Mentors

It’s a funny thing about mentors. Some of those who have influenced us most, probably had no idea at the time how they would affect our lives. That’s the case with two men who kindled my passion for photography.

During my early childhood I was fortunate enough to grow up in a large house in Pinner, which was then, in the 1960’s, still a quiet village on the periphery of the London suburbs. Fields bordered the village, yet we were still on the Metropolitan tube line to London – 20 minutes to Baker Street.

My mother had been in the theatre, so knew a lot of actors and celebrities, and the easy tube ride combined with the sunny gardens at Sundawn Orchard meant a long string of visitors came down in the hot Summers. One regular was Laon – Laon Maybanke – an old friend of my mother’s from the time when she lived and worked in London. To a parochial six year old Laon seemed the epitome of sophistication, and to those that knew him, and he had many friends at the top of the social whirl that was sixties London, he was witty, stylish and erudite.

Laon was also an accomplished portrait photographer. His two books, First Faces and Second Faces feature some of the biggest names of the era, many of whom are still stars now. Now collectors’ pieces, it was one of the great sadnesses of my life when my cherished copies were destroyed in a flood a few years ago.

Somewhere in one of those books is a photo of a blonde haired boy, about five or six, at the British Museum, with a Kodak Brownie around his neck. It’s me. Starting young. Rarely have I been seen in a new place since without a camera around my neck. Laon used a twin lens reflex, which seemed to me at six to be a fascinating and mysterious object. I don’t remember ever talking about photography with him, but for me at six he was the start of it all.

Such was my desire to emulate my hero that I attempted to copy his style. At six this was inevitably comic. Laon is remembered for his style in clothes as well as his wit, and one long hot Summer when he was staying at Sundawn he decided to take a gentle stroll around the rose garden. Everyone, including me, had been in swim suits all afternoon on that shimmering day, and as evening approached Laon had put on a stylish white towelling dressing gown over his swimsuit. My mother delights in telling the story of looking out of the window to see Laon slowly walking around the garden with a drink in one hand, white towelling dressing gown in place, with me following silently behind, with glass of water held aloft and draped in an old white towel I had found.

No doubt Laon had little idea of the influence he had. I was just the photogenic child of his best friend, but Laon lived for photography and somehow that passion had begun to transfuse into me. He had a way of capturing something in his portrait subjects that went to the heart of what made them special – surely the mark of a great celebrity portrait photographer. For those who can track down his books, you will find familiar faces just starting out on their path to stardom, but Laon caught the magic we now associate with them, right from the beginning.

Although we didn’t talk about photography – after all, what could I have discussed at six? – watching him work with the camera made me know I wanted to do the same.

Laon was loved by many around the world, but as is so often the case, my mother and he lost contact at a crucial point in his life back in the 1980’s, when she was moving home. He was one of a group of friends who had not yet been contacted with the change of address. It was much later that we heard, via a mutual friend, that following a bout of depression after being run over and injured outside Kew Gardens, he had quietly gone back to his flat, dressed in his finest evening wear, wrote farewell letters to his closest friends and lay down on his bed to await the effect of the overdose of sleeping pills he had taken.

There must have been a letter for my mother, but it never found its way to her. She always felt she could not have read it.

The second great influence must have had even less idea of his importance in my life. Still in Pinner, I was already a keen photographer at the age of ten. There was one studio in Pinner which specialised in photography called Humphrey-Saunders’ Studio. A little plain shop in the High Street with a blue canopy over the window, it drew me like a magnet. When I was not ogling cameras displayed in the shop window, I was inside leaving films for processing.

I remember on going in to the shop the walls were surrounded by massive enlargements of black and white photographs of polar expeditions. These were photographs from the classic era of polar exploration, and sometimes in the shot was the photographer with massive wooden bellows camera and tripod. The mixture of heady adventure, exotic location and the vintage equipment weaved its magic on me. I wondered whether the little elderly white haired man, Humphrey Saunders, who was the father to my English teacher at prep school and owned the shop, was one of those photographers in his youth. With the shyness of boyhood, I never had the courage to ask.

It must have been the mystery of those large format cameras in the heady enlargements in the shop, speaking of bravery and hardship at the edges of the world, that led me to spending my pocket money on the nearest thing I could afford, a vintage quarter-plate folding bellows camera. I bought it on a solo trip to a smart camera shop in London, where I must have seemed an eccentric boy in the time when 35mm. ruled the world.

Of course, nobody wanted a quarter-plate camera from the Edwardian era, so it was cheap enough for me to buy. Then I had to figure out how to take a picture on it: no easy feat for a youngster brought up on modern cameras. This meant many trips to Humphrey-Saunders’ shop to try and locate quarter plate glass plates or sheet film. To most shop owners of the time this would have been a major annoyance. Glass plates were in their last gasp in the early 1970’s, and no one else but the old man would have had the patience to persevere in tracking them down for me. But he did. Cut film too, and he developed the results – and they did look like photographs. I was hooked on large (if then rather small) format.

I am indebted to his patience, and to his great knowledge in large format. What I learned one long day in his presence at Sundawn Orchard has stood me in good stead for a lifetime interest in large format. My parents were separating, and the old house was to be sold. My father had contracted Humphrey-Saunders to take the brochure photos, in the days when estate agents didn’t dirty their hands with such things.

He turned up early one morning and I was there too. To my joy he didn’t disappoint. One couldn’t have imagined Humphrey-Saunders turning up with a single lens reflex, although they were de rigueur then. One couldn’t even have imagined him with a twin lens reflex. I still had the vision of the polar photos in my head. Well, he brought with him a 10×8″ mahogany Sanderson camera, complete with red leather bellows, big brass lens, tripod and dark cloth. It was heaven.

That long day was my apprenticeship into analogue photography at its most basic. This was the nineteenth century ballet that underlies all modern dance. Patient as always, the old man took the time to explain why – simply why – this museum piece was the best tool for the job. He taught me how to use it, how to load the dark slides, how to compose on that magnificent 10×8 inch frosted glass beneath that stuffy cloth, how to expose, judge depth of field – and much more. That one long day was the best foundation for photographic technique you could imagine. Such cameras and what they do still underpin all of modern photography.

It was a couple of weeks later when I saw the results and was hooked. I saw the magic of detail and resolution that 10×8 negatives are capable of, still unmatched by the best digital has to offer. He had not let down the hope of those polar photographs, and I can still walk into that shop, long gone, after all these years, in my mind’s eye, and see the old man’s kindly, patient face. Perhaps he never did feature in those early photographs, but he was my hero nonetheless.