Interview with Christopher Manson (2/4) By Steve Rudd

(1/4), (2/4), (3/4), (4/4).

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Your photographs have graced the pages of many newspapers and magazines including The Observer On Sunday, Time Out and Hello, Daily Express and Ethiad's in-flight magazine. Given that your images have been published in so many different publications, do you still get a kick out of seeing your work in print? I don't think I'll ever tire of it. Magazines and newspapers give the editorial photographer a platform to tell his story, which is the best thing about the job. To be an editorial photographer you have to inherently understand how people see and then produce images that present the viewer with the whole situation in one shot. If I'm successful in my work, the photographs I take support an editor's story.

Susan Sontag once wrote about how the photograph adopts the opinion of a story and therefore legitimizes it and, at its best, the editorial photograph is a synopsis of the story - the viewer shouldn't need to read the story to get an idea of its contents. In that way, the photograph is as important as the editorial. When I get that right, and my photographs get published, there's nothing better. You have recently returned from Toronto where you have been doing some fashion photography. How did you get in involved in that scene? The fashion industry is completely saturated with photographers, but the images are so horrifically uniform that it benefits the photographer to create his own style, one that doesn't wash right over you. Until 2006, the only fashion oriented work I had produced was a body of work showing the backstage tension at a Catherine Malendrino catwalk show in Dubai. However, that summer I started freelancing in the Daily Express studios with a fantastically fashion-obsessed photographer called Caroline Leeming. She inspired me to give fashion a go, so I worked on a few shoots to build a small portfolio of images. When I moved to Canada I got in touch with some modeling agencies who liked my work and hired me to work on some test shoots for them. Do you have a favourite kind of photography? (e.g. landscapes, still life, fashion)

Currently I'm obsessed with the potential of documentary photography. I think the genre is incredibly effective for sociological study. My own documentary work concerns itself with people on the outside of society, the subcultures you wouldn't pay much attention to, like the talented but unknown local Burlesque dancer who puts on a show in front of an audience of two, or the residents of the East Riding who are quietly accepting the conditions they must live in as a result of the 2007 floods.

Photographs can tell a different kind of truth; they can hold a scene frozen in time to enable us to have a closer look or, in some cases, a first glance at something we would have otherwise overlooked. What kind of camera equipment are you currently using, or is it a case of using different cameras for different types of shoot? Yes it is. All decisions should be made once you know how the photographs will be printed. For example, the daily newspapers that are given out for free every day will generally print at low cost and therefore low quality paper stock. In this case, using standard 6 mega pixel 35mm digital SLR is perfectly adequate. Basically, if the photograph is being printed on something akin to toilet paper, it's never going to look good regardless of how high a resolution you have provided. As the paper stock improves and the size of the end photograph gets larger you should improve the quality and capabilities of the camera.

Continued .... Next Page (3/4)

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