30.19°C For decades, Geoff Lawrence has photographed musicians, strangers and everyday life. Ahead of his latest exhibition at The Foresters Arms, he looks back on the pictures that stayed with him and the ones he almost forgot.
Geoff Lawrence almost left his camera at home when we met. With around 150 photographs already waiting to be edited for his latest exhibition, he decided there was probably little point in taking any more. Then, almost immediately, he laughed at himself.
“That’s a terrible attitude,” he says. “I might have seen something great today.”
It sounds like an offhand remark, but by the end of our conversation it feels more like a philosophy. Whether he’s wandering through Colchester, stepping off a train in an unfamiliar part of London or looking back through photographs he took decades ago, Geoff still believes the next corner might hold something worth noticing.
Perhaps that’s why choosing this exhibition proved far harder than he expected.
Most people would imagine selecting forty photographs from an archive of hundreds is simply a matter of picking favourites. Geoff found himself doing something quite different.
“I’ll go looking for one photograph and end up finding another I’d completely forgotten about,” he says. “Then I think, ‘Why didn’t I ever use that one?'”
Some photographs he’d overlooked the first time suddenly stood out. Others he’d always liked didn’t seem quite as strong anymore. Looking back through them felt less like choosing favourites and more like seeing them again for the first time.
That thought takes Geoff back to one of the first photographs he ever made. His father bought him a Kodak Brownie from a jumble sale and, like countless children handed their first camera, he couldn’t wait to try it. One photograph from those early days has stayed with him ever since. It showed his young nephew on a beach.
His nephew wasn’t looking at the camera.
“I loved it,” Geoff says.
His father wasn’t nearly so impressed. “He said, ‘Well, he’s not even looking at the camera. You’re not going to be a photographer if you do that.'”
Geoff still laughs about it.
Looking through his photographs today, it’s striking how many people aren’t looking at the camera. They’re talking, laughing or simply caught in their own thoughts. Those are the moments that seem to interest him most.
That instinct followed him into more than forty years of school photography. The work took him across the country and funded everything else he loved doing, but Geoff remembers the journeys almost as clearly as the schools. If a sunrise caught his eye on the way to North London, he’d pull over. If the light across a field looked different that morning, he’d stop.
The timetable could wait. If something caught his eye, it was worth stopping for.
Retirement hasn’t changed that instinct. It’s given him more freedom to follow it.
“I needed some sort of project,” he says.
So, he started picking London Underground stations, getting off the train and going for a walk. Sometimes it was Whitechapel. Sometimes Peckham Rye. Quite often it was somewhere he’d never been before.
Some days he came home with nothing. Other days he’d find exactly what he was hoping for without quite knowing what it was. He remembers Peckham Rye reminding him of late-1970s New York, its brightly painted shopfronts and busy streets making him feel as though he’d stepped into another city altogether.
“There are some photographs I’m really proud of because they’re quite brave,” he says. “Years ago, I could never have stopped somebody in the street.”
Now he does exactly that. If someone’s clothes catch his eye or the light falls across their face in just the right way, he’ll start a conversation long before he reaches for the camera.
“If you tell somebody they look fantastic, most people are happy.”
The conversation comes first. The photograph comes afterwards. Some of his favourite portraits have begun exactly that way, whether it’s a woman in a mustard-coloured coat, people he met while photographing Colchester Pride or complete strangers whose paths happened to cross his for a few minutes.
Over the years, Geoff has also built an extraordinary record of Colchester’s live music scene. He’s photographed countless musicians, but he doesn’t really separate music photography from street photography.
“It’s all people.”
Geoff often thinks about something the late photographer Martin Parr once said. Parr reckoned he might take three hundred photographs in a day and expect only one to be truly outstanding.
“I thought, ‘That’s about my success rate,'” Geoff laughs.
Rather than finding that discouraging, Geoff found it reassuring. Not every photograph has to work. Sometimes one picture is enough to make the whole day worthwhile.
The exhibition found a home
These aren’t necessarily Geoff’s favourite photographs. They’re the images he kept coming back to while preparing the exhibition.
Some were taken decades ago, others much more recently. Together, they reflect more than fifty years spent photographing musicians, strangers and everyday life.
The Foresters Arms was a natural choice for the exhibition. Geoff spent around ten years drinking there and still describes it as “a country pub in town”. When he heard John Livingstone had taken over, he dropped in to introduce himself, taking one of his photography books with him. The two got chatting about photography and art. John mentioned he’d been thinking about hosting exhibitions, so Geoff asked if he could be the first.
It feels like a fitting way for the exhibition to come about. Like many of Geoff’s photographs, it all started with a conversation.
Geoff Lawrence’s photography exhibition opens at The Foresters Arms, Colchester, on Wednesday 29th July. Featuring around 40 photographs spanning more than 50 years, the exhibition includes street photography, portraits and images from Colchester’s live music scene. Entry is free, and visitors are welcome whenever the pub is open.
