Chris Shaw began taking photographs on the Sandy Hill housing estate near Aldershot in 1987 just after, as he puts it: “I got in a bit of trouble at college for my attitude and they tried to chuck me out.” When pressed on what kind of trouble exactly, he says matter-of-factly: “I was causing mayhem on the campus, turning up to classes pissed.”
Now a long time sober, he recalls his younger self in a clear-eyed, if unrepentant, way. “I had moved from Toxteth to Farnham to study photography, but I didn’t really get on with the people at college. There was just one northerner and one black person in the year. It was like I was suddenly confronted with the class system head-on. I felt alienated and I was drinking heavily. It was all a bit of a mess, really.”
Out of the mess, though, came the images that make up Retrospecting Sandy Hill, a photobook that shows the beginning of a style that would find its full expression in Shaw’s most celebrated series, Life as a Night Porter (2006).
I met up with Shaw for lunch during Paris Photo. He has lived in Paris since 2009, though his Wirral accent remains undimmed. “I initially started going to Sandy Hill because I was feeling ostracised by these rich kids at college,” he tells me. “Maybe it was just all in my head, but I felt like I was going there every day as a reaction and using the camera to speak to normal people.”
The Sandy Hill images merge fly-on-the-wall documentary with the kind of raw intimacy that is his signature. Portraits and snapshot-style glimpses of everyday life on the estate are rendered in high contrast monochrome tones. He was drawn to 80s “soul boys” with their casual style and cars, perhaps because they represented his younger self, but also curious children and ordinary people going about their daily routine.
Were they not suspicious of a stranger with a camera? “No, not at all. It wasn’t a dangerous place. I’d already done some documentary work on Toxteth so this was a bit of a breeze. We’d chat and I’d take photos. A lot of the time, they’d check my accent and start taking the piss, talking about Brookside.”
Often, he would give local people the prints he made, and soon the word went around. “People would turn up wanting their picture done,” he says, smiling. “For me, Sandy Hill was a breath of fresh air, a home from home.”
While he befriended and photographed the residents, Shaw also recorded his thoughts – and theirs – in his notebook. Back in his studio, he began writing these fragments in marker pen on the prints. A broken branch dangling from a desolate tree against a brick wall has the scrawled title, Pastoral My Arse. On the opposite page, a young, pregnant girl stands outside a shop advertising toilet rolls (63p a twin pack), while a large cardboard box seems to hover in the air beside her. In red marker, a single ominous line reads. “Jim said she was jumped, humped and made to undress in the wilderness.”
“As I’ve said before, it’s not Ansel Adams,” says Shaw, laughing, “but it’s not taking the piss or looking down on anyone. I namecheck that book, Chavs by Owen Jones [in the introduction], because I really identified with what he was saying. These were working class people with nice houses and aspirations. They weren’t chavs, whatever that means.”
Shaw grew up in Wallasey on Merseyside, and worked “on a lathe” in an engineering plant in Ontario, Canada, before being laid off. There, he picked up a book on photography in a public library and was mesmerised by a small reproduction of an image by Ikko Narahara. “It was two dustbins suspended in the air from his New Mexico series. That was the turning point for me.”
He returned to England and enrolled on a foundation course in photography in Liverpool, where Tom Wood was one of the tutors and an early inspiration. From the start, though, Shaw was a singular talent, temperamentally unsuited, as his Farnham experience highlights, to the strictures of art college and, to a degree, to the dictates of the art market. His raw, black and white images took a long time to find a critical audience in Britain and, for a time, he remained something of an outsider, both by temperament and design.
“I know that my experience as a photographer is different to anyone else I speak to. For a long time, I did menial jobs to fund my work because I couldn’t afford to work as a photographer’s assistant for nothing in order to learn. I don’t teach. I’ve never done journalistic work. I still make and sell my own prints without a gallery. I’ve always wanted to do that and I remember Martin Parr telling me that that was impossible, but that just made me want to do it even more.”
His most famous part-time job inspired his best-known series, Life as a Night Porter, in which he created a style that he describes as “almost an anti-aesthetic”. Taken on a humble Instamatic, the photographs evoke a sense of his own precarious life – and state of mind – at that time. Shaw began working as a night porter in the Bonnington Hotel in London, because the job provided live-in accommodation after he had suddenly became homeless. Permanently exhausted from working long hours on the night shift and constantly hungover, he soon found himself existing in a state of what he calls “permanent jet lag”.
“I’d knock myself out for a few hours with alcohol and then wake up in time to go to work. The buzzer is going all night. You’re on call for room service, and then the deliveries arrive early in the morning. It’s full on before you even take into account the regular mayhem – guests locked out of their rooms and wandering around half naked, arguments, pissed people, fights. It was a pretty surreal existence.”
His exhaustion inevitably led to mistakes in the darkroom, which he came to embrace. “Once, I dropped a print on the floor and stood on it. There’s thumb smudges on some of the prints from when I touched them when the emulsion was still wet. I’ve accidentally exposed the prints to the light and liked the result. There’s one called The Girl Who Didn’t Powder Her Nose and it looks like she has cocaine on her boots, but it’s because I’d left it in the dark room developer and forgotten about it. When I whipped it out, I saw that smudge of light and thought, ‘Fuck! This is so great.’
“There is,” he says, sounding animated, “a lot of alchemy that goes on in the dark room. Some might say I’m making an aesthetic out of bad printing but, to me, it is pure magic.” Alongside Retrospecting Sandy Hill, Shaw has just published Horizon Icons, a book of desert nightscapes made in the Joshua Tree wilderness that is a Californian counterpoint to last year’s Weeds of Wallasey.
One wonders what will happen as Shaw continues to be embraced by the art world (the Tate hosted a mini-retrospective last year). For now, he remains an elusive figure, content to work quietly away on his own terms and one senses he doesn’t suffer fools gladly. “The fact that I’ve managed to do five different books with five different publishers without destroying the working relationships is a bit of a miracle in itself,” he says at one point.
Does he feel differently about himself and his work now? “Well, put it this way, I didn’t sell my first print until 2001. That’s 15 years of making them and not selling them. Going into the dark room every day thinking you are going to sell your work is a very different feeling to relentlessly printing and, all the while, thinking, ‘Why am I doing this?’ The pressure is off to a degree. Then again,” he says, grinning, “in 2008, I was on my uppers and I had to work in a hotel in my home town for a while. It’s been fine since, but you never know.”
