Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
A photographer who moved to Tobago and started a sausage co-operative.
On the island
Eight records
Well, because of my association with Carnival, I'm at Trinidad... I would sit with my record player and I would think about the happy times I had playing carnival in Trinidad, in Port of Spain, where you have a license to be drunk, which is part of the joys of life. It gets rid of all your inhibitions.
Well, obviously, out of respect to Richard Spate, FRPS, I can't get started with him, or couldn't get started with him, Punny Berrigan.
A Sleeping Bee by Diane Caroll when she was about eighteen from the House of Flowers.
Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic
I have to hark back too to the nst nostalgic period in America when there was football games and raccoon coats and large two gallon shakers full of martinez and West Point and Ives. Charles Ives. The composer. Symphony number two.
My friend Tom Leira... Doing what I go was called genuflect, and I'm afraid it's not in Polish. Ah, this is the Vatican Rag.
Grace Jones, that lovely Jamaica girl, reminiscent of one's wild life in um discos, La Vien Rose.
FanfareFavourite
Trumpeters of the Royal Military School of Music
I remember at Westminster... the monarch visited the Abbey and was greeted by the wonderful fanfares of the trumpeters in Mellow Hall. And as I sit there miserably dreaming of a rum punch and drinking coconut milk, I want to play this one.
Fear No More (Dirge from Cymbeline)
Sir John Gilgood has been a very, very old friend of mine... And here we go, John Gilgood, Fear No More. From Cymbaline.
In conversation
Presenter asks
2:53How well could you survive on a desert island, do you think?
Oh yes, I can I'm I hope we don't start with the rainy season. And this desert island will obviously be divided, as Tobago is, part of the year rain and part of the year dry. And if I can just get started with maybe two or three months of dry, I can get myself organized because nothing's worse than being damp. And you know more or less which fruits you can eat and which ones to keep off.
Presenter asks
5:16Where were you born?
I was born in Putney, Rehampton, right in there. Perhaps schooled in Eastbourne, then Westminster School, in the days of top hat and tail coat.
Presenter asks
6:20Did you know anything about photography?
Not a thing. ... No, it seemed you know, one was dragging one's feet into anything and it seemed to be a good way of getting by.
Presenter asks
8:56What was the break? What saved you?
The keepsakes
The luxury
the statue which I saw recently, which haunts me, by a Venezuelan sculptor... life-size, bronze. And she's leaning against a hammock.
Well, there was a lovely lady who was the editor of English Harper's called P. Joyce Reynolds. And she was visiting a photographer on the fifth floor of Number 1 Delvey Street. And the lift fortunately that day had broken and she'd noticed some snaps of mine that I had taken outside. And when she got back to the office she got the art director Alan McPeak to telephone me and asked me if I'd like to take some photographs for them outside. … I had to, with my last twenty pounds, buy a Graphlex. … the pictures came out and I think that was the beginning.
Presenter asks
11:21Now you were an innovator as far as fashion photography is concerned, weren't you?
Well, the kind people say so. I remember that these photographers I was talking about earlier took very scent-laden studio or apartment pictures of girls, rather like Steichen with heavy furniture … And as soon as I got hold of girls, I thought that they didn't really need their knees bolted together. I think that they were people who should be taken outside and should run and jump and behave like I always saw them the way they did behave.
Presenter asks
18:03How much can one retouch?
Ah, well once upon a time, I think this is where photography has grown up, there was a lot of retouching went on. But the portraits I do of people today, mostly ladies, I mean a man who wants to be photographed has obviously got a screw loose somewhere. … You do your retouching before. … Put the retouching right there and then.
“I moved to a desert island in order to be well rehearsed.”
“I thought that they didn't really need their knees bolted together.”
“And as long as you're wearing a hat, it's all right. … they just won't even start to work until they see I put my hat on.”
“I hope I'll lie in a tin bath with ice all round me and this is the way we get our cool drinks when we go to a funeral in Tobago.”