(I’ll keep the post on geo-politics for another day – this is personal)
Here in the town I live, we have a well equiped centre devoted to circus arts. For some years now I have ‘worked’ here for free as a photographer – interesting to note that there are now 388 albums of photos dedicated to Circa on my site (Circa is the name of the association that runs this place)
Up until recently, it was pretty straightforward – the person dealing with the artists at Circa would alert me to the fact that a company was arriving for a residency (usually 10 – 14 days) and I would contact them and visit to photograph whatever it was they were doing.
As a general rule, the companies were in the ‘creation’ stage, which means anything between first steps, and nearly finished, but very often something was missing – lighting, costumes, music etc. As such, many of the photos I took were fine for a ‘history’ of what they were doing, and where they had got to, but rarely useable for publicity. The albums of photos I created were interesting, but I rarely received orders for images.
Sometimes however, the companies request a ‘shooting’ – this is good as it’s A: paid work, and B: usually preparing for publicity, press releases etc. This is much more interesting as we can do a kind of ‘stop-start’ performance where sometimes I ask them to repeat a sequence as I’ve found a better angle etc. Most times the companies go away with a batch of images, and I see my name in lights !
Sadly, the last four rersidencies have simply not gone according to plan – and this is very frustrating.
Either I spend a long time waiting for nothing to happen – one time I waited 4 hours for the artist to suddenly decide he had a sciatica and couldn’t perform.
And on three occasions I’ve sent the link to the albums to the artists – and heard NOTHING in return.
Here are some shots from two different companies who, to date, have not even bothered to thank me for my efforts
The idea of presenting the images like this is actually two-fold – it gives a much better indication of movement, and in the event that the company hasn’t organised it’s costumes at the time of the residency, the fact that they are not clear in the images means that the images can still be used for pre-publicity.
I don’t want to stop doing this – I actually quite like trying to give life to otherwise static performances – but I can’t help thinking that these people are taking the piss….