About Stuart Clarke Life, work & Aspirations
Four Four Two meets Stuart Clarke
Stuart Clarke talks to FourFourTwo, July 2007
When did you take your first football picture?
I took my first football picture back at Vicarage Road (home of Watford) when they were ‘crappy’ in the 4th Division. I bunked off school (a rugby-dominated grammar school which had lessons on Saturdays) caught the train, instamatic camera hidden. I had all Sunday to think up an excuse.
I was joined on the Vicarage Road terraces by ‘the man with the bag’ who was always there-with-bag (not sure what was in it) shouting abuse from start to finish and threatening to leave but never did. He probably did leave for good when they got good under Elton John & Graham Taylor.
What would you say was your breakthrough picture?
Beyond my love for Watford, which included trying to get a girlfriend to go along there and me photograph her there under the floodlights, Professional football for me held a fascination. But it was mostly dark out there and the only place I really knew was the Vicarage. Most teams beyond Watford were ‘the enemy’ really, teams to be clambered over on the rise up. So, when after the Hillsborough Disaster, when I realized something of national importance was dying or in big trouble, I saw an opportunity to make a grand portrait and maybe, just maybe play a small part in football’s recovery. I started “The Homes of Football” in black and white. Then my filming turned to colour. How else would I be able to show that gold of my Watford shining through. I went to loads and loads of grounds during 1990 and the clubs were in a state. Still I loved what I was seeing. Beauty in the squalor and the degeneration.
“Sunset Over Springfield Park” was the picture which made people realise I was on to something, that I had taken the ‘everyone likes a sunset’ idiom, applied it to football, in an unfashionable place and… created a bit of visual magic, taking the viewer with me on some sort of Dorothy in Oz kind of journey.
If I clicked my heels, stuck out a thumb, jumped in my car I could suddenly and quickly be transported further along the road to another magical place with magical characters, which I felt (like Dorothy in the woods) came truly alive for me only. I was on a mission to find the path and link all the characters known or not known…
Then after that first spring and summer and sunsetted-autumn, a real stroke of luck – the weather changed significantly. It snowed at Wycombe. It was as if I laid down at Adams Park, opened my eyes to see snow, magically falling, no one else around save for… a strange and wonderful man in a sheepskin coat speaking funny… it was John Motson and film crew going out live on BBC‘s Football Focus.
Which is your favourite photo and why?
“Reporting From The Ground” made John Motson’s sheepskin coat famous which in turn he says made him famous . It created a vision of the English eccentric in touch with his eccentric weather and his eccentric wealth of football experiences… one has to remember we were not talking Manchester United here, but non-League Wycombe that day in December. How the whole nation, through the eyes and words of John Motson, can get excited by a team barely ranked in the top 100 of the English League system (taking on Peterbough ranked about 75th) ... well I won’t say “it beats me” because being a Watford fan – a fan of the underdog, I thoroughly understood it.
Who or what have been your inspirations?
I have always been after ‘my own vision’ but have looked for inspiration on and off the field. The painter Lowry, by not showing faces in his matchstick vision of Bolton Wanderers and the north inspired me to show faces. So too the chemist-photographer over in Cologne, August Sander, who showed nothing but faces and types of a German nation about to do themselves, and others, in.
The underdog and the almost-overlooked has always been my inspiration. In war-torn countries and in alleyways nearer to home, the ill-treatment of people and animals has always made me desperate to do something – even just to bear witness, with camera. Football is a subject full of underdogs (most teams and their supporters really, as most rarely win a thing) – it is a subject which conveys a lot of the struggle we all go through in everyday life and it is not surprising that lot of people have a lot of time for it, which is fortunate for me. On a grander scale football is as able as any in being anti-war and anti-racist which makes one feel that FourFourTwo, The Homes of Football, the England team, etc. etc. are all ‘players’.
If ever the enthusiasm was to have flagged, I should have anticipated that a Brooks Mileson character was just around the corner, armed with nothing more than Gretna. Here is a man, of ill health, who was almost crippled as a boy, but went on to outrun Brendan Foster (cross-country champion)... emerging years later as not only an altruistic kind old keeper of abandoned and abused animals (he has 680 or so in his backgarden sanctuary) but a dynamic driving-force behind taking Gretna (population 1,999) through all the ranks of Scottish football to play in their Premiership this season.
Career high point?
