Title: Chris Steele-Perkins: From Survival Programmes to Magnum
Abstract: Chris Steele-Perkins was born in Rangoon, Burma, in 1947. His father took him back to Britain where he did most of his schooling. After graduating in psychology and while he was lecturing, he started free-lancing in photography. Joining the Exit group in 1975, he went on documenting British life as it was experienced by the under-privileged in inner-cities. The black and white photographs would ultimately become an exhibition as well as a book, Survival Programmes, published by the Open University in 1982. In 1976 he joined the young French photo-agency Viva. Although his first book The Teds was published in 1979, he was leaving behind the various aspects of British subcultures and traveling more and more frequently to foreigh destinations. He started to photograph the consequences of war and conflicts in the Middle East, Africa, Asia, and Central America. He joined Magum as a full member in 1982, won the Tom Hopkinson Award for British Journalism in 1988, the Oskar Barnack Prize and the Robert Capa Gold Medal in 1989, and finally the World Press Photo Award (category Daily Life) in 2000 His latest projects have more intimate as illustrated by Echoes (Trolley Ltd, 2003), a book of personal photographs the photographer took in 2001. This phone interview happened in April 2004. After, in the 1970s, such an interesting project as Survival Programmes with the Exit Photography Group (Nicholas Battye, Paul Trevor, and yourself), one deeply rooted in the English documentary tradition of those days, why did you seek foreign assignments and document wars? It was a normal evolution. I am from a middle-class background and I was for atime intrigued by the English way of life. Later, my involvement with Magnum and war photography had to do with the hard times for documentary photography. This was in the 1980s. The vehicles that used to present documentary photography, collapsed. I did not have any agenda: I wanted to know what it meant in the world to be at war. What did you learn from that experience? I learnt that war is a terrible thing and that I couldn't change anything. It is also a test for yourself. I never felt that I made any of my best photographs under such circumstances. But it changed my mind. I started to photograph in a more fluid way. You don't really know why you do these things. The pictures that mean the most to me are the ones that operate gently rather than directly, pictures that are more about how people react to, cope with a given situation. We can all create differences at some kind of level, but it is egotistic to think we can make some major changes. What do you think of the evolution in the media coverage of foreign conflicts, the photographers for instance? Media management seems more sophisticated than it used to be. Regarding the phenomenon of embedded photographers, of course the army has more control, but I have no major objection though. Even you can still do something interesting. …
Publication Year: 2004
Publication Date: 2004-05-01
Language: en
Type: article
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