I’ve decided to open my blog up to photographers that inspire me but have small followings on social media. In the first guest blog I’d like to introduce Daron Marshall, please make sure you follow his work on Instagram
I’ll now let Daron talk, enjoy:
Most of my childhood memories are from 1970’s Herefordshire. One of the earliest aged 5, I’m escaping from my parents’ garden, dragging a dustbin to the garden gate and making my way across a car park to my Auntie’s house. After an extensive police search I was found in her shed with her puppy (I’d heard it barking & wandered in), both of us very sick - after drinking a bottle of white spirit. I had shared some with the puppy. I was rushed to the hospital and had my stomach pumped, it was a close call. The puppy survived - no one took photos. Nowadays every member of the family would have had a video of me and the poor animal, both covered in vomit on a trolley next to the ambulance!
Very few photos exist from this period, as my parents loaned their camera to a friend… and sadly it was never returned. There are a couple of old photo booth snaps around aged 3 and then a big jump to Bristol zoo aged 6, dressed in blue shorts and a red t-shirt, carefully holding a real miniature monkey. I watched my parents hand the photographer some cash as he presented me with the toy-sized monkey, with which I immediately fell in love (I still remember his little hand, wrapped around my finger). He snapped a couple of pics and then pried it from my arms - I cried all the way home. The next photo jumps to age 14; I’m wearing a straw hat with a hole in it & a 70’s shirt with jeans. On my belt is a sheath, carrying a 6 inch Bowie knife! Life was suburban/rural.
My grandfather was an old ex-fighter pilot, a squadron leader who ran a post office and lived with my crazy grandmother in a big old victorian house out of town. There were many photographs around the house, one, in particular, a tiny portrait of a beautiful young woman, I would have been perhaps 10 years old and I think that photo may have been my first love. ‘Papa’ had a couple of old cameras lying around & sometimes I would pin his medals to my coat and run around the garden, pretending to be a war photographer! Sometime later, his post office was robbed and he beat off the thieves with an old-style wooden police truncheon - the government gave him an award for bravery.
Jump to Wales and Mwnt bay in 1985… the Human League are on the radio and I’m holding an old Pentax (i think) camera, snapping a ‘selfie’ in a mirror with my girlfriend at the time, Anna. The next few years saw an apprenticeship as a lithographic printer and my first experience of real work… I didn’t like it at all and I was overcome with a burning desire to escape the shire.
Some years earlier, I’d picked up a guitar and had been spending a lot of time with it; I loved words and writing & Bowie. So, I decided I would leave Hereford for London, maybe join a band and become a rockstar! I left Hereford and found a tiny dingy room in dingy Stoke Newington (it was dingy then), where I shared a single bed with my girlfriend. It was the 90’s… I found a job running a live music venue and began booking bands - Pulp, Blur, Pixies etc, but still without a camera! After a couple of years, my plan started to come together; I found a band I liked and 3 months later we were offered a record deal. So…I left my job and became a rockstar (like you do), recording & touring, for the next 8 years.
‘Drugstore’ made 4 albums and a ‘Best of’, we travelled extensively playing TV & Radio shows, plus live gigs all over the UK, Europe and the US. For a little while, I carried an old Lomo camera, the metal one. I would have the slide film cross-processed & really liked the unpredictable results, but I had no idea what I was doing when it came to settings etc….we were always around cameras, at interviews, live performance, but they remained a bit of a mystery to me. We were asked to tour with so many great bands, for example, Radiohead - Drugstore recorded a duet with Thom, which was a top 20 single… another was the sublime Jeff Buckley, who would often come on and play the drums with us. Sadly a few years later, Jeff accidentally drowned while swimming in the Mississippi River. We also shared the stage with many of my favourite US bands, but these were the days before the iPhone - and my little Lomo wasn’t so reliable! I wish now, that given the access we had, I had been able to take many more pics. It would have been fabulous to document that period, Radiohead were writing ‘OK Computer’ while we were with them touring ‘The Bends’ in the US - there were so many fantastic, lost moments.
After Drugstore, I ran my own company, which included spending a lot of time in the studio (and at the pub), writing music for TV ads. Alongside this, my partner was a really talented wedding cake designer and she needed some pics… so I bought a Nikon D90, some big lights etc, learned what I needed to know about product photography, and took some shots for her website. The results were okay, but still, I felt I didn’t really know what I was doing.
Jump forward in time and about a year ago, at the Groucho club in London I was introduced to Alan Schaller. His friend Richie told me that Alan was a brilliant photographer, so later I looked at his instagram feed. His work was so good and after a couple of short conversations with him, I was really inspired once again to pick up a camera. I launched into YouTube and taught myself everything about photography - a lot of which I already knew. So it was a short learning curve and really just put the experience I’d already had with a camera into some kind of order; basically I just set aside some time to really absorb the technical theory. I had a Ricoh GRII and initially went out on the street looking for shots in Alan’s style, shooting black and white. I was pretty nervous at first & found taking shots in public was really hard… I felt very self-conscious and was worried I might meet some resistance. Early on there were a couple of times when it got a little edgy - snapping drug dealers in the back streets of Brixton probably isn’t the best idea I ever had. But, as time went on, this seemed to get easier (once I stopped shooting dealers). Nowadays, I’ve realised that people hardly notice, or even care.
I loved the compact Ricoh GRII and it’s 28mm focal length, I still own it & it’s a great camera - though I’d recommend the latest model over it. But quite quickly I found myself tiring of having only one wide, fixed lens camera. I tried the Fuji X100, but again tired of the fixed lens, so I settled with a Fuji X-Pro 2, plus a couple of lenses - particularly, an XF35 F2 and XF56 F1.2 (a must-have).
When I’m on the street, I am constantly looking around for a shot. I may walk and hunt, always moving, not thinking, just looking; if I see a shot I grab it fast and move on. Sometimes, I may find a nice scene, so I’ll stay in one spot and fish for a while, waiting for the right subject to appear, which they nearly always do.
Though street photography offers many opportunities to interact with people, it more often feels like a quiet, almost meditative and insular activity. I don’t really hang out with other photographers or discuss work with anyone, so the selection process has always been difficult. It’s a purely self-inflicted pressure, as I have no goals for my work….only to improve. I’m always fascinated by the work of my peers, composition techniques, how they achieved certain colours, or their editing style and sometimes feel that there is a secret recipe ‘out there’. But actually, I’ve begun to realise that there isn’t and the best way to develop your own recipe is to simply take more photos. Walk the street, it’s a goldmine of moments…shoot, shoot and shoot some more. Given time, I’ve been told that your own style appears… I’m still waiting for mine…but it’s only been a year.
I have a few other film cameras, including a Nikon F3 (my favourite little vintage camera) and I’ve been meaning to use them more. My dad passed away about 7 years ago and recently, while looking through his belongings, I found an Olympus OM-10 with a really old expired roll of Superia, which I’m currently shooting. I had the idea that I would use the roll as a little project, to photograph only the things he loved. I’m sure I’ll get to it one day soon.
So - Happy snapping! - be serious, but not too serious.
You can find more work from Daz on Instagram