When I began The Homes of Football as a long-time portrait I mentioned setting myself 10 years because I felt that would show commitment but not too much commitment. I did not want to be a captive in the Palace of Oz – I was just a Kid at the altar of my father, on a journey. I wanted to ‘phone home’ to my Dad, and brother and uncle, post them my images, show something they had almost seen on the tv, but expressed in my own Stuart speak. And after 10 years? I suppose I would get back to chasing girls or being the father in my own family. In a way The Homes of Football was a tribute to above all my Dad, who had an almost mysterious love of the game and had always involved himself in its organisation.
In May 1999, on the day Watford shot up on the rails, got to Wembley v Bolton in the Play Offs with a chance to get to the Premiership for the first time, I was so proud. But my Dad was ill. Really ill. He watched it at home. He died a few days later.
…low point?
The low point wasn’t just in the passing of my father , the low points are there all along, mirroring the high points. Sometimes they are intertwined. Football as we football fans know straddles that happy-sad feeling.
Low is surely our devoting a lifetime to a mere game! What is the pleasure in watching supporters and occasions and seasons and teams and players and stars and even grounds and occasionally clubs come and go?! Of having time march on incessantly, however much we try and freeze-frame time and moment, that moment is surpassed. The low point for me is thinking : it’s not enough, I have not captured what I set out to.
Who or what would be your dream subject?
My dream flutters between concentrating just on the Uppies & Downies raw game of football at Workington. Or football in mud. Or Sunday League football. Or naked womens football on the Orkneys. Something specific. Doing nothing else. Simple life.
Then the overriding dream kicks in and the dream remains to achieve an almighty portrait, of football, something that can’t quite be found elsewhere. So the search goes on.
Whilst the World beyond the British Homes of Football beckons, with its warm tones and exotic airs, I am inextricably drawn to the greener grasses of home, I’m after THE CRADLE OF THE GAME : this very place where Armstrongs fought Milburns over borders and sheep and football. Where Mary Queen of Scots was captivated watching her captors playing a game aside Carlisle Castle. Where the hordes played street games at Easter and at Christmas and then at almost anytime prompting a succession of kings to try and ban them. This cradle from where army officers set forth with balls in hand to France’s World War One killing fields knowing that no British private could not be inspired and led by the sight of a football and a dribble. And where decades before more posh men had organised the game into an Association and a League.
I simply HAVE to go back to ALL those clubs and ground big and small in British football and see why the game is so alluring and why so many clubs have refused to go under on this small set of islands.
how have fans changes since you’ve been shooting them?
On the run-up to my beginning The Homes of Football in 1990, the general impression was that the fans ruled the shabby roosts and that football supporting was handed-down, in the genes.
In the last 2 decades there has been an unprecedented interest in football, even surpassing 1949 when the nation, recovering from War, revelled in its image of itself as ‘supporters’ and looked for post-war heroes, players like Matthews and Finney.
Now the media frenzy feeds a new frenzy. Fans are much the same really as when I begun in 1990, just a bit more monied, bringing their children to the game that they were warned off going to (during the boot boy decades).
where is your favorite place to photograph football and its fans in Britain?
When it comes to naming favourites I go to say a name or place and then get my pencil out and start making huge long lists because I love doing Top Tens and making sure there is a balance of obvious choices, surprise choices and underdogs.
I like Burnley, Turf Moor. It’s all there as it was when they co-founded The League. I love the slightly scary walk to the ground, the sun low on the streets on the Towneley side and the chip shops and the newspaper blagsheets bring a touch of the sensational to the occasion. Variations of this scene are many throughout the UK.
Celtic and Liverpool offer something quite different. Their fanaticism is based on a very joint experience rather than a lot of people sharing something personal (as I described at Watford).
how does it feel to have your pictures hung throughout the FA building?
In doing The Homes of Football I set out to have one foot in authority – pictures all over the FA, invites to openings, a chance to show at The Houses of Parliament – and to having the other foot in pure artistry. I would make my living above all staging shows, edited by me, at public art galleries around the country. I broke the attendance records here and there and also risked showing in unfashionable haunts where crowds were few. No one can deny my claim to have staged the longest ever touring art exhibition lasting 15 years (Anne Frank’s show was several different shows).
What were your best moments last season?
For me this last season, possibly the best ever, reached a climax north and south of the border in the sun and the rain and with incomparable drama and emotion. Gretna, runaway leaders heading towards the Scottish Premiership with a 12 point lead, had blown it all like a boy at the fair come the last match at Dingwall against Ross County who had to win to stay up. Title contenders-with-momentum St.Johnstone meanwhile were at Hamilton. They had to win. And come 10 to 5 they had won, 4–3 and were rejoicing ‘winning’ promotion believing Gretna had only drawn 2–2. But Gretna had not finished. The helicopter with the cup on its way dutifully to Hamilton, made an about turn towards Dingwall.
