the beaches’; Luther King’s ‘I have a dream’, etc). What a magnificent project to take each speech and make a 14-image set to illustrate each!

The Albert Dock and the Capital of Culture

An essay such as this needs illustration. A series taken by member, Paul McMullin, makes a perfect candidate. This is personal work in the best of traditions, taken while McMullin was just starting out his career, working for one of the established photographic practises in Liverpool. He would spend his lunchtimes (and some weekends) inside the decaying Albert Dock, capturing the very faded grandeur of the place, which was in many ways just as the last of the dockers left it, but with its leaking roof, and an abundant carpet of ferns growing across the floors. Those leaving dockers could hardly know that one day it would be magnificently refurbished into swanky offices and apartments and that in 2008 it will become the centre of the Capital of Culture 08 celebrations, housing the Tate Liverpool. If ever a picture set was taken for personal reasons and suddenly its time had come, then this is it. It was shot on film, mono, colour negative and transparency, using a mix of a Sinar Norma, a Hasselblad C500 and a Mamiya 330 and was recently rescanned on a Flextight. Shot around 1978, the 44 images will be 30 years old in 2008.

Photo Quote: I don't like to work with assistants. I'm already one too many the camera alone would be enough. - Alfred Eisenstaedt