Russell Boyce Transcription

00:00 Kate Genever: Okay, so it’s Kate Genever recording Russell Boyce on Saturday 9 August 2025, at Kate’s house in Offington. Okay, Russell, start from the beginning.

00:21 Russell Boyce: From a very early age, I knew that all I wanted to do was make pictures. I remember very clearly the moment I became aware of this. I was at school, probably about six or seven years old, and the teacher had cut a tree with bare branches out of brown card and stuck it on the wall. She’d added a blue sky and a big yellow circle for the sun. In her drawer she had lots of pieces of green paper cut into the shape of leaves. I think she was going to teach us about photosynthesis. She asked, “Okay, children, what’s missing from the picture?” I never used to put my hand up to answer questions, but I knew the answer to this one. She said, “Oh, Russell, what’s missing?” I replied, “Miss, the sun’s shining and there aren’t any shadows.”

“Oh,” she said, “that’s very good. Also, of course, there are no leaves.” She said, “You can pick two friends, if you like, and you can stick the leaves on and paint some shadows on the tree.” I thought this was great, so I chose my best friend, Colin Daniels, and a girl I really, really liked, Helen Attlewell. We spent the afternoon painting and sticking on leaves. I thought, ‘this is for me’. From that moment on, I knew I wanted to make pictures. None of my family had ever gone to university. My grandfather on my mother’s side was a postman, and my grandfather on my father’s side was a cobbler his wife was a dinner lady. There was no family history of, or experience in, the arts.

I became obsessed with drawing; I’d draw and draw and draw. At secondary school, two friends and I used to draw cartoons. We’d make up characters and create comic strips and little books. At the same time, I started collecting Marvel comics, but I didn’t buy them according to the characters – such as Spider-Man, Conan or Captain Marvel – I bought them according to the artist, because I liked certain illustrators. Jim Starlin and John Buscema were my favourites. Whenever one of those artists moved from one title to another, I’d start collecting that comic instead. My parents didn’t want me to study art because they said, “There’s no work. You can’t get a job, you can’t earn any money. Don’t be silly.” So they encouraged me to study the sciences, which made sense given their background. Consequently, throughout school up to GCSE level, I studied the sciences, along with Geography, English and Maths.

When it came to choosing my A-level subjects, I realised that what I really wanted to do was art, but my parents naturally couldn’t see any future in it. We had those conversations that most parents have with their children about university and, ‘What are you going to do with your life?’ Eventually they said, ‘Okay, let’s go to the school, speak to the Head of Art and see if you can take A-level Art.’ Initially, the Head of Art said, ‘If you haven’t done GCSE Art, you can’t take A-level Art but let me have a look at your work.’ So, I showed him all my drawings, and he said, ‘That’s fantastic. I’ll tell you what we can do. You can take A-level Art, but you’ll have to complete the GCSE in your first year and then the A-level in your second year. Basically, four years’ worth of work in two years.’ Of course, I agreed because I absolutely loved it. What could be better than sitting in a classroom painting and drawing?

In the second year of my A-levels, I was taught by Mr Taylor. He was exactly as you’d imagine: a sort of beatnik, for want of a better description. He had a big moustache, a mop of swept-back hair and wore a beret. He’d invite students round to his house, where we’d chat about art, painting and politics over a glass of wine. It was my first real experience of an adult social space, and I felt strangely liberated.

I got straight A grades, and my parents agreed that I could do an Art Foundation course in Cambridge. Getting a place was extremely competitive, with very few places available. Once you were there, you got to try all sorts of different disciplines: printmaking, graphic design and sculpture. I did a bit of pottery and hated it. I just couldn’t get on with it – all that clay, the mess, and everything going everywhere. It was horrible.

I really wanted to be a painter because I loved the composition and light in the work of the Old Masters. I was fascinated by oil paint and the way you build up translucent layers. My tutor was a wonderfully talented, strong and gentle woman called Julia Ball. She made us all feel that anything was possible if we worked hard enough and were good enough.

You have to remember, this was the early 1980s. The country was in the middle of a huge recession, so the idea of going to university to study Fine Art during the Thatcher years, with unemployment so high, seemed bizarre. My father was really worried about it all. He said, ‘What are you going to do for a living?’ I replied, ‘Dad, don’t worry. I’ll be fine.’ I just knew I’d be fine. I’ve always believed that if you work hard enough, you’ll get your lucky breaks. If you have a real passion for what you want to do, somehow things will work out.

During this time, I was working in the bakery at Tesco. Initially, I worked on the shop floor, which I hated, because customers were always asking where the tomato purée was. I’d never know where the tomato purée was—or anything else, for that matter. My head was always somewhere else. After one incident, when I accidentally lifted a customer’s trolley into the air with a forklift truck before it crashed back down in the middle of the shop, it was decided that I needed to be punished. The management sent me to the bakery to clean all the machinery. For me, it was perfect. I didn’t have to deal with customers; I could just get on with the job. After a while, I persuaded my boss to employ my friend John Moore, who I’ve actually reconnected with recently, in the bakery as well. We had to be there at half past five every morning, which wasn’t easy because it was the height of the punk explosion—and the age when you were discovering girls. The night before work we’d cycle the nine miles to the Cambridge Corn Exchange to see bands like The Clash, The Stranglers, The Damned, or whoever happened to be playing. We’d drink underage, when a pint cost about 30p, then cycle all the way home. Wearing wet weather gear and cycling miles wasn’t exactly the best way to impress girls with your looks.

When we arrived at the bakery, hungover and with our ears still ringing from the previous night’s gig, the bakery staff would greet us with, ‘Hi lads, you all right? We’re off for breakfast.’ That meant they disappeared for a couple of hours and left all the work to us. We’d mix all the doughs, prove the bread, prepare the different recipes and follow the orders left by the manager. Once everything was ready, we’d load the ovens, make sure nothing burnt, and take the bread out ready for sale. One of the worst jobs with a hangover was frying the doughnuts. John’s lasting memory of working there is trying not to be sick into the vat of boiling oil. The reason I’m talking about my job at Tesco is that it played a major part in my application to art school so please give me a few minutes to get to the point.

Having spent most of my life in the south of England, I wanted college to be somewhere completely different. My first thought was to apply to Goldsmiths or the Slade, which at the time were regarded as the leading art schools. But when I looked into them more closely—and remember, there was no internet in those days—I discovered they had very little money. What I found was that many of the northern art schools were much better funded. When I looked at Hull, they were offering everything I wanted: large painting studios, film-editing facilities, darkrooms, photographic equipment, design studios, printmaking and sculpture workshops. It all looked fantastic. I thought, ‘I’ll go there,’ even though everyone assumed I’d end up at one of the London colleges, because that’s where you were supposed to go. But a week before my interview, I was due to see Mr Taylor after my shift at Tesco so he could look through my portfolio before I travelled to Hull. At the time I had a blue Mini 850, which I’d saved up for by working during the summer holidays at the National Institute of Agricultural Botany. I’d spend the whole summer digging up onions so they could be measured and assessed as part of trials to identify new varieties that were more resistant to disease.

09:37 Kate Genever: For farms?

09:38 Russell Boyce: Yes—for developing different plant varieties and testing how resistant they were to disease. The job paid enough for me to buy a car because, as I always say, if you’re cycling nine miles everywhere, you’re never going to get a date. Bike clips, wet hair and oil stains aren’t exactly a good look. [Kate laughs.] So I bought the Mini. I’d put my portfolio in the back of the car before going into Tesco for my shift. When I came out, the car had been stolen. [Kate gasps. My first thought was, ‘Shit.’ My next thought was ‘it’s over, no art school place for me’. The police eventually found the car, but everything inside had gone. My entire portfolio had disappeared. The only work I had left was a collection of sketchbooks and drawings that were still at home. The following week I travelled to Hull with nothing but those drawings. I explained what had happened and talked the tutors through the work I had left. Fortunately, they really liked the drawings and offered me a place. Maybe losing the portfolio was a blessing in disguise. Perhaps the paintings weren’t very good and the drawings were stronger.

So I went to Hull. In those days, the art school didn’t have halls of residence. If you were at the university near to the Avenues area, everything was rather grand, but the art students had to fend for themselves. Because my parents had never been through the university system, I had to sort everything out on my own. They simply didn’t know how it all worked. Me neither. Eventually I found somewhere to live on St George’s Road. One of my housemates was a man called Jerry, who was studying nautical communications at the Polytechnic. He was a bit older than the rest of us. The Polytechnic, where you could study nursing, computing, and that sort of thing was next to the art school on Queen’s Gardens in Hull. Also in our house was a guy there called Phil Ashby, who was a sculptor. He loved weight training and was always trying to get himself all beefed up, whereas Jerry and I definitely weren’t into any of that. Jerry and I used to take the mickey out of Phil for all his weight training. One night we’d been out drinking, and eventually Jerry and I agreed that we’d let Phil take us to the gym. He said, “Right then, I’ll take you to the gym.” So Jerry and I turned up in our ridiculous vests and shorts, looking pale, skinny, puffy and generally awful. Phil said, ‘Just do this,’ and showed us loads of little exercises. ‘Move your feet like that, move your arms like this,’ you know, all the usual things. The next day, every bone in my body ached. My girlfriend practically had to roll me out of bed because I couldn’t move. It was absolutely horrible. I swore I’d never do it again, so I’ve never really been a gym bunny. Phil thought the whole thing was hilarious. I don’t think we saw Jerry for two days afterwards – I think he just stayed in bed, completely comatose. Anyway, the point is that Hull was an awakening for me in terms of understanding people.

