Talk by Nicholas.J.R.White image
•He was previously a student studying photography at Plymouth College of art (2008).
•He has a love of the outdoors, and photography was the best way to display this.
•His original dream was to be a drummer in a metal band, but this didn’t work out. When he finished his A-levels he went onto study at PCA.
•He didn’t like photographing people and didn’t like anything man made.
•The individuals that have influenced him include: Simon Norwell, Richard Moss.
•‘The militarisation of Dartmoor’, was a project that he took on during his third year of his degree. Through this he wanted to display things that had a connection to the war, and not the idea of bodies everywhere.
•He works with medium format film.
•When finishing his degree, he struggled to find his path and work getting recognised.
•He took on many different jobs during this time, but nothing that he truly wanted to do.
•‘Black dots’ (2015-2018), this was a project that he took on when he was working full-time, using holidays and sick days to his advantage, being able to go out and photograph work towards this project. He set maps up in his room and placed red stickers on places where mountain bothies were most common. He did approximately 3-4 shoots a year, travelling around all over the place. He also made a lot of documentation on the project that he was making, doing behind the scenes images showing his set up etc.
•As part of this project he also had to take portraits as well. He realised that this would add value to his work, in terms of the bothy community.
•A soon as he completed his shoot for his project, he decided he wanted to quit his job as soon as he got back.
•He struck a deal with ‘Rab’ clothing company, where by he gave them access to the photos on the bothy community project which he had made, in exchange for them giving him the equipment he needed for every trip he went on. After every shoot, he would polish things up and then send it to them, so that they could put it on their website.
•Through having made a connection with ‘Rab’, he then gained a large amount of publicity from other well companies.
•After this he decided to publish a book, ‘Black Dots’.
•He then wanted to make a short film and so enlisted the help of his friend to do this. Enabling him to generate more publicity for his project and the work that he has created.
•Advice that he has given, is to not take it to heart if you enter a competition and do not win, or do not place at all. This does not devalue your work or the quality of your work. Enter competitions but don’t let them take over you, make sure that you are doing it for yourself.
•A project that he is currently doing is ‘Carpathia’; initially this involved him taking portraits of some of the rangers that were working on creating wildlife parks for nature in order to protect them from being hunted. This has so far been a learning experience for him, as he was helping and getting his hands dirty. Then once he got to know the individuals, he began photographing the rangers. He didn’t want the images to be so obvious in what they were trying to show, so instead he took a step back, so that you could see them hard at work, but not knowing exactly what they are doing.
•Recently he has been doing more commercial work, but still likes to mix his commercial work with his personal work, so that potential clients can see how versatile he is. He prefers to capture his individuals using film cameras but does also take some images on his DSLR camera but prefers the quality of film.
•The best way to work under pressure with a piece of kit e.g. film cameras, is to know the equipment well, so that you aren’t wasting time.

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