In England, no one really thought Sheffield United would get relegated – it was all a question whether visitors Wigan would return from whence they came or whether West Ham would get a comeuppance at Old Trafford. Yet there in the rain of May, Bramall Lane saw heroes turn villains and Wigan’s chosen few escape as if with their lives.
What are you looking forward to most this season?
Gretna have it all to do in Scotland and that will be great, a fairy-story and I feel close to that. Carlisle could still put further light between them and the basement. Barrow and Workington are also my teams, where I live. Then there are about another 200 clubs to look out for. And of course someone will walk into my gallery and tell me something about their own club which I had overlooked and that will make it 201 clubs ‘I support’. Sunderland v Newcastle will be very tasty this season. I am on the scout for the best derbies, and there are always new ones emerging as well as the old classics. I am keen on what is happening in Ireland, considering the peace accord and I long to hear “Sweet Caroline” belted out at an international in Belfast.
The Champions League will hardly get a look-in (for me) and I am not that excited about the Euros that follow the domestic disputes – but I WILL BE nearer the time.
What future projects are you excited about?
If All The World’s A Stage then certainly all the World loves football and I want to share my love of football with other people’s love of football around the World and we can all get all loved up. (You can tell I have been going to a lot of Glastonbury-esque festivals during the close season!) Making these sequences for FourFourTwo is exciting , so too turning this and more into a book “England & Scotland The Cradle Of The Game” to wipe the floor with my first 5 book offerings. It’s time to get a new show on the road in exhibition-form, and follow up what I did for television way back in 1996 when I wrote and presented “A Common Passion”.
What single moment/image do you most regret missing?
I wish I had been there at certain games like Liverpool 4 Newcastle 3 when Keegan’s charge was all but ended. I regret things then think that it makes me hungrier to see other things. Whilst you are busy missing things you are busy missing things.
What makes football a great subject to photograph?
Football for me has always been about identity, belonging, irony, humour, occasion, emotion, colour, camaraderie, compassion, absurdity, value, teamwork, participation, consumption, reflection, simplicity, beauty, hope.
Apart from that I can’t see why anyone would waste time on it.
In what ways has being a football photographer changed since you began?
I don’t quite do what most of the sports photographers do but I suppose I am still a ‘football photographer’ and am treated as one. However, when I started this in 1990 it was far easier just to walk-in a ground…I liked going in and chatting to groundsmen and soaking up the ‘atmosphere’ of a completely empty ground with no match in sight. No story in sight.
The clubs have become more image-conscious recently and the photographers less observant as they all have to do so much editing on laptops – their deadlines are tighter than ever (they are in real time) … exhausting stuff. I still amble about as I always did.
Why do you think we so enjoy looking at pictures of football and fans from the past?
All pictures are relations to and descendants of and understudies to family portraits on the mantlepiece. So we are looking at what our family, relations, friend’s family and relations look like and get up to, when we look at photographs. The reality shows play on this.
Old photographs have frozen time – new photographs do too – but the old photographs show something that is gone forever and can’t be recreated.
Do you think that fans in the past looked better than they do now?
George Best looked sexier than the players of now. I look to see if the crowds around him in the Swinging Sixties when I was borne likewise looked sexier – and no they don’t.
The players of the 1930’s, my grandfather’s era, looked more handsome in the way they manicured and dressed and folded their arms all with respect… and one comes to think this is true of the fans also but had one been there at the time one could have probably noted big differences in attitude and dress amidst the apparent uniformity of cloth caps.
Now is the very golden era that our children shall look back on – of baggy oversized replica-shirt wearing, of pretend-scruffy haircuts, of Mum as well as Dad being in the crowd and sometimes even together on the same side, having a laugh.
Memories are made of kicks by Mark Metcalf
Published on Jun 22 2006 The North West Enquirer
The historical links between football and the North West make it entirely appropriate that two of the world’s finest exhibitions of football memorabilia and photographs are based in the region.
And while the National Football Museum in Preston and Stuart Clarke’s Homes of Football gallery in Ambleside are largely aimed at football fans, even those with only a passing interest in the sport are unlikely to be disappointed – particularly as both are free to enter.
Mark Bushell, the Preston museum’s football historian and one of only three people lucky enough to have such a post in the country, has been involved since its opening in 2001, when the original objective was to save football memorabilia for future generations.