I was studying Fine Art, mainly painting, although I’d always loved drawing especially wherever people were. The painting tutor was, to be honest, an alcoholic. I’d turn up in the morning and he’d hate everything the students had done. It was always, “Rubbish, rubbish, rubbish,” with endless ranting. Then he’d disappear for lunch, have a few pints, come back in the afternoon, and suddenly everything was wonderful. I decided to put it to the test. He completely slated one of my paintings one morning, so I deliberately didn’t change a single thing. He went off for lunch, had a few drinks, came back, looked at exactly the same painting and said, “Wonderful, wonderful, wonderful.”

That also quickly taught me an important lesson. People’s opinions are often dependent on how they’re feeling and you have to have confidence in your own work and be able to say, ‘This is what I wanted to do.’ Other people’s opinions are valuable if you value their judgement, but sometimes they’re simply a reflection of that person’s mood or state of mind.

You have to choose carefully whose criticism you listen to, while also having the confidence to say, ‘Actually, I agree with that,’ or, ‘No, I don’t agree with that.’ I think that’s one of the hallmarks of becoming an artist.

Hull was always freezing. I’ve never been so cold in my life. The heater in my Mini stopped working so everything inside the car froze. I used to joke that the wind came straight from Siberia into Hull, passing through every layer of clothing you had. As a student, you wore horrible old ex-army coats because you had no money, and I was constantly freezing. The flat we lived in had no heating. There was frost on the inside of the windows that you could actually scrape off. It was absolutely bitter. The bathroom had a corrugated metal roof, so every time you turned the hot water on, the whole room filled with steam. The bath itself was one of those old metal baths, so when you sat down it was freezing cold. You’d spend the first few minutes trying to warm it up before you could even relax. It was horrible.

The tiny flat was damp. Everything was damp. But despite all that, I absolutely loved it. It was exciting.

Despite the cold I was always drawing people outside, and I became fascinated by Bob Carver’s fish and chip shop. I remember its beautiful red doors. I was interested in the structure of what we’d probably call bifold doors today, the way they folded back and created all these repeating red stripes and lines, together with the tiled interior.

I’d draw the architectural structure in reds, then watch the way people moved through the space – their colours, their shapes, their feet as they walked. I became interested in movement and colour within the structure of the architecture. I started using charcoal and different coloured crayons to capture blur and movement.

One day, a bloke stood watching me. Eventually he asked, ‘What are you doing there, son?’

I said, ‘I’m doing some drawing.”

He looked at it and said, ‘What’s that then?’

I replied, ‘It’s Bob Carver’s.’

He said, ‘That’s not Bob Carver’s. It’s just scribble and I can’t tell what’s going on.’

It was quite abstract, so I said, ‘No, that’s right I am trying to capture a sense of the place not recreate what can actually be seen.’

He shook his head and said, ‘No, mate, that’s rubbish,’ and wandered off.

I remember thinking that he simply didn’t understand what I was trying to do, but it struck a chord, what’s the point of doing things that people don’t understand.

At the time, my girlfriend was studying Graphic Design, and Daniel Meadows was teaching photography. The Graphic Design course included little modules covering design, typography, photography, layout, copywriting and print production.

One day I bumped into my girlfriend while she was talking to Daniel, and we got chatting. I told him about the work I was doing at Bob Carver’s, and he suggested that I should take a camera down there to support my drawings and paintings.

I thought, ‘That’s a good idea.’

To borrow college equipment students had to go to the equipment store, where there was a young bloke who seemed more interested in chasing the girls than anything else. He fancied my girlfriend so even though I was not of the graphics course he allowed me to sign out a camera. You could sign out a Nikon camera, a couple of lenses, and maybe a few rolls of film from the college, although after that you had to buy your own film.

Of course, I had absolutely no idea how the camera worked. Daniel showed me the basics: “This is the f-stop, the aperture, shutter speeds and this is how you load the film,” and so on.

Off I went.

Learning to focus properly wasn’t easy. The lighting in Bob Carver’s was particularly difficult because half the shop was open to the outside. When it was sunny in Hull – which wasn’t often – the outside was incredibly bright, while inside was quite dark. The steam and smoke from the frying fish softened and diffused the light beautifully, but it was very difficult to photograph.

I made plenty of mistakes. The exposure would be wrong, the focus would be wrong, but gradually, as I developed more films, I began to understand what I needed to do.

Eventually I produced a series of photographs that I quite liked. Then something in my head changed. I suddenly realised that, in one-sixtieth of a second, I could create a complete picture. There was none of the endless drawing, painting, mixing colours and everything else. It completely grabbed me. I thought, ‘This is for me.’

It suited my personality. I’m patient up to a point, but then suddenly I think, ‘Right, I have to do this now.’ What I also loved was giving people prints. I’d make prints and give it to the women who worked there, to Bob Carver himself, and to other people who were regulars in the shop.  Basically, when you do a Fine Art course, you can more or less do whatever you want. If you wanted, you could spend the whole day doing nothing, then turn up, throw some paint on a canvas and say, ‘There it is,’ and that was perfectly acceptable.

That freedom meant I could do what I wanted, so I started following what the Graphic Design students were doing in photography. Daniel would show me different techniques, and the technician would teach me how to process film and make prints. I was gradually learning all those skills. I decided that I wanted to hold an exhibition in Bob Carver’s fish and chip shop. I thought it would be a lovely idea because I’d always wanted as many people as possible to see my work and hopefully interact with it. After all, the photographs were about them.

I asked Bob Carver if I could put the exhibition on. “Yeah, yeah, sure,” he said. I printed a series of 16” x 12” photographs and planned to mount them around the shop. The walls were completely tiled. The college technician suggested laminating the prints, so I put each one through the laminating machine, sealing it in plastic. When I tried to stick them up with double-sided tape, though, nothing would stay on the walls because there was so much grease everywhere. So I found some incredibly strong industrial cleaner and scrubbed all the grease off the walls before putting the photographs up. I think there were about twelve or sixteen prints altogether. I also hung up a visitors’ comments book. Lots of people wrote comments, but my favourite has stayed with me ever since: ‘Great pictures of people enjoying their day the Bob Carver’s way.’ I thought that was brilliant.

The local newspaper ran a small story about the exhibition, and I think the local television news came along as well. That felt magical to me. People had seen my work. The photographs weren’t particularly sophisticated but the people in them enjoyed seeing themselves, and other people responded to the images and took the trouble to write comments. As I became more confident with photography, I noticed more I wanted to photograph. I kept seeing 19-year-old George Norris riding past on his horse and cart. He was the local rag-and-bone man, whose call was ‘Battery! Boiler! Bike frame! Lumber! Rag and bone!’ I loved that cry.

Around the same time, I was also exploring the neighbourhood around the pubs. If you came out of my house—I think it was 242 St George’s Road—you could turn left towards St George’s Pub, or right towards Hessle Road. Further along was the Star & Garter.

Everything seemed to be happening at once. I wasn’t working on one project and then moving on to the next. I had three or four different stories developing at the same time.

I’d often go into the Star & Garter at lunchtime to take pictures. It would be full of old fishermen drinking pints. The place was thick with cigarette smoke, the windows were half frosted with heavy curtains, and when the sun came round the light streamed through, creating beautiful, high-contrast scenes diffused by the smoke, what not to like?

Around that time, Brett Hamling, who was a year above me at college, mentioned that he knew George Norris. I’d told him I was interested in photographing the rag-and-bone man, so Brett introduced us.

I asked George if I could photograph him.

‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘Come along.’

So I started riding along with him and his mate Glenn while he did his rounds, taking photographs as we went.

At the same time, St George’s Pub—run by Clarice Mack—had Sunday night drag shows.

I stumbled across them completely by accident. I think Jerry and I had gone there for a pint one Sunday evening. It was mind-blowing chaos, the whole place as the show went on erupted. Everyone got completely drunk. People were standing on chairs, singing, shouting, laughing… it was unforgettable.

The performer was Kandy de Barry, whose real name is Ray Millington.

He performed by miming to cassette recordings, changing costumes between songs. One minute he’d appear as a pregnant nun, the next as Shirley Temple, then Shirley Bassey, then some completely different character. It was wonderfully irreverent and fun. Towards the end of the night, he’d dress in a flamboyant Union Jack costume while everyone stood on chairs singing “Rule, Britannia!” and “There’ll Always Be an England”, waving their arms in the air.

Then at the end of every show, though, everything changed. He’d perform “What Makes a Man a Man” by Charles Aznavour during which he’d gradually transform into an ordinary-looking man: slightly balding, slim, wearing black trousers. He’d wipe away his make-up as the song played, and by the end he was simply Ray again.

When he finished, he’d bow on the tiny stage. Landlady Clarice Mack would step forward and announce: ‘Ladies and gentlemen! Kandy de Barry, a true artiste!’ She always pronounced it ‘artiste’, never ‘artist’. Then she’d make absolutely sure everyone applauded. If she spotted someone not clapping, she’d point at them and shout, ‘Oi! You’re not clapping! Clap!’. She ruled the room.

St George’s was divided into two bars. As you went in, I think the saloon bar was on the left and the public bar was on the right. On Sunday nights it became this extraordinary performance space, but on every other night it was simply full of local people having a quiet drink and chat.

Sunday nights were different. The bar on the left-hand side would be absolutely crammed for the Kandy de Barry show. Locals simply called it ‘gay night’. A lot of the regular drinkers weren’t interested in the show, so they’d stay and drink in the other bar.

