Highlight: Poetry in the 100 Club! As I am usually crushed up agains the speakers for this venue it was refreshing to be able to actually move around the space to shoot.
Lowlight: Being made to feel illiterate by a bunch of teenage kids - the week just gets worse (see National Poetry Competition)
Fill in: The cream of the young performing poetry set is crammed into a red and black, spotlit, graffitti-ed dungeon of the 100 Club (see National Poetry Competition). It is fairly heaving down there with anarchic teenagers exorcising their emotions and then there's me, blundering into this hallowed atmosphere brandishing a camera with a visual expression that says 'Trust me -I'm a Photographer'. Maybe it's because they are performance artists, but they all take the order to have their photo taken in their stride, either that or it's because the inimitable Joelle Taylor has them well trained. As wells the portraits, I have to document the whole event getting audience shots, mentoring shots, group shots, performances and presentations.
These young poets never fail to amaze me with their insights and ability to paint with words. From Glastonbury to Drag Queens, no subject is sacred and the evening is filled with humour, anger, irony, sadness and any other emotional scab you might want to pick over.
Look out future here comes (in no particular order):
Aaron ICY Denyer
Gabriel Akamo
Megan Beech
Charlotte Higgins
Harry Wilson
Tamara Lawrence
Renne Pascal
Emily Anne
Tech Spec: The light was not great but decided to give these guys the low-fi NME treatment and just grabbed them unawares and shot them (photographically speaking) with no additional lights, reflectors or other gizmos as they all looked funky and needed no embellishments. They were not phased at all - in fact Gabriel and Renne were obviously well seasoned at it.
I used a 24-70mm zoom, turned it up to 3200 ISO and shot at F2.8. for the whole event. When it came to the performances I felt like I was at NME again - except I was not trying to cram the whole thing onto one 36 frame roll of Tri-X pushed to 3200.
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