Winston Churchill Memorial Trust Fellowship Award 2012

In mid-January I made an early morning journey from Scotland by train to London, having been shortlisted for a Winston Churchill Memorial Trust Fellowship. I was on my way to an interview being held in Westminster to meet a panel who would decide if I would be successful or not in my application.

The Trust was established in 1965 on the death of Sir Winston Churchill, and is seen as a living memorial, annually awarding people from across the UK Fellowships to travel overseas to study or gain experience for their profession or their community.

My own proposal was to spend 5-6 weeks travelling across the US to study the rise in popularity of historical photographic processes such as wet-plate collodion, and to do this by interviewing practitioners from LA to San Francisco, from the Mid-West to New York. It was an ambitious plan to cross the continent of America and also visit the museums and galleries which have been dealing with this re-emergence, and to learn more from the US, which has a far more sophisticated and established photography market than here in Europe.

I arrived at the interview running slightly late, having come from another meeting in London with a former director of Magnum, however luckily the other candidates were running slightly behind schedule, so I had time to gather my thoughts and calm my nerves before meeting the panel.

Eventually the fateful time arrived, and I was escorted through and took my seat in front of the three interviewers and the Director General of the Trust, Major-General Jamie Balfour who introduced me. One thing that I had not expected was to be interviewed by one of the most prominent former Fellows of the Trust, Nick Danziger – a photographer whose work I deeply admire, who travelled in disguise across asia for 18 months, taking some of the most hard hitting images of poverty I have ever seen, experiences which were later published in his book Danziger’s Travels. His work documenting the Iraq war from within the corridors of power are also incredibly revealing, with his images of George Bush and Tony Blair being some of the most iconic of the last decade.

Nick Danziger (BBC Images)

As much as I wanted to, I didn’t however have time to ask him a thousand questions, and concentrated on the task at hand, which was answering theirs. Firstly I was asked to explain the aims of my project, and how it would benefit both me personally and professionally as well as the UK community – with a variety off questions from “why is it important to preserve these processes?” right through to impossible questions such as “what is the current number of glass-plate images in collections in the UK today?”.

The questions came in thick and fast, and I stood my ground, giving the best answers I could, knowing that Nick is incredibly familiar with photographic developments in the UK and would have the  ability to ask me a huge variety of very specific questions. The final round of questions centered on my itinerary, and I was asked by Jeremy Soames (the grandson of Sir Winston) how I intended to carry out my Fellowship.  After this it was over, and exhausted I left the room feeling slightly dejected but glad it was over.

A few weeks have passed since then, however yesterday I received a wonderful letter from the trust congratulating me, and awarded me a Fellowship. To say that I’m excited is an understatement, however the real work is now only just beginning as I plan my journey across the US as well as to Europe and beyond.

It is an exciting time for wet plate collodion photography, and with the emergence in full swing across the world, I hope to be able to meet and work with those who are leading the revival, and to bring these lessons back to the UK and share them with the wider community.

Find out more at www.wcmt.org.uk

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