I remember being there one evening with my girlfriend. During the interval she said, ‘Can you get me a drink?’ My girlfriend drank that dreadful drink called a Snowball—you know, the creamy white one. I still can’t understand why anyone would drink it.

Anyway, the bar on Kandy’s side was packed, so I thought I’d nip into the other bar instead. It was full of locals. They knew I’d come from next door; I squeezed between two blokes at the bar to order the drink.’ Can I have a Snowball please?’ The bloke standing next to me looked over and said, ’is that for you, love?’ I laughed and said, ‘No, it’s not for me. It’s for my girlfriend’. ‘What’s his name?’ he asked.

It was all gentle banter. There was a bit of mickey-taking, but never any aggression. I never felt threatened. I think they enjoyed having a laugh because of my southern accent, the fact I was ordering this strange Snowball drink, and because I’d wandered over from the drag show. I probably had my camera with me as well, and in those days carrying a camera immediately made you stand out. You became an obvious target for a bit of friendly teasing.

I got her drink and went back. That was always the atmosphere. I never saw any trouble there—ever. It was always welcoming, friendly and enormous fun. Other people would drift in during the evening who weren’t necessarily part of Ray’s circle. Ray had his regular entourage—I remember someone everyone called Twaddles—and various other characters. Then there was Clarice Mack.

She ran the place like a commander. She was a fabulous woman, always immaculately dressed in these sharp double-breasted suits, almost like a power suit. Her hair was perfectly set, lipstick immaculate, and you absolutely did not mess with her. She was completely in control of the pub.

As people became used to me wandering around with a camera, they gradually stopped noticing me, which was wonderful.

By then Daniel was teaching me different photographic techniques. The pub was obviously very dark, and Kandy’s performances were incredibly energetic. If you wanted to freeze the action you needed flash, because with a slow shutter speed everything became blurred. But if you used flash on its own, it killed all the beautiful ambient light in the room.

I said to Daniel, “I want to keep the atmosphere of the room, but I also want to freeze the movement.”

He introduced me to slow-sync flash.

The idea was that you used a slower shutter speed while firing the flash during the exposure. The flash froze part of the image, while the longer exposure recorded the ambient light, creating movement and blur around the sharp subject.

The longer the exposure, the more blur you got, but you always retained that frozen moment from the flash. It became a matter of balancing how much blur you wanted against how much sharpness and atmosphere you wanted to keep.

I found that fascinating.

Some of my photographs are extremely blurred, with just a tiny flash freezing a single moment. Others have only a slight sense of movement. Gradually I was building a visual record of those evenings.

Some pictures worked best using only the available light. Others needed direct flash because that sudden burst of light actually added to the energy of the scene. Others needed a combination of both.

As I worked through the negatives and edited the photographs, I began to understand how to tell the story visually. The editing wasn’t simply about choosing the best individual pictures; it was about recreating the feeling of being in that smoke-filled pub, with all its movement, light, noise and atmosphere.

One thing I still regret is never photographing Ray backstage while he was getting changed. It simply never occurred to me at the time. I was too busy taking pictures, chatting to people and having a drink. Looking back, I wish I’d done it.

When I returned to the project in 2021, I realised that backstage story of Ray’s performance was an important part of it, so I made sure that was my focus of the story update.

At the same time I was photographing Ray in 1983, I was also photographing George Norris and his horse and cart, as well as working on a story about the lunchtime drinkers in the Star & Garter. Those projects were all developing together.

The editing process fascinated me.

Back then everything was shot on 36-exposure rolls of film. You couldn’t look at the back of the camera to check what you’d done. You had to process the film first, and only then discover whether it had worked.

Sometimes you’d look at the negatives and think, “Well, that hasn’t quite worked.”

Whenever I’d finished a roll, I’d take it to Daniel.

After processing the film, you’d cut it into strips of six negatives, lay them on photographic paper under a sheet of glass, and make a contact sheet. Then you’d examine every frame with a loupe.

I’d often burst into Daniel’s classes and say, “Can you have a look at these?”

He was always welcoming.

“Yeah, of course,” he’d say.

No matter how busy he was, he’d make time.

He’d go through the contact sheets with me, critique the work and always leave me feeling I’d learnt something. You’d come away encouraged, with another piece of knowledge that would help you improve your photography and your storytelling.

Daniel is a tall man, and when he really liked a picture he’d burst out laughing, wave his arms around and say,

‘Oh! That’s fantastic! What a picture!’

Then he’d add,

‘That’s a brilliant image… but wouldn’t it be even better if you also did this?’

You never left feeling discouraged. You left feeling excited to go out and make more photographs.

His whole philosophy was about storytelling.

He’d say, ‘You’ve got to tell the story. You’ve got to photograph an ordinary scene in a way it hasn’t been photographed before. Either show something ordinary in an extraordinary way, or photograph something extraordinary.’

The Kandy de Barry nights certainly counted as extraordinary.

I remember one evening when, right in the middle of the show, someone dressed in a full gorilla suit suddenly appeared.

The place was packed. There wasn’t room to move. Tables were crammed together and people were squeezed shoulder to shoulder.

The gorilla burst into the room, grabbed a woman who screamed, knocked over a table, sent pints flying everywhere, sat on someone’s knee, hugged half the audience, caused complete mayhem…

…and then disappeared.

I remember thinking, ‘What on earth just happened?’

I managed to fire off two or three frames. Two were out of focus, but one worked.

Everyone was laughing. There was beer all over the floor, broken glasses everywhere. It was complete chaos.

Years later, when I photographed Ray again, I asked him about it.

He laughed and said he’d always loved gorillas. His house was full of little stuffed gorillas. He thought it would be hilarious to have one suddenly appear during the act, so he’d ask a friend to put on a gorilla suit.

The best part was that Ray never knew exactly when the gorilla would arrive. Sometimes it wouldn’t appear for weeks. Then, without warning, in the middle of a performance, the gorilla would suddenly burst into the room, create complete havoc, and disappear again.

It became this bizarre little parallel performance running alongside the drag show.

It was wonderful.

One of the hardest parts of the project was editing everything down. Ray had so many different costumes—suspenders, bras, feather boas swirling around him—and he’d constantly interact with the audience.

People who’d simply come in for a quiet pint would suddenly find themselves pulled into the performance. They’d be standing there wondering what was going on when Ray would single them out.

But he never humiliated anyone.

It was always inclusive, always warm and always funny.

People genuinely enjoyed it.

It really was an extraordinary evening.

KG: Can you remember the costumes?

RB: Yeah. There was Shirley Temple, with the little dress and wig. Then there was Shirley Bassey, with these glamorous outfits covered in tassels. I think there was both a black version and a white version.

I’ll never forget the pregnant nun act. The song was Always Something There to Remind Me. He’d come on dressed as a nun with this enormous fake pregnant belly, singing the song. At some point during the act he’d burst the balloon, the belly would suddenly disappear, and the audience would all gasp and laugh. It was brilliant.

There was also the stripper-style act, with suspenders, stockings and a bra, all in black. I remember him telling me that a member of his family—I think it was his grandmother—didn’t approve of that outfit. She said, ‘I don’t like you showing your arse in public.’

Ray just laughed and said to me, ‘I had to keep doing it—it put a loaf of bread on my table.’

That always made me laugh.

I’ve got a lovely photograph of him in that costume, twirling a feather boa, wearing this wonderfully dramatic expression. Sitting in front of him is a woman in a huge fur coat, and you almost can’t tell which one is the drag artist and which one has simply turned up looking glamorous.

A lot of the women made a real effort with their appearance. They’d wear fur coats, have beautifully bouffant hairstyles, bright lipstick and glamorous clothes. In a funny way, there was a sort of visual mirroring between the audience and the performers. They were all celebrating style and performance in different ways.

There were plenty of younger people there as well.

There were lots of other costumes too. I remember a Native American-inspired outfit, with a brown fringed dress. I can’t remember what song accompanied that one, though.

Towards the end of every evening, after the earlier acts such as the pregnant nun, Shirley Temple or Shirley Bassey, he’d come out wearing this enormous Union Jack dress with a big blue wig.

He’d always perform patriotic songs like Rule, Britannia! and There’ll Always Be an England. By then everyone would be standing on the chairs, linking arms and singing at the top of their voices.

Ray told me the Union Jack dress had actually been made from a double duvet.

He’d spread his arms wide so the whole Union Jack opened out across the stage.

People absolutely loved it.

Every now and then, though, there’d be someone who simply refused to join in. They wouldn’t stand on the chairs or sing along. I’ve got one photograph showing complete chaos all around them—everyone celebrating—while two people are just sitting there looking completely uninterested.

When I showed that picture to Ray years later, he pointed to one of the men and said,

‘He’s a lovely bloke.’

He said the man would never join in with the singing and would never speak to him while he was in drag. He’d only ever talk to him afterwards, when he’d changed back into Ray Millington.

Ray said he was a genuinely lovely man. That was just the way he was.

Those are the costumes I remember best.

As I said, one of my biggest regrets is never photographing Ray while he was actually getting changed.

A couple of times, though, I photographed him waiting to make his entrance.

There was a corridor running down the middle of the pub. The performance room was on the left, the other bar was on the right, and the toilets were at the far end.

Ray would be standing there in full costume, waiting for his cue on the cassette tape. I remember one photograph where he’s dressed as the pregnant nun, waiting quietly in the corridor, while a man comes out of the toilets looking completely bewildered to find a pregnant nun standing there.

It’s one of my favourite photographs.

Then the cue would come, and in he’d go.