1966
It has clearly done that. There’s Geoff Hurst’s 1966 World Cup hat-trick ball, Tommy Lawton’s ashes, Arnold Kirke Smith’s shirt and cap from the first international match in 1872, and even Jimmy Hill’s chair on which he plotted the Professional Footballers’ Association’s campaign to break the clubs’ stranglehold on players’ contracts in the 1960s.
As the museum expanded, so did the aims. “We wanted to create a great museum that wasn’t just for football fans, and we’ve achieved that by placing football in its social context,” says Bushell.
As such, key events in football history are set alongside political and historical displays and photographs. Music too: a picture of the Liverpool Kop of the 1960s is accompanied by a Beatles’ classic.
Film images from games and events, largely sourced from the BBC archives, also help to bring the past to life.
Free
Initially there was an entry fee for the museum, and at £6.95 per person it wasn’t cheap. Realising this, local MP Mark Kendrick lobbied on behalf on the museum to make sure the government treated it like the other 18 national museums by providing funding to ensure that entry became free.
“We now get more than 100,000 visitors a year, which makes it the second most popular football museum in the country, after Manchester United’s, who have 180,000 visitors a year,” adds Bushell, himself a United fan.
His favourite photograph is a black and white one from an early-1900s FA Cup final, and shows a row of fans standing on a line of 3ft high stumps to help them see over the crowd.
“It would have taken some strength, not to mention stamina, to have done that and not fallen off. I like that picture because it’s of something unusual, but also the photograph is good in itself,” he said.
Ambleside
Good photographs are certainly something associated with Stuart Clarke. His Homes of Football exhibition in Ambleside documents fans across the world from the last 17 years.
Starting soon after the Hillsborough disaster in 1989, it provides a vivid testament to the pleasure the game can bring.
He says: “Like most football fans I knew that after Hillsborough things needed reshaping. Those changes have made things better, and I wanted to play my part in making sure that was going to be the case.”
Armed with his pair of Bronica medium format cameras, a make that American company Tamron stopped producing late last year, he began to snap crowds up and down the country. He says: “I thought when I started I would spend ten to 15 years building a volume of work.
Football crowds
“I wasn’t bothered that galleries wouldn’t take my pictures of football crowds, I knew that if I enjoyed the pictures I took of the great game of football then others who saw them would.”
He admits that the famous painter LS Lowry was one of his inspirations.
He says: “I loved his pictures of matchstick men and women, but what I felt was missing was an image of what people look like. This is where photography can be so good by capturing the colour and the warmth of people, the fans.”
While he is keen to display thousands of people’s faces on the walls at Ambleside, Clarke can sometimes be keen to keep out of the limelight, admitting to hiding in a cupboard so that he can listen to the comments of some of the 80,000 annual visitors. The only criticisms he gets are from fans disappointed that “there aren’t more of my own club”.
Ethos
Homes of Football is now sponsored by the PFA. “The PFA knew I was photographing fans and grounds of all the clubs,” he says. “It knew I wasn’t being elitist and this fitted the union’s ethos and its support has been very welcome.”
That apart, the rest of the gallery and its employees are funded from the sale of Clarke’s work to the newspapers and TV, plus the sale of prints and his books.
The latter, in particular, is to be expanded considerably over the next few years with his latest collection, England’s World Cup German Summer Recalled, due out on July 31, with an exhibition at Ambleside shortly afterwards.
Clarke is the only one of 1,500 photographers in Germany at the World Cup who still uses film.
“I may have to change to digital,” he admits. “But I love the feeling that you’ve got something enamel in your hand. I know film inside out.”
Interview for Ballesterer magazine of Vienna, Austria - November 2005
How did you actually get in contact with football? What are your first memories and which of them are still able to fascinate you after all these years?
I was surrounded by football from an early age. My family organised youth football and supported a professional team (Watford). My first big memory of football was Manchester United with George Best coming to play at Watford in the cup. Little Watford were thrashed before a huge crowd. We did not mind too much.
Matchday, anywhere, at any level, never ceases to fascinate me – it is about people : 11 v 11 or a cast of thousands. In a big crowd, alongside my father and brother, the young boy Stuart Clarke spent half the time looking around and behind him. He still does.
When – and why – did you start to take a camera to a football ground?
I liked drawing as a boy : imaginary stadiums and crowds. I dreamt of taking the perfect girlfriend to the perfect match. Instead I took the camera.
