Feature: Picture perfect snapshots of English history
Published: 2 December, 2010
by DAN CARRIER
Photographer Red Saunders focuses on key moments in the struggle for democracy and creates iconic images those times would have given us – if the camera has been invented
IN this age of instant digital photography, where cameramen will point a lens in the general direction of a topic and machine-gun their subjects, the work of Red Saunders harks back to a less trigger-happy time.
Red, now 64, has spent a lifetime working for major newspapers and magazines – but his work, on display at the Museum of London, focuses on subject matter that could only really have been shot if he had use of the time-travelling Tardis.
Instead of capturing the world around him, Red has created vivid images of crucial scenes in British political history. He calls the works “environmental portraits” and he draws influence from Victorian paintings and theatre set design.
“I had, for a long time, kept my social and political activities separate from my artistic activities, but here I thought I would bring them together,” he explains.
Some of his works include representations of Wat Tyler and the Peasants Revolt from 1381; William Cuffay, as the leader of the Chartists; campaigning for the vote in Whitechapel in the 1840s; and a picture of Thomas Paine, the author of crucial tracts in both the American and French revolutions.
Red says it was partly his love of the crucial, yet untold stories in British history that drove him to create these images.
“These are topics that are hidden away – it is not about kings and queens and foreign wars and ‘great men’. It is crucial social history that people do not know about,” he says. “These are figures that are instrumental in moving forward justice and democracy. I recreate important moments in the long struggle of working people. My pictures engage with a different historical narrative involving dissenters, non-conformists, revolutionaries and radicals.
“I am always surprised that so few people know the story of Thomas Paine, which is simply extraordinary. And while I had heard about the Chartists, I did not know that the person elected to lead them – William Cuffay – was a black man.”
Red is a product himself of a revolution in British social history – he started work in 1960, and comes from the generation of trendy photographers who cut their teeth as London began to swing. He has always been involved in politics and was a founding member of Rock Against Racism.
“I answered an advert for a bright young lad,” he recalls. It was at the famous SH Benson advertising agency in Holborn – a sort of London Mad Men.” He was taken on as a tea boy and gradually learned the skills required to be a photographer by studying at night school at the Regent Street Polytechnic. His influences were American Pop Art – he photographed Andy Warhol once – and Soviet Constructionism.
Then a 20-year spell on the Sunday Times colour supplement gave him the chance to travel, and to do photo essays with some of the leading journalists of the period. It means he is firmly grounded in the era of film photography, working long before digitalisation, and his tableaux, as he calls them, reflect that.
He uses large format cameras – the type you see in films, where the photographer hides underneath a black cloth and the actual camera is mounted on a tripod.
“It’s a totally different way of working,” he says.
“It is very Zen – it is slow paced, and very considered. Technically you really have to know what you are doing. It is a long, time-consuming process.
“It is like making a small film. It is a labour of love and I had to do it on small resources. It means you have to collaborate with others to be able to achieve what you are after.”
It also means his friends have doubled as peasants and Chartists, and he even roped in students from the London College of Fashion to help with outfits – they used the project as part of their degree’s course work.
And these images are just the start – he plans to chronicle other crucial moments in British history, although he says he will only do pictures of times before the invention of the camera.
He now hopes to raise funds to create pictures of writer and women’s rights advocate Mary Wollstonecraft and John Bull, a preacher who traversed the country building support for peasants. “They were known as hedgerow priests as they weren’t allowed to preach in chapels,” he explains.
Red has found a blustery spot on the Dorset coast and plans to set the shot up in the depths of winter.
“I want it to be a stormy epic,” he says. “The place I have found has wonderful rolling hills as a backdrop and a bent hawthorn for John Bull to stand beneath.”
• Hidden by Red Saunders is in the foyer of the Museum of London, London Wall, EC2 (Barbican, St Paul’s, Moorgate tubes) until April 6. Free. Daily 10am-6pm. 020 7001 9844.