Everything was run from cassette tapes. Whoever was helping him would play the tape at exactly the right moment.

Ray is a perfectionist.

He cared enormously about getting the show right. The costumes had to look good. The make-up had to be right. The timing had to be perfect.

It didn’t matter whether there were twenty people there or two hundred. For Ray, the performance always mattered.

At the end of the evening they’d pack everything away, have a chat together, and then everyone would head home.

KG: So you were still studying while all this was happening?

RB: Yeah, exactly. That’s what I was doing.

KG: And then what happened? You were making all these photographs…

RB: I basically fell in love with photography—especially darkroom photography—and I wanted to make a living from it.

When you’re young, you believe in your photographs. You believe they’re going to take you somewhere.

I started having exhibitions. One of my photographs was selected for the Young Blood exhibition at the Hayward Gallery in London.

It was around the time of the Falklands War, when the ship MV Norland returned to Hull. I remember everyone waiting for it to dock, but it was so windy that it couldn’t come alongside straight away.

While everyone was waiting, I photographed a group of policemen standing together. Suddenly a huge gust of wind caught them all at once, and they all leaned over together. It looked as though they were performing a dance. That photograph ended up in the exhibition.

Around the same time I received a commission from Impressions Gallery, which was based in York then. The project was called The Road to Wigan Pier, inspired by George Orwell’s book. It was 1984, and five or six photographers were commissioned to produce work based on Orwell’s writing.

My project focused on a young woman called Tina, whom George Norris introduced me to.

She was living in a condemned house in Hull while waiting to be rehoused. She was pregnant, and I think her younger sister was living with her because their mother wasn’t around. It was quite a complicated situation.

The little cul-de-sac had originally been built behind the factories. Most of the houses were boarded up, but Tina was still living in one of them. It was incredibly damp and squalid, with an outside toilet.

What interested me was that Orwell wrote so powerfully about poverty, but I was equally aware that even in extreme poverty, life continues. People still laugh, find pleasure and carry on living. That’s what I wanted to photograph.

This was during the huge recession of the early 1980s, with unemployment everywhere.

I remember Tina saying to me,

‘I’m so bored. I’m just smoking myself to death.’

I’ve got photographs of her sitting in front of the television with a cigarette, while one of her friends sits beside her. On the television, Margaret Thatcher was visiting Madame Tussauds and looking at her own waxwork. Two Margaret Thatchers on the television, while Tina sits there pregnant, smoking a cigarette.

For me it’s an extraordinary story telling moment because of the contrast.

I also remember noticing her shoes. She’d made a real effort to look smart and attractive, but her shoes were completely worn out. Somehow that detail stayed with me because it summed up the reality of her situation.

The work was exhibited at Impressions Gallery, which was a huge opportunity for me. It was a very prestigious gallery, and I was thrilled.

After that I applied for several artist residencies. In those days you could get grants to spend time living in a town, producing your own work while also teaching local people. I applied for a couple of those—including one in Boston—but I wasn’t successful.

Eventually I moved to Peterborough.

I kept trying to survive on photographic commissions, but the money simply ran out.

I remember the day I took a piece of bread back out of my own dustbin. I’d thrown it away the previous day because it was too mouldy to eat. The next day I had no money and no food, so I took it back out of the bin. I remember thinking,

‘This really isn’t working.’

My sister worked for the Cambridge Evening News, and she knew Michael Manni, who ran his own commercial photography business.

She heard he was looking for someone in Peterborough to help expand the business, so I got a part-time job with him. At first I did things like passport photographs, but that side of the business didn’t really work out.

Eventually I joined him full-time in Cambridge, working mainly in the darkroom.

I spent hours making prints while Michael covered all kinds of commercial photography—studio work, weddings, public relations, press jobs and advertising.

It was all film, of course, long before digital photography.

We copied transparencies, processed negatives and printed everything by hand.

It was a fantastic education because I learnt the commercial side of photography as well as the technical side.

What really interested me, though, was the press photography.

The commercial PR jobs paid much better, but they were often rather dull. A room full of people in suits would already have a fixed idea of the photograph they wanted.

You’d smile politely and say,

‘Yes, that’s a great idea.’ Then you’d suggest, ‘Would you mind if we just tried this?’

You’d quietly arrange something much stronger, take the picture, and of course they loved it.

Michael realised I was quite good at handling people, so naturally he wanted me doing more commercial work because that was where the money was.

I, however, wanted the newspaper assignments.

Every now and then a national newspaper would need somebody to cover a court case or another news story, and I’d jump at the chance, even though those jobs often occupied an entire day and earned far less than commercial work.

Around that time there was a major breakthrough at Papworth Hospital involving heart and lung transplant surgery.

We got a call about one patient who’d undergone a pioneering operation, and I was sent to the hospital to see whether I could get some kind of photograph.

This was also the period when newspapers were changing from black and white to colour. Different newspapers wanted different film. Today wanted colour transparencies. The Daily Mirror wanted colour negatives. The broadsheets still wanted black-and-white film.

So I carried three cameras—one loaded with transparency film, one with colour negative film and one with black-and-white film.

When I arrived at the hospital car park, the patient’s family turned up at exactly the same moment. Right in front of me they embraced one another, hugging and kissing after this hugely emotional operation. Everything happened in front of me but was over in seconds.

I was shooting with one camera…switching to another…then grabbing the third…

By the end, all three cameras were tangled around my neck, but I’d captured the whole sequence on all three types of film. Michael was absolutely delighted.

We sent the photographs out, and they appeared on the front pages of all the nation al newspapers.

I think they were strong pictures because they captured a genuine emotional moment without intruding upon it.

I heard that Anglia Press Agency, a small news agency, was looking for a full-time photographer.

I rang them and said I was interested in the job and if they wanted to look at the quality of my work all they had to do was look at the fronts of all the day’s newspapers. I chanced my arm as that was my first big hit.

They invited me for an interview.

At that time, I was working thirteen days out of every fourteen for Michael. The only jobs I never did were weddings. I absolutely hated the thought of photographing weddings. The pressure was just too much.

Keith, who worked with us, photographed the weddings. He was the calmest man imaginable—almost like a monk. He’d shoot them on large-format cameras, and I’d help him by loading film holders and assisting with the equipment. Watching him, I always thought, ‘I never, ever want to do this.’

I remember making some silly joke once about taking the bridal photographs on the blue patio. The blue patio was actually a cover for a swimming pool. Keith wasn’t remotely amused and gave me a proper telling-off.

Looking back, he was probably right.

Anyway, the bosses from Anglia Press Agency arranged to meet me in a pub one Sunday.

The agency was run by Jeff Cooper and Richard Goss. Both had originally been journalists on the Daily Sketch before setting up the business in East Anglia.

We met in the pub and spent most of the afternoon drinking. Eventually one of them asked,

‘How quickly can you get a photograph out of the darkroom? From the moment the film arrives until it’s ready to send?’ I genuinely didn’t know what the correct answer should be. I didn’t want to exaggerate, but I didn’t want to sound slow either. So I asked, ‘Is that with wet negatives or dry negatives?’ Richard wasn’t a technician, so he looked completely puzzled. ‘I’ve no idea,’ he said. ‘You’d better ask Phil, the phootgrapher… Anyway, whose round is it?’

That was more or less the interview. They offered me the job.

I left Michael Manni just after Christmas and started at Anglia Press Agency. At that point I owned almost nothing. I packed a few clothes into my car and drove down to Colchester. They said, ‘Don’t worry—we’ve got a company flat.’ I thought, ‘Brilliant.’

The reality was rather different.

Jeff was married to Jackie, and they had a lovely house. The ‘company flat’, however, was basically a derelict building. Sometimes it had running water, sometimes it didn’t. I’d often have to wash in the local pub toilets. There was no heating, and the electricity worked from 50p coins fed into a meter. One freezing winter evening the electricity cut out altogether. We used to drink in the Wig and Pen pub, and one day Jackie asked me, ‘So where are you living?’ I said, ‘The company flat.’ She replied ‘What company flat?’ When I explained where it was, she turned to Jeff and said, ‘What do you mean you’ve got him living there?’ She was furious.  She said, ‘You’re not staying there any longer. It’s disgusting.’

So I moved into their house for about a month. After that, Sue—the barmaid at the Wig and Pen—said, ‘I’ve got a spare room. Why don’t you come and live with me?’

So I became her lodger. Sue became a lifelong friend. We were never romantically involved—we were simply close friends. In fact, she was my best woman at my wedding.

KG: Ah, yeah.

RB: She really is a lovely woman.

So, for about eighteen months to two years, I worked as a press photographer, mainly covering stories for the tabloids. Jeff and Richard taught me everything I needed to know about earning a living as a news photographer.

Some of the jobs were horrible.

You’d have to visit the homes of people who had just died to try to obtain what we called a ‘collect picture’—a photograph of the person who’d died that could accompany the newspaper story.

You’d knock on the door, explain why you were there, and ask whether the family had a photograph you could copy.

I was never aggressive. If they said no, I’d simply thank them and leave. There are respectful ways of doing those things, and I always believed that photographs were important because they helped tell the person’s story. It was always about explaining why the picture mattered and allowing people to make their own decision.

We also covered court cases. You’d wait outside the court for someone coming out after a criminal trial and photograph them as they left.

Then there was sport. I photographed football, mainly covering Norwich City and Ipswich Town. The workflow was completely different from today.

We were based in Colchester, so you’d drive to the match, photograph the opening minutes of the game, and then leave early to make the newspaper deadlines.

