An interview with Ian Beesley

In the spring of 2015, just months before I completed my degree in Graphic Arts and Design, I interviewed Bradford based photographer Ian Beesley about his work and practice. This is a great little interview with advice if you are about to leave university or are just starting out on a creative endeavour.

Sophie Pitchford: I noticed you do a lot of work around people. The thought of entering other peoples lives and asking to photograph them and make work about them is quite daunting, what advice would you give me looking at this.

Ian Beesley: I understand it’s hard to go and photograph people you don’t know but what I’ve always done is focused around where I live, that’s why I’ve photographed Bradford so much. You should look at Mansfield, look at the area around where you’re known and accepted. So you have the advantage of being the insider. If I went to Mansfield and took photographs I wouldn’t have the insight that you have, similar if you came to Bradford. You can either be the insider looking around or the outsider looking in. What you should do is look at the things you know best, even look at your own family.

I then show Ian some photographs I had taken for my brief on working men’s clubs including photographs of my grandmother and her friends.

SP: You’re right I do find the photographs I take at home look more comfortable and natural than others I have taken.

IB: Well they will be won’t they? They don’t mind that you’re there, they know you and the thing is they also trustyou, and of course that’s the important thing in the dynamic of image making. I would definitely say stick with an area you know, and the people that you know because you’re accepted and you’re trusted.

SP: How do you tackle issues which could potentially be too big to handle

IB: No you shouldn’t make your work too broad because often the significant detail is more important and by going in and distilling it down to a very precise thing will probably show more than if you did a very wide and generic project.

SP: As a creative, you are always given so much contrasting advice, how do you deal with that?

IB: The problem is that a lot of people will have a lot of ideas for you to think about but you’ve actually got to go back to what you have access to and that you feel comfortable with and what you know, to produce the foundation, the building blocks of it. Then you can start pushing it further. As Paul Strand said, ‘every photograph you ever need to take is within one mile of your doorstep’

SP: It’s interesting to see that you experiment with conceptual photography alongside documentation, can you tell me a bit about it?

IB: My practice has actually shifted a bit over the past 10 years, I still do lots of social documentary photography but a lot of the stuff I do now is concept based and sometimes site specific. Such as the work I made for the ultra scan department in Bradford hospital, they asked me to produce some work for the waiting area. It went through a long process because I did submit a number of ideas all in which they rejected because what they really wanted was pictures of lovely landscapes, which you can see why, people sat in waiting areas are usually nervous and a beautiful landscape would definitely be a distraction. So I considered that element whilst at the same time wanted something that referenced the scanning, so that’s why it’s that shape. It also represents the swing of a pendulum, and you know how usually a scan is from the outside looking in, well these pictures are from the inside looking out onto what I’ve based on the 5 elements.

SP: How do you find the kind of work you want to do?

IB: You have to realise that thing you’re going into is a free-lance economy, you’re going to have to work for yourself, or take commissions, sell work and things like that. Having said that there are opportunities, but you have to go out and find them, they’re not going to come to you. One of the things you should be subscribing to is Artist Newsletter it might cost you £30 to subscribe to it but they have lots of advice about costing’s of commissions, about copyright and insurance but the most important thing is that every week they publish the longest list of opportunities for photographers, writers, performers and just about everything. They also have a lot of calls for international exhibitions, not just for photography but all things, Graphic arts and things like that. See if galleries want a specific subject they will go to the appropriate artist, and most regional galleries are likely to be open for offer, so if you have an idea for an exhibition you can always apply, you just have to identify that what you’re doing is going to the right place.

SP: Great! Finally, do you have any advice?

IB: First you have to realise what you want to be, and where you want to be. I gave it a go in London and I hated it, I’ve always stuck to the North. Once you know that you have to establish a presence showing what you do. Write a list on how you might do that, you get your work published you get your work exhibited you get your work on websites; you get it out in to the public. You start producing little things, a set of post cards for example; they’re cheap and easy enough. You just need to create stuff to start making a presence. Then you have a look round and try to identify the companies and institutions that you’d like to work for, worldwide! You might be based in Nottinghamshire but you it’s irrelevant because we’ve got the Internet. It could be anywhere, if you’re doing stuff that’s not building giant bloody bronze sculptures then it’s easy enough to get around. The first thing you need to do is get a nice website built and think about key words that people search for, work out how Google works, how the search engine works. You can get that in part of a website package, you can get not only a Geo tracker but also a word tracker and it will tell you what people are looking at, so what you do is you encode those words into the opening page of your website. On the other side of things, you need to also produce some sort of artefacts that you can send to people, people love to have things, it’s alright to have a website or emailing people but the trick to do is to give somebody a card, something really well designed that they can keep, because what they’ll do is they’ll say ‘oh I like that, I’ll keep that’ and stick it on the wall or in their draw. I’ve had people 6 or 7 years after the event ringing me up saying ‘Ian, I’ve got that thing that you did’. You’d be surprised, I have things coming back from 10 years ago. If you build a presence up, so that you have an archive that’s in the public some people will keep stuff and it will turn up years later. It’s just about building all the time, it’s a bit like throwing a pebble into a pool, it goes out and the echo’s come back. So you need to do that, you need to go home or wherever you’re going after finishing here and look for contracts and commissions. Subscribe to artist newsletter, also speak to people like you have done to me, I still do it now and in my experience it’s the good people, the genuine people will always be there to help you. But like I said, you just need to make stuff and send it out. I still do it now; I bombard people, make calendars and just send them out. But it doesn’t always work instantly, people do tend to give up because they think ‘ah nothings happened’ but in reality unless you land something on someone’s desk when they’ve got something going on It doesn’t work, what you need them to do is to keep it, keep your details. ALWAYS always put your name and details on everything and never ever change your phone number, oh, and always keep absolutely everything you ever make and ever photograph, because I’m still generating income from pictures I took 35 years ago.

www.ianbeesley.com