Your work seems to focus on expressions of joy as well as expressions of agony. Tea ladies and fanzine sellers stand next to the players and managers, as Chelsea stands next to Ullswater United. Is it this tension that makes the game so fascinating for so many people around the world?
I went to Northern Ireland recently. All that is true about “Versus” someone and “competition” semed truer there. They played Wales. What a “derby” between near neighbours. The crowd sang “Sweet Caroline” and other songs, yelling down the opposition.
Then as the crowd spilled out on to the streets i realised that it was mostly a man thing, that not everyone likes being beaten or even played against, that the people are not as one, but are divided even within what looked like a crowd united. That people are at odds with themselves and their own lives. Inside the ground there is a sense of majestic unified Northern Ireland and for that matter majestic unified Wales. Within that crowd unit, individuals feel goliath and magnificent.
Returning to the rest of the World from Northern Ireland one realises that the rest of the World is less bothered about this screaming child/wise old man of a country. Northern Ireland, and Wales, are “underdogs”. The majority of the countries in the FIFA ranking and the majority of teams in any league are unlikely to win the cup or the competition but each can have their day and sparkle in the rain. And sometimes the keenest players at a match can be the tea girls manning the beaten up old tea bar.
Your pictures visualise football as something deeply human, where people come together in shared passion. How important is football – in your opinion – in public life, especially in English public life?
In English public life there is now no activity or commitment bigger than football. It is way ahead of all other sporting pursuits and it is ahead of religion. It is ahead of music festivals. However, should festivals be all year long and not just in summertime in England, they would run the game a close second. On this island we like looking at our neighbour, sharing something, then like going home.
Billy Bragg claims that your work says more about England than many books on this topic. Do you actually see your pictures as an objective visualisation of English everyday culture? Or do you see them more as a subjective illustration of your England, an England of passion, humanity and humour?
I had always thought that my approach is “documentary” : telling the truth or conveying the feeling of something. But I can admit now that it is my truth and often my feeling. And maybe yours and yours too. And if it is not it could be. If the papers are all an audience read they will be influenced by what they read. If they see pictures like mine, and in art galleries, they may be influenced again in a different way. And which way is this? I think my photographs show colour, colours, warmth, humour, humility, camaraderie, individuality, humour again in double dollops, passion, stoicism, invention. They look to highlight loyalty and courage and show that winning is not everything. I am a story-teller, painting visions and confirming details.
The photographic images of Stuart Clarke show a game shared by everyone. To what extent are recent developments in modern football like state-of-the-art-all-seater-stadiums and high ticket prices a threat to the soul of this culture? In other words: Is this soul getting lost on its way from Maine Road to the City of Manchester Stadium?
I keep believing the game gets better and is now more amazing and popular than in 1949 say, when British attendances were at their (previous) peak. Of course we now have tv audiences as well on top of those actually in attendance. It annoys me that anyone could want to put anything above going to the match at the time when the match is played. Or “wasting” what little money they have on cigarettes. People should not be shopping or fishing or bored when there is a game to be watcing in real life, just down the road! I do not want football to be viewed as a consumerist product or a matter of choice. We have to choose a team, or two, and we have to follow a team to degrees. And of course there is a sense in which teams and colours choose us.
After all the hurt and the monies spent and committed, including grants, the grounds are there ready for this new mass audience, and they are mostly good safe grounds. They are not the organic grounds that grew up out of a nighbourhhood or a works team 125 years ago. They are concrete bowls with few surprises. The surprises are saved for matchday, with the throng of the crowd and two teams pitting their wits and skills against one another. And if these are inadequate then , as in the case of Northern Ireland, the crowd invents songs and chants and the crowd becomes the force to contend with – as with Liverpools travelling Kop 3 nil down at Istanbul. Or, again, as in the case of Northern Ireland, if things are crap, a player such as George Best might emerge to lead a merry dance and show the way.
The last 5 years of football at Maine Road, though troubled, were more interesting than the first 5 semi-successful years at the City of Manchester Stadium. However , there are lifetimes to go still! Where however will City find their new fanbase? Perhaps from abroad. From Austria , and Scandinavia – from international fans who want a peculiar team to follow.
What is the team you support? Is it Carlisle?
Carlisle United and, over the border Gretna. Watford have never left me. Ullswater United is quite literally on my doorstep. I can prepare their pitch for them if I like. I sponsor Amblesides University football team – in a sense a bunch of mercenaries who will be come and gone within 3 years but in that time I hope they help put our town on the map. I insist they be successful. And I have the occasional match in my backgarden where winning is not everything.