Back then you couldn’t transmit photographs yourself.

I had to race back to Anglia Press Agency, process the negatives, make a print, and then Jeff or Richard would write the caption on a typewriter. The typed caption would be attached to the bottom of an 8 × 6 print.

The print was then wrapped around a drum scanner and transmitted to London.

The whole system relied on NGA operators—the National Graphical Association technicians.

Our operator Alan would contact the NGA operator at Colchester Post Office, who would contact the operator in London, who would then connect to the operator at whichever newspaper was receiving the picture: the Daily Express, the Daily Mirror, The Guardian, The Times and so on.

Once everyone was connected, they’d start transmission.

“Right… all ready?”

“Yep.”

“Receiving?”

“Yep.”

Then Alan would start the drum scanner, and the photograph would be transmitted line by line over the telephone network.

When one paper had received it, you’d disconnect and send it to the next one.

Everything depended on speed because once the presses started rolling, that edition had gone.

Football was particularly frantic.

You’d only photograph the opening fifteen or twenty minutes of the match, hoping you’d captured enough action—and hoping it was all in focus, because everything was manual focus and shot on film.

Then you’d jump in the car and race back from Norwich to Colchester. The A140 felt like a racing circuit. Looking back, I realise I drove far too dangerously and fast. But when you’re in your twenties it all feels exciting. You don’t really think about the risks.

You’d get back, process the film, transmit the pictures, and then the next morning you’d open the Sunday newspapers and see your photograph in print.

That was a wonderful feeling.

You never received an individual byline. The credit simply read “APA” for Anglia Press Agency.

Eventually I moved into a flat above one of the sandwich shops owned by Jeff’s wife. 

Our office was down near the docks in Colchester, on Hythe Road.

It was a wonderful place and I have fond memories. Three desks were pushed together. Jeff and Richard sat opposite one another with their typewriters rattling away all day.

There were newspapers everywhere—literally piles a foot or more high.

The office was always untidy.

Jeff constantly smoked a pipe. I can still picture him puffing away, looking a bit like the champion darts player Jocky Wilson.

Eventually he’d look up and say, ‘Rusty, my boy… time for a pint.’ I’d say, ‘Okay, Jeff.’ So we’d all pile into our cars. Jeff drove a Mercedes. Gossy—Richard Goss—had a Range Rover.

We’d head off to the Wig and Pen.

We’d each drink six, seven or even eight pints of Greene King IPA. Afterwards I’d stagger back down the hill to my flat above the sandwich shop. Gossy was always the early starter.

He’d go home first, keep an eye on the news, and if something happened he’d either ring me or send a message on my pager—this was long before mobile phones. If the pager went off, I’d have to find a telephone box and ring him back. He’d say, ‘Right… get yourself over to King’s Lynn,’ or wherever the story happened to be. Off I’d go.

Sometimes he’d wake me at six or seven in the morning.

I’d jump into the car, race off, photograph the story, return to the office, process the film…and then Jeff would look up and say, ‘Rusty, my boy… time for a pint.’

That became my life.

I’d spend the evening in the pub, stagger home, sleep for a few hours, then get woken up to cover another story. To be honest, I hardly ate. I seemed to live almost entirely on IPA. The Wig and Pen did wonderful garlic potatoes—thinly sliced potatoes baked with garlic and oil. They were absolutely delicious. That was about the healthiest thing I ate.

Eventually I developed a rash. I went to see the doctor, who asked, ‘Tell me about your diet.’ I explained how I was living. He looked at me and said, ‘Well, you’ve got vitamin deficiencies. The way you’re living, son…’

The doctor basically said, ‘You’re not going to live very long if you carry on like this. It’s really not good.’ He told me I needed to eat vegetables—carrots in particular. So I started keeping a bag of peeled carrots in the car and would munch on them while I was driving.

For some reason, I never made the connection between living on garlic potatoes and IPA. I genuinely thought the carrots were the cure! So, yes… I had to change my lifestyle a little.

Working at Anglia Press taught me a huge amount.

I remember one day covering a court martial case alongside Phil Haniford from The Sun. Quite often photographers from other newspapers would use our office to transmit their pictures.

There was a defendant being escorted out of military court, surrounded by officers trying to shield him from the cameras. I waited and waited, hoping to get a clear shot of his face. It never happened. So I didn’t press the shutter once.

Phil, on the other hand, photographed what little he could see. I think all you could make out was the man’s ear. He sent the picture anyway. Afterwards Jeff said to me, ‘Russell, you didn’t take a single photograph.’ I said, ‘No, because I couldn’t see his face.’ He replied ‘We’ve got nothing to sell.’ He added, ‘How are we supposed to pay you if we haven’t got a picture we can sell? It might only be an ear. It might only be part of a face. It might not be the picture you wanted—but it’s something. You’ve got nothing.’

That really opened my eyes.

It taught me that, as a professional photographer, you have to be commercially successful if you want to carry on working.

It was a hugely important lesson.

If you don’t produce something that can be sold, you don’t earn any money—and if you don’t earn any money, you can’t keep doing the work. I’ve never forgotten that.

After about eighteen months there, I realised tabloid journalism wasn’t really suited to my personality. I enjoyed it enormously—it was exciting, fast-paced and sometimes quite brutal—but it taught me the craft and how to work under pressure.

I also met extraordinary people.

It wasn’t all sensational stories either. We covered features for the broadsheets as well, along with plenty of interesting assignments. What I was really learning was how to earn a living as a photographer. I never wanted to be someone working behind a bar saying, ‘One day I’m going to be a photographer.’ I wanted photography itself to be my livelihood.

I knew I didn’t want to photograph weddings because the pressure made me too nervous. I didn’t want to spend my life in a studio either. I wanted to be out with people. For me, the camera was always a way into people’s lives. It was about stories. Happy stories. Sad stories. Funny stories. Tragic stories.

Even a football match is a story that unfolds over ninety minutes. That’s what fascinated me.

Then I saw an advert in the UK Press Gazette.

Reuters was moving part of its international picture operation from Brussels to London and was recruiting a number of young photographers and picture editors to work on its UK picture desk.

It wasn’t a photography job—it was a desk job. The role involved editing photographs arriving from all over the world. I remember thinking that it sounded fascinating. I’d be learning an entirely new set of skills, and perhaps one day it might lead somewhere else.

I applied and was invited for an interview. I needed a reference from Jeff.

The funny thing was that Anglia Press almost expected people to move on. Young photographers would arrive, work incredibly hard for a couple of years, and then progress to national newspapers or agencies.

It was almost like a training ground—a photographic boot camp.

People like Cleggy, Simon Runting, Phil Haniford, Shaky from the BBC, Stefan Rosseau, Paul Currie and plenty of others had all come through there before moving on.

So I told Jeff and Richard that I was applying to Reuters. They gave me a terrible amount of stick. Most people moved on to the tabloids, whereas I was heading towards Reuters. They used to joke about “arty-farty” photographers—as if I thought I was too good for them.

When I asked Jeff for a reference, he said, ‘Of course.’

A little while later he handed me the letter. It read something like:

‘Dear Steve Crisp,

Our employee, Russell Boyce, is ideally suited to your piss-poor organisation. He is a piss-poor photographer, a drunk and thoroughly abusive. Don’t let him anywhere near your female staff because he can’t keep his hands off them. I cannot recommend him under any circumstances.’

He handed it over and said, ‘There you are.’ I just stood there looking at it.

The penny dropped, it was a joke and his blessing.

I’ve still got that letter.

It sums up exactly what Jeff and Richard were like. It was affectionate, irreverent and full of humour but at the same time professional and hard working. That was the relationship we all had with each other.

Just before I joined APA I remember getting a message on my answering machine. It was Paul Heaton from the Housemartins. He said, ‘You don’t know who I am, but I know who you are, and we’d like to use one of your pictures for one of our record covers.’

I had no idea what to charge them, so I made a print and asked my friend Verity—who is now my wife, although we were just friends at the time—’How much should I charge?’

She said, ‘I’d charge NUJ rates,’ because you had to be a member of the NUJ then. That’s another story, though. Getting involved with that was hard work.

So I drove the print down and gave it to them, and it ended up being used for a record cover. Eventually The Housemartins used two of my pictures for their single record covers Flag Day and Think for a Minute

By the time the records came out I’d moved to Colchester and was working for APA, and I remember receiving a letter from a solicitor. It related to a photograph I’d taken in the Star & Garter of an elderly gentleman. The letter claimed that I hadn’t secured the rights to sell the image, and that his client had suffered mental distress and torment from his peers because of its publication. The man must have been eighty if he was a day.

I was quite shocked. It was a solicitor’s letter, and I started worrying, wondering what I was going to do.

I took the letter to Gossy and asked, ‘What do I do with this?’

He said, ‘I’ve got just the solution.’

He pulled open the drawer beneath his desk, rummaged around for a moment, then said, ‘Ah, there it is.’

He took out a large rubber stamp and an ink pad, gave it a huge thump onto the ink pad, and said, ‘Just send it back to them.’

The stamp simply read: ‘BULLSHIT’

So I sent it back, and I never heard another word.

That was what they were like.

I remember another time when an unpaid invoice was being chased. A bloke rang up asking why it hadn’t been paid. Jeff said, ‘Yes, I’ll just put you through to our accounts department.’ In those days you could press the switch hook on the phone and keep the caller on the line. So he put the caller on hold and passed the handset to Gossie. ‘Accounts,’ Gossie answered. Then he’d say, ‘Oh, you’ll need to speak to Mr Jones.’ The phone would then come to me. ‘Hello, is Mr Jones there?’

