Sophie Howarth - From 20,000 Photos to Peace, Love and Brown Rice
You queued to get into the inner sanctum of the Big Day Out D-barrier, endured the bladder shrinking agony waiting for your favourite band to hit the stage, put up with bands you hated intensely and got the bruises from the front barrier to show for your dedication. And yet a few minutes before the band a select band of laminate-brandishing impostors, carrying their own body weight in cameras and other photographic paraphernalia stumbled nonchalantly into the stage pit and for the first three songs theirs is the best view in the house. No wall of security guards, nothing between them and the band.
As far as the Big Day Out (BDO) goes, no one knows the photographic experience better than Sophie Howarth, who is employed as official tour photographer and has been involved with the festival since the beginning. Sophie has published a photographic history of the festival Peace, Love and Brown Rice, taken from her unique and personal perspective. The Dwarf spoke to her about her book, photographing the BDO and why digital cameras are not so great after all.
Sophie’s photographic adventures began when her Mum sent her to do a short course on photography when she was 16, “the sort of things mums do”, and although she started at art school in Sydney to study for a Diploma in Fine Art she found that her true vocation lay away from the more high art of her studies.
“Painting was a massive struggle, whereas I picked up the camera and photography just seemed to happen and I used to feel really good doing it. The teachers were like ‘Yeah, you should pursue that, it’s a fun thing to do’”.
As with most other music photographers Sophie’s entry into a life of photographing bands for a living followed the traditional route of having friends in bands and friends who worked in the music industry.
“Somewhere along the way I left art school and had a decision to make – ‘what am I going to do now? I’ve been to college, learnt a skill, where am I going to do it, how am I going to do it, how am I going to make a career out of the art which I love to do? This thing is showing itself in front of me, I may as well go there and see what happens’. People started asking me to do shoots and papers. I worked on the street press doing their live page every week, which got me into shows and it build from there, from those little papers to magazines to doing $50 jobs to $5,000 dollar jobs”.
With the friends and contacts she had made in the music business through her photographs, Sophie was fortunate to be involved with the BDO since the start. Having photographed it every year since 1994 (she was there in 1992 but didn’t photograph it and was away in India in 1993) it might seem the obvious end-goal would be to publish a book of the photographs at some point, but this wasn’t the case.
“I didn’t really think about making a book. It had some into a few conversations along the way because I’d always wondered why I was spending my money getting around the BDO”.
However, help was at hand to help Sophie understand and fully appreciate the unique archive she had assembled over the years she had been following the tour.
“In 2000 it really started to come to the surface. And I also made it a personal choice. I didn’t want to just keep going to shows and shooting from the pit every night of the week. I wanted to use my photography and branch out so I started doing other things like more humanitarian photo essays. I did a lot of shoots in my late 20s, early 30s in North East Arnhem Land and I also went to an agent and started doing advertising. And my agent couldn’t believe that I had this smorgasbord of photographs and she was like ‘we gotta do a book, we gotta do a book’, so she helped me bring it to the surface”.
Making the decision to put a book together was the easy part; choosing what should go in it was something more time consuming, with boxes of BDO mementos hidden all over Sophie’s house and the small matter of the narrowing down the 20,000 of so photos that she had taken down the years.
“We created a filing system because of course the material, the paraphernalia, negatives, proof sheets, programmes, setlists, diaries was absolutely everywhere, and she helped me get it into a form that I could then start thinking about making it into a book. The way that I work is very organic, in that story telling way and all the material was on different things – some was on CD, some were on proof sheets, some were on print so I got it all onto the same format, all onto CD, all onto proof sheets and all printed as mini-prints so I physically had them to look at. And that pretty much took from 2000 to 2005 when I met Jeremy Gordon who helped me produce it”
Funding the project then presented a fresh series of challenges, with remaining in complete artistic control over the book of paramount importance and something that Sophie wasn’t prepared to lose sight of.
“Jeremy and I went for gold last year and put our heads down for nine months and made the decision to self publish. I had a couple of offers but they wanted to take the material and do it their way and I was going back to the art thing and I enjoy laying out and seeing the whole picture and so I wanted to keep the integrity that way and tell my story, I didn’t just want the story of the BDO”.
However, the positive feedback that Sophie has received on her book shows that she made the correct decision by ensuring that she kept full artistic control of the book.
“I get lots of people saying that I captured it so well that they feel like it’s their story in terms of the photos being so personal and people resonate and think that it’s their own photo album. I think because I told it from such a personal perspective it touches that place in them”.
Coming from an artistic background, and as with other photographers who have come from similar backgrounds, Sophie has an awkwardness with being labelled as a ‘photographer’.
“It sounds funny but I don’t really ever label myself a photographer, like in my eyes. I think of myself more artistically as a bit more all-rounded as in terms of I love laying out the photos, drawing on them, cutting and pasting things. A lot of the time the record companies that do use me entrust me to create photographs that aren’t sterile, they’re moody or environmental. To more that’s more creative, more of a creative process than just saying ‘Can you photograph that guy over there’”.
With Sophie having started her photographic career in the early 1990s her photographic archive was built up in a pre-digital world of negatives, contact sheets and prints. However, a rarity for most photographers, and especially the majority of photographers involved in the music industry, is that Sophie has stayed true to film and has not been tempted with the darkside and a move to digital.
“I have a digital snappy but I love film and there’s nothing in me that is trying to learn how to get what I want out of a digital camera. I love the snappy thing because you can take a billion photos but it’s something in putting the film in the camera, knowing you’ve got 36 shots to get what you want and then taking it out and taking it off to get processed”.
“Someone scoffed at me last BDO because I was shooting film, a photographer I’ve known for years, in a ‘Come on get with the times’ kind of thing. I’m like ‘You can’t get the grain and you can’t get all the little gritty bits and pieces’ and he’s like ‘Yeah, just put in noise’. But how long does it take you to learn a whole another skill on a computer to create something you can just chuck a roll of film in the camera and get”.
“Nikon lent me a camera for a tour in 2004 and it was amazing but they were the photos that I didn’t get to look at [when putting the book together] because there were so many and they were on file and just couldn’t get to them, I couldn’t see them and the computer was running really slow. I need to touch things, I need to pick up a photo to look at it to know if I like it.”
With the ever-decreasing cost of digital cameras the popularity of photographing live music is at an all-time high, with a wall of punters lined up in front of the stage of even the smallest gigs, armed with everything from the most expensive DSLRs to the cheapest camera phone. As someone so established and with so much experience does Sophie have any advice for the aspiring music photographer?
“I don’t think anyone ever articulated it to me, at least not photographically, but just follow that think that speaks to you inside. I come from that kind of perspective more than a cerebral one, thinking about it too much, and what life has shown me is that if you follow that voice it won’t do you wrong”.
“My experience of capturing music is a mood and it inspires or ignites something in people, it’s such an amazing vehicle, a voice that speaks to so many people. I think that the photographer has that ability to document the emotion that gets poured out at a show”.