We’d pass the poor chap around between us before eventually giving him back to Gossie.

Finally Gossie said, ‘Look, mate, we run a very tight accounts department here. At the end of every month we put all the unpaid bills into a hat and draw out three to pay. If you don’t fuck off, you’re not even going in the hat.’ And put the phone down.

That was the sort of humour we lived with every day.

When we drank in the Wig and Pen there were always lawyers, police officers and journalists in there, all swapping stories. Just being part of that atmosphere taught you so much. They certainly weren’t saints—not by a long way—but I learnt an enormous amount. I learnt the trade.

After that I joined Reuters.

I started on the picture desk, watching photographs arrive from all over the world. Everything was still analogue. There was a cupboard full of cameras, and every now and then you’d get the chance to go out and shoot something. If one of your pictures went onto the Reuters wire, it was sent all over the world.

We wore shirts and ties, and jackets were expected. Everyone called me ‘Boyce’.

One day someone shouted, ‘Boyce! England are playing at Wembley today. Off you go.’

I was sitting there in my suit, so I grabbed the cameras and headed off.

In those days you’d work with a motorcycle courier. You’d shoot a roll of film, hand it to the biker, who’d race it back to the office for processing, and then the picture would be transmitted.

So there I was, sitting in the pouring rain at Wembley in my suit, photographing England and whoever they were playing—and thinking, ‘This is fantastic.’

As time went on, opportunities kept coming. You met people, covered different events, and gradually the whole world opened up.

But I never forgot that what I really wanted to do was tell stories.

While I was living in Hackney, I began photographing Kurdish refugees. They used to gather in a community hall while they were trying to obtain asylum. I can’t remember the name of the hall now, but I started photographing there and met one family in particular. The father had been tortured, and all four family members were sleeping in a single bed.

I photographed their story.

Reuters didn’t want it because it wasn’t part of my work for them, so I offered it elsewhere, and the New Statesman published it. I was very proud of that.

Of course, when you work for Reuters you don’t have much time for your own projects. Eventually Reuters expanded its UK operation, and I moved from the picture desk into a staff photographer’s role based in London. For the next ten years I travelled all over the world photographing news, politics, sport and conflicts. It was an extraordinary time.

It was a fantastic period, but I always believed that you had to remain human when covering the news. News photography is about taking pictures, but it’s also about people. You’re there to record events honestly and fairly. At Reuters we never staged photographs. If you staged a picture, you were dismissed. It was as simple as that.

I really admired Reuters’ trust principles and ethics. Safety was always taken seriously too, particularly when covering dangerous assignments.

During that time I worked through the industry’s transition from analogue film to digital photography. We moved to autofocus cameras and then digital cameras.

With film, if you covered an FA Cup Final, you might shoot three rolls of 36 exposures. That’s 108 photographs to cover the entire match—every goal, every celebration, every key moment.

That was all you had.

Today, digital cameras can shoot twenty frames a second. You can take thousands of photographs and transmit them instantly while an editor selects and processes them in real time.

In the film days, if we covered, for example, Liverpool against Bayern Munich, our competitors were usually AP and AFP. We’d all be covering the same match. We’d collect our accreditation, photograph the game, and because of deadlines we’d often only shoot the first few minutes before rushing back to the hotel to process and transmit the film. I was used to this from my days at APA.

If you missed the transmission deadline, there was no point. The newspapers had already gone to press.

We’d all stay in the same hotel because it was the closest. We’d even share taxis back together. We were competitors, but we were also friends. The competition only really started when we were photographing.

If there was a key piece of action and you missed focus, processed your film too slowly, or your transmission was delayed, you might finish third on the wire. If that happened, you’d lost. The entire trip had been wasted because your pictures wouldn’t appear in the newspapers. Every assignment was a competition. You had to produce the best picture, and you had to be first. In news photography you simply couldn’t afford to lose.

That environment drilled two things into you: speed and accuracy.

Over time I built systems into the way I worked to make everything as efficient as possible. If something went wrong, you lost. Your editors knew you’d lost because your pictures weren’t in the papers.

If you wanted the major assignments—the Olympics, the World Cup, the biggest international news stories—you had to prove yourself consistently.

That stayed with me throughout my career.

Even now I put systems in place to avoid making unnecessary mistakes. I always kept my films, negatives and pictures meticulously organised so that everything was accessible when I needed it.

I’ve always believed that’s incredibly important.

Organisation is very important. I’m not naturally an organised person, although there are certain things I like to keep organised.

When the technology changed from analogue to digital, people suddenly started sending hundreds of pictures at a time. Cameras could just rattle them off endlessly. Around that time I became much more interested in the editing process.

At major events you’d usually work in teams of two or three photographers. One person might gather everyone’s film and take it back to process it and send the pictures on the wire. Later, once transmission became possible from hotel rooms using portable transmitters over telephone lines, that process became even quicker.

I found myself becoming more and more interested in editing other people’s work. I’d shoot my own pictures, collect the other photographers’ film as well, and edit the whole package.

Some people would naturally prioritise getting their own pictures onto the wire and leave everyone else’s behind. I wasn’t interested in that. I was interested in getting the very best picture onto the wire, no matter who had taken it. I wanted the team to win. I wanted Reuters to win. I wanted us to be the best.

I became known as ‘CropperBoyce’ because I had a reputation for cropping photographs in a way that I knew newspapers would use, and I could do it quickly.

Gradually I found myself enjoying the editing process almost as much as taking pictures. I still loved photography, but I also loved the business of photography and making the whole operation work.

Eventually I applied for the role of Chief Photographer for Asia. It was a huge job. I imagined I’d be travelling around Asia photographing stories in fascinating places.

The job involved moving my family to Singapore.

When I arrived, my boss, Paul Barker, who was a lovely man, welcomed me and got me settled in. Asia was an extraordinary place for news. There were earthquakes, volcanoes, riots—something was happening all the time. It was dynamic, exciting and full of incredible stories.

I remember thinking, I want to photograph all of this.

But Asia is enormous, and I soon realised I wasn’t going to be photographing very much at all. Instead, I found myself doing what I’d started out doing years earlier—looking at other people’s work.

I realised that Europe and the Americas were still Reuters’ biggest priorities, with Asia behind them, followed by Middle East and Africa. I thought perhaps my role was actually to pass on everything I’d learnt in Europe to the photographers across Asia—to teach them about speed, organisation, workflow and the systems that made Reuters successful. Speed and accuracy.

So I travelled constantly.

If there was a Formula One race in Japan or Malaysia, that gave me an excuse to visit the country. I’d meet the local team, review their work and explain exactly what Reuters needed. I’d spend time with the photographers, listen to their concerns—usually they wanted new cameras, better equipment or larger budgets—and I learnt that a big part of my job was simply listening.

Much of my role became helping photographers grow professionally while also helping the company understand what photographers needed in order to do their jobs properly.

I was always fascinated by that relationship between management and photographers.

I spent six years doing it.

I particularly remember working with the Japanese photographers. They were exceptionally talented, but every one of them wanted to cover the Olympics or the FIFA World Cup.

They kept asking me, ‘Why do we never get selected?’

I explained that it wasn’t because of their photography—it was because they couldn’t speak English.

We were working through translators, but I told them that at events like the Olympics the entire photographic operation runs over radio communication. Athletics, for example, has track events and field events happening simultaneously, with only a limited number of accredited photographers. Editors constantly direct photographers over the radios.

Someone might say, ‘The long jump could produce a gold medal or world record—get over there now.’

Everyone has to move immediately.

If you don’t understand what’s being said, you miss the moment.

At an Olympics the whole world is watching. If your team misses the gold medal-winning moment because one photographer couldn’t understand the instructions, that’s a serious problem.

It’s exactly the same with England playing football. If you don’t capture the winning goal, you may as well not have been there.

I remember one photographer missing England’s winning goal. For whatever reason, he simply didn’t get the picture. He wasn’t a poor photographer; sometimes the photography gods just aren’t smiling on you.

He was devastated.

People tried to reassure him, saying, ‘Don’t worr, there’ll be another match.’

But photographers know when they’ve missed the picture. Nobody has to tell them.

So I told the Japanese team, ‘Learn English.’

They asked, ‘How?’

I suggested they have an ‘English day’ in the office. Whenever they spoke to each other—even if it was only asking someone if they wanted a coffee—they should do it in English. Gradually they’d build their confidence.

Once their English improved, I said I’d support them for international assignments.

Their photography was already good enough. Language was simply the barrier.

I also pushed for greater diversity within Reuters. It made perfect sense to have Japanese photographers covering Japanese athletes at the Olympics or the World Cup. They brought a different perspective, understood the culture and often had better access.

Seeing those photographers develop was hugely rewarding. They were wonderful people and excellent photographers, and their work just kept getting better.

Then Reuters decided to launch something called The Wider Image.

Reuters’ core business had always been breaking news—fast, immediate, now. But the company wanted something different. They wanted to tell deeper stories that explained the reasons behind the news. For example, the news photograph might show a riot. The Wider Image would explain why the riot was happening.

Perhaps fuel prices had risen so much that families could no longer afford cooking oil. That economic pressure led to unrest, and eventually to riots. The riot was the news. The inability to buy cooking oil was the story behind the news.

That was The Wider Image.

Because Reuters knew I was interested in storytelling, they asked me to run the project. I left Asia, returned to London and worked alongside The Global Picture Editor Reinhard Krause to establish The Wider Image.

One of my biggest tasks was developing a training programme. For years we’d trained photographers to react instantly: now, now, now. Suddenly we were asking them to do almost the opposite—to slow down, spend time with people, understand the story and think more deeply. It was a complicated message because they still had to be capable of reacting instantly whenever breaking news happened.

News photographers are naturally reactive. If there’s an explosion, they run towards it. If there’s a fight, they run towards it. If there’s a historic embrace or a dramatic political moment, they run towards it. That’s what makes great news photographers. Most people instinctively run away from danger. News photographers run straight towards it.

Teaching them to think proactively at the same time—to ask why something was happening and what the longer story might be—was much more difficult.

Reinhard and I travelled around the world holding workshops in Reuters bureaus. We’d bring photographers together and explain the philosophy behind The Wider Image, the structure of the stories, and how we wanted them to approach this new way of working.

Much of that thinking was based on the teaching of Daniel Meadows, who had first taught me that photographs should tell stories rather than simply record events.

Daniel taught us that every visual story should contain a series of essential pictures:

• An establishing shot. 
• A portrait. 
• An action photograph. 
• The consequence of that action. 
• A detail shot. 
• And finally, the “wow” picture. 

If you had those six elements, you had a complete visual story.

Some stories required more detail shots. Others needed more action or stronger consequences. But those six elements formed the backbone of almost every story.

Take a coalman delivering coal as an example. You begin with a general view of him, his lorry and the street. Then you make a portrait of him. Next comes the action shot of him delivering the coal. After that, you photograph the result—the family now has a warm fire. Then you capture a close-up detail, perhaps his dirty hands or the coal dust on his clothes. Finally, you produce the “wow” image that ties everything together.

Exactly the same storytelling structure works whether you’re covering floods, tsunamis, wars or everyday life.

The Wider Image became hugely successful. Once it was established, Reuters asked someone else to run it, which pleased me because we’d achieved what we set out to do.

It allowed me to combine my love of breaking news, storytelling and mentoring photographers.

Some photographers embraced the approach immediately; others struggled with it. That’s simply the nature of the job.

After that, Reinhard gradually gave me more responsibility on the news file. First he asked me to oversee Africa. Then, during the Syrian conflict, I also took responsibility for the Middle East after the previous manager, Steve Crisp retired.

Normally that role was based in Beirut, and I thought, ‘That would be exciting.’ It might have made for an awkward conversation with my wife, but Beirut is a remarkable city.

Instead, Reuters decided it was better (cheaper) for me to remain in London, so I spent the next five years managing the Middle East and Africa from there, working with an outstanding team.

It was demanding work because almost every major story involved conflict or loss of life. My phone would ring at two or three o’clock in the morning whenever there was an explosion, a terrorist attack or another major incident.

My wife used to joke that every time we went out for dinner, my phone would ring and the first thing I’d say was, ‘How many dead?’

The answer determined everything.

If it was a tsunami, an earthquake or a volcanic eruption, you had to decide immediately how many photographers to send, where to deploy them and how to do it safely. Every assignment cost money. You had to arrange flights, assess the risks, organise transport, accommodation, generators, food, water and communications. You also had to remember that the people you were going to photograph often had none of those things themselves, so your teams had to be completely self-sufficient.

Eventually, Reuters decided to merge television and still photography into a single operation. At that point, I knew management jobs would disappear because television generated more revenue than still images.

The day I received the email from Human Resources inviting me to a mandatory meeting with HR and my manager, I turned to Verity and said, ‘I’m going to be made redundant.’

She simply replied, ‘Good. That job’s killing you.’

And she was right.

I was made redundant.

But I had an extraordinary career. I travelled the world, met remarkable people, worked with outstanding photographers, and experienced things I could never have imagined when I first picked up a camera.

I made a career out of photography, but what redundancy allowed me to do was return to shooting my own stories, I can finally return to taking pictures and photograph the projects I want to do. I’ve had all those years of experience, and in many ways I’ve come back to my roots. Now I’m photographing stories about my own community.

With this new freedom the first thing I had to think about was how I wanted to work. I couldn’t simply go back to what I was doing when I was 21, wandering around with a black-and-white 35mm camera, because I’m not 21 anymore, sadly. Equally, I didn’t want to carry on working the way I had at Reuters with digital 35mm cameras. I found myself wondering where that would take me and what I would actually do with it.

A friend of mine, Mike Hutchings from South Africa, mentioned that someone had given him a Rolleiflex, which is a medium-format camera. I remembered using Rolleiflex cameras when I worked for Michael Manni. We’d occasionally use them for commercial work because they produced square-format images. I thought, ‘Ah yes.’ The square format makes you compose pictures differently from a 35mm camera, Also you look down into the viewfinder and everything appears back to front. Left becomes right and right becomes left. I thought that would be an interesting creative challenge.

So I said to Verity, ‘I’m going to buy a Rolleiflex.’ They’re no longer made, so if you want a good one, you have to buy a vintage camera.

She said, ‘Right… how much is that going to cost?’ I said, ‘About £2500’ She looked at me and said, ‘£2500?’ Then, because she’s wonderful, she said, ‘Explain it to me, Russell. You’ve already got two or three top-of-the-range digital cameras with professional lenses that Reuters supplied. Now you want us to spend £2500 on a vintage camera that works back to front, shoots film, and means you’ll have to process the negatives as well?’  She laughed and said, ‘Just explain what you’re thinking.’

When she put it like that, it does sound rather ridiculous. I tried to explain that I wanted to experiment with shape, composition and a different way of seeing.

She simply said, ‘OK, that makes sense.’ She understands those things.

I spent a long time searching for the right camera. I looked on eBay and that was unsuccessful. Eventually I found a dealer called Classic and Vintage Cameras in Portsmouth, run by a man called Robert.

I explained exactly what I wanted.

‘I don’t want a camera to sit on a shelf,’ I told him. ‘People collect these things nowadays, but I want to use it. I want to make pictures with it. I don’t want to come home after photographing a story only to discover the camera hasn’t worked properly.’ He smiled and said, ‘I’ve got exactly the camera for you. It isn’t cheap.’

That’s the camera I eventually bought with a 80mm 2.8 lens. When it arrived, I was incredibly excited. The problem was that I had absolutely no idea how to load it with film.

I ended up watching YouTube videos to learn how to put the film in properly. Then I bought some film, which cost £6.80 a roll for just twelve exposures, before you even think about paying for processing and chemicals.

So I decided my first project wasn’t really about telling a story—it was about learning how to use the camera.

During COVID, I began by photographing my neighbours outside their houses. I’ve always loved those Victorian and Edwardian photographs of shopkeepers standing proudly outside their businesses. They’re such ordinary pictures, yet time makes them extraordinary. That’s what I love about them. Given enough years, the everyday becomes historically important.

That led me to my first proper project.

During the pandemic, there was so much discussion about the future of Britain’s high streets, so I decided to document my own. I photographed local shopkeepers outside their businesses as a nod to those Edwardian portraits.

I asked each of the shop owners why they had started their business and what they thought the future of the high street would look like after COVID. I filmed those interviews as well, drawing on everything I’d learned about video during my Reuters years.

Alongside the interviews, I made two still photographs of each business: one showing the owner and staff standing outside together, and another portrait of the owner inside the shop.

The project eventually became an exhibition displayed all along the high street itself.

That was very important to me. If you’re making work about a community, then that community should be able to see it. The photographs shouldn’t disappear into a gallery somewhere miles away; they should be shown where they were made.

From there, the projects simply grew.

I’ve always believed people should be able to see the work that’s made about them.

Again, my camera has become a passport into other people’s lives.

What interests me now is what I call “negotiated space”. Instead of simply arriving, taking a photograph and leaving, I spend time explaining what I’m doing. We agree how we’ll work together, and that creates a very different kind of portrait. The different camera, the slower process and that shared understanding all influence the final image.

In many ways, I’ve come full circle.

After I’d been made redundant, George—the rag-and-bone man I’d photographed back in 1983—told me he was going back out on the cart with his father after nearly forty years. In the meantime he’d been working on the oil rigs.

When I photographed him in 1983, he looked like the coolest man on earth: shirt off, flat-top haircut, fit as anything, driving the horse and cart around collecting scrap.

When he told me he was going back out with his dad, I said, ‘George, I’d love to photograph this as a follow-up.’ He said, ‘Yeah, that’s fine.’ I said, ‘Just ask your dad first. He might not want me getting in the way.’

His dad agreed, as long as I stayed out of the way.

So I followed George and his father, but this time I photographed everything in colour. I deliberately wanted it to contrast with the original black-and-white photographs and feel like a different body of work.

While I was there, I discovered that Ray Millington (Kandy de Barry)  was still performing but now under the stage name of Bobby Mandrell..

I thought, ‘That’s amazing.’ So I phoned Ray and asked whether I could photograph him. He said, ‘Yeah, of course.’ I also suggested filming an interview about his life and showing him the old black-and-white photographs while he talked about them.

He agreed.

At the same time, I thought it would be wonderful to take the original prints back into the Star & Garter—now called Rayners—and photograph them held up in exactly the same places where I’d taken them all those years earlier. That would create three connected stories separated by almost 40 years.

The interview with Ray turned into one of the most enjoyable afternoons imaginable.

George, Ray and I spent about three hours laughing together as we looked through the old photographs. Showing him my 1983 pictures of his act unlocked all sorts of memories. We also went upstairs so tay could show us where he kept his massive collection of costumes that is worth tens of thousands of pounds . 

As we chatted, I shot a time-lapse of him applying his make-up. He told me the eye make-up was always the hardest part. ‘It’s got to be right,’ he said. ‘I always do it at home before I drive to the club.’ He laughed and said that, years ago, he’d sometimes be stopped by the police on the way. ‘They’d look in the car and say, ‘What’s going on here then, son?’ He’d explain he was on his way to perform. Nowadays, of course, nobody bats an eyelid.

I photographed the show that evening, and in the end I had three new reimagined bodies of work: the original photographs from the 1980s, the new work from 2021 and 2022, and the filmed interviews.

Together they became the basis of the joint exhibition with George Norris You and Me and HU3.

And that’s really where the story comes full circle.

1:33:04 KG: That’s pretty impressive.

1:33:05 RB: Is that okay?

1:33:07 KG: Brilliant. I do have some questions.

1:33:09 RB: Go on then.

1:33:10 KG: First of all, it’s fascinating to think about Daniel’s influence on your career, from when you were a student right through to Reuters.

1:33:21 RB: Yeah.

1:33:21 KG: Could you tell us a bit more about Daniel, your experience of him, and perhaps how he critiqued your work?

1:33:35 RB: Yeah. The thing about Daniel was that, no matter how busy he was, he always had time for you. He’d sit with you, look through your prints, and give you feedback. The frustrating thing was that he was almost always right. He’d look at a picture and say, ‘Russell, that’s very nice, but imagine if you did this instead.’ I’d think, What does he mean? Then I’d go away, try it, and realise exactly where he was coming from. He really helped me grow.

During that time, he sparked my passion for documentary photography. It’s his bloody fault, really. He encouraged me to take the camera down to Bob Carver’s and photograph there, but he didn’t just point me in a direction and forget about me. He nurtured me, encouraged me and built my confidence until I was able to go out and work independently.

What was really nice was that, with my most recent project on Lea Bridge Road, I sent the work back to him. I said, ‘It’s all very well getting praise from people who say, ‘Lovely, wonderful,’ but I really want someone whose judgement I trust to critique the work honestly.’

He looked through it and asked me, ‘Why are you shooting in black and white? The world is in colour.’ He also said, ‘You need to get closer to your subjects.’ He didn’t necessarily mean physically closer, although sometimes he did. Because I was using the Rolleiflex, I realised I was often standing too far back because I was worried about getting the focus right.

He kept asking, ‘Why are you doing this? Why this story? Why this picture?’ Some of the images, he said, were boring. He was right. Some weren’t sharp enough. He was right about that too. He told me I needed to tighten the whole body of work up.

Later, he apologised and said he’d reread his comments and thought he’d been a bit harsh. I told him I didn’t mind at all. That’s exactly the sort of criticism I wanted because he was right. I really valued that feedback.

We still speak now and then. We don’t keep in regular contact because our lives have moved on, but whenever we meet it’s as though no time has passed. I’ve been to his exhibitions, and he’s always warm and friendly. We might not have seen each other for years, but it’s like we only met last week. He’s still passionate about documentary photography, still passionate about telling stories ethically, and that’s something that’s very important to me as well.

1:35:56 KG: When he said you needed to get closer, did he mean building a closer relationship with the people you were photographing?

1:36:01 RB: Not exactly. I think he meant that I was observing the story from too much of a distance, and I needed to become more immersed in it. That meant getting physically closer in some cases, but it also meant becoming closer to the people so the photographs felt more intimate.

It was quite a complicated thing to explain, and it took me a while to understand what he meant. To be honest, I’m still working it out. I don’t think you ever completely solve it. You’re always learning, always trying to make the next picture better. Sometimes I look back and think, ‘I wish I’d tried that differently,’ but every now and then you make a picture and think, ‘Yes, that’s it.’

1:36:40 KG: Clearly you’ve had an incredible career, taking and editing remarkable photographs, but what was it about Hull in those early days that proved so influential?

1:37:04 RB: I think it was because it was such a transition for me. I came from a background with no real exposure to the arts, and suddenly I found myself immersed in real life. I saw people living their lives honestly and openly, and I realised it wasn’t frightening at all. It was exciting, fascinating and full of stories.

One of the biggest things I learned was that there’s far more good in people than there is bad. Even people who might seem hard or intimidating usually have kindness in them somewhere.

At first I’d think, ‘They’re never going to let me photograph them.’ Then I’d simply talk to them, explain what I was doing, and most people were absolutely fine.

Take the Star & Garter, for example. I’d walk in and the landlord would say, ‘Hi Russell,’ pull me a pint and put it on the bar. I’d have a couple of sips, chat to people, put the pint down and start taking photographs. Almost every time, someone would take the pint and drink it.

Some people could be aggressive at first. They’d say, ‘You’re not taking my bloody picture or you’ll get a knuckle sandwich.’ But once I started giving people prints of the photographs, those same people would ask, ‘Where’s my picture then?’ I’d remind them of their threat of a knuckle sandwich, and they’d laugh and say, ‘Yeah, I didn’t mean it.’

I think it all comes down to taking time with people. Hull taught me that, however tough people might appear on the outside, if you genuinely take an interest in them and listen to them, they’re just people. Of course there are bad people, but I genuinely believe most people are good.

1:38:41 KG: Mm-hmm.

1:38:41 RB: That’s certainly what I’ve learned.

There’s a photographer I really admire called Zohra Bensemra, an Algerian photographer. She photographs incredibly difficult stories— conflict, terrible human tragedies, disasters. She once told me, ‘I never take photographs without permission.’

I asked her how that worked when she didn’t even speak the local language. She explained that she’d walk into a room holding her camera where everyone could see it. She’d look people in the eyes and simply wait. She said she could tell, just from their expression, whether the answer was yes or no.

If she saw no, she never took the photograph. If she saw yes, she’d quietly lift the camera and begin working.

I think photography often works like that. After years of doing it, you develop a sense of when someone has given you permission. It’s rarely spoken and almost never written down, but you know.

The important thing is never to exploit that trust. People may be vulnerable or going through the worst moment of their lives, and it’s your responsibility not to take advantage of that. At the same time, those stories still need to be recorded because they matter.

For me, that’s what documentary and news photography is really about. It’s about telling important stories, but doing it with honesty, dignity and, above all, respect.

1:40:27 KG: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Um, I mean, and I think that is really clear in the photographs of that time in the ’80s when you were in Hull, well even in your photos more recently of Ray, there is a warmth and generosity in them. 

1:40:51 RB: Thank you. 

1:40:51 KG: There’s a lot of humour. 

1:40:52 RB: Mm-hmm (affirmative), yeah [he chuckles]. 

1:40:54 KG: I had a question it was about the people that were in … When you talked before about St. George’s, and you said it wasn’t ever called a drag night, it was called a gay night? 

1:41:09 RB: it was sometimes called drag night and referred to as gay night sometimes. 

1:41:18 KG: In the adverts, or just between? 

1:41:20 RB: I don’t remember, just amongst people, I think the banner would be these posters of “drag night with Kandy de Barry,” I think it was literally drag night, but I think the locals might say, ‘oh, it’s gay night in the pub,’ but it wasn’t a negative thing, it was like a label, it’s like it’s a blue night or a green night, darts night or quiz night.… 

1:41:41 KG: And you talked as well about there was no violence or intolerance, there was a lot of tolerance, do you remember, um, do you … I mean, I guess what we’re, I’m interested in knowing is do you remember who was in those venues? Like, was- 

1:42:09 RB: I don’t think that tolerance or intolerance was in people’s minds. It was just another night in the pub. The people there were a mixture of locals and Ray’s following, For example; I have a picture that I I call ‘date night’. I don’t know who these people are, but there’s a woman and a man. He’s got his jacket and tie on and he’s sitting next to a woman, who’s slightly younger than him but looks like she has got her best outfit on. Consequently, they look a little out of place as you wouldn’t imagine those people dressed as they are, to be in a drag event. The way they are dressed you could imagine them having lunch in a Beefeater or going to the cinema. This is all guess work and first impressions with a dash of my imagination – I might be completely wrong. I do remember taking the picture thinking that they were a quirky element. I might have even considered not taking the picture as they didn’t really fit but when you when you’re building a story you include elements that run against the visual tide as that adds to the pace of the images in a story. 

Looking at the picture of the couple I wouldn’t have thought they would be in the pub knowing what the event was so I’ve included the image because people actually came to the pub for a pleasant evening, a fun evening, and it didn’t matter whether they’re a member of the gay community or just a local. Rightly or wrongly, I get a sense that they are a new couple who just decided to go out and found themselves in a place they wouldn’t ordinarily go to but once there thought ‘let’s stay’.

Sort of like going to a party and someone’s turned up in fancy dress, and they shouldn’t be in fancy dress. This couple is like the reverse of that, everyone else is noisy and drunk and flamboyant, and these people are sort of very, very straight. 

A visual curve ball. But often when I looked around, there were a few people like that, so my impression was that the general attitude was ‘I’m going to go to my local, oh that’s happening’, like if there’s bingo night, quiz night or darts night, just another night in the local and I liked that mix of people. Obviously, Ray’s entourage was there to help him with the show, and his mates would turn up knowing what to expect – a fun night. 

I wouldn’t go there every Sunday to shoot pictures because sometimes I would do other things. At other times I’d go with my house mates and girlfriend, consciously not taking the camera just for a night out. Sometimes they’d turn when I was shooting pictures up and I’d think ‘oh no bloody art students in my pictures’. But at the end of the day, they too were just part of the community.

1:44:38 KG: Mm-hmm (affirmative).