Gavin Evans: Challenging the conventions of photography
© Gavin Evans
Gavin Evans’ career began with a car crash.
As a teenager, Gavin was at his neighbour’s house when he came across a portfolio of photographs from his neighbour’s time in the Bermuda Police Service. “They were all very abstract and very beautiful...I was fascinated at what I was looking at without knowing what it was”, Gavin recalls from his current base somewhere in “deepest, darkest Berlin”.
It turns out that he was actually looking at detailed forensic evidence from a fatal car accident, but had no idea until his neighbour caught him flicking through the photos and berated him before explaining what they were. “I thought one image was a mirrorball - it was really beguiling - but it was actually the protective glass of a car windshield encrusted on someone’s head. It was shocking, but when I first looked at it there was this sparkling image in all this tropical light and I thought, ‘wow, what is this?’”
From this moment onwards Gavin was fascinated by photography and never dared to look back. “It appeared to me that the most private moments were something that could be photographed, and that provoked me into thinking that this art form can really go anywhere.”
© Gavin Evans, Sony α7. 'Kolkata, 11 February, 2.58am. 'Intimacy under a fly-over. Rickshaw pullers share a blanket'.
Years later and Gavin is now an internationally-acclaimed photographer, his work ranging from skulking around the sleeping streets of Kolkata at 4am to photographing household name celebrities. He’s shot portraits of David Bowie, Gary Oldman and Daniel Craig, he’s just been commissioned to photograph some of the biggest arts practitioners in the world for the 2015 Edinburgh International Festival, and was recently named a Sony Global Imaging Ambassador for the U.K.
But this success didn’t just fall at Gavin’s feet - he worked for it, and he worked hard. He spent 18 months learning and practically living in the studio of his local photography lecturer, several years squatting and living semi-rough in London, and then moved to Edinburgh where he worked in a second-hand bookshop, all the while continuing to keep one eye firmly fixed on his camera.
This bookshop was where Gavin’s big break arrived. A man approached him and offered him a job as the staff photographer and picture editor of Cut, a music and lifestyle magazine. Suddenly his days were spent snapping celebrities both obscure and renowned, and both his portfolio and his contact list began to grow exponentially.
What separates Gavin’s portraiture work from his peers is its honesty and intimacy. Each of his shots portrays a side to his subject that is seldom seen when in the public eye, and he achieves this through the psychological approach to his work. “There’s all sorts of stories about certain people who have gone into the studio, taken a look at the photographer, turned around and walked away. The point is how do you keep them there and how do you get the shot? I try and quickly find a meeting point by talking. Just assessing them, finding out simple things about them and then working from there. There’s no point second-guessing what the session is going to be like because you don’t know.”
© Gavin Evans, Sony α7
Go to the ‘personal interests’ section of Gavin’s Facebook profile and you’ll see just two words: “challenging conventions”. It’s a lofty ambition, yet it’s realised in almost every one of his projects, from the aforementioned celebrity shots to his ‘Touch’ series, a collection of portraits where Gavin instructs his subjects to place his hand into the shot. With over 2,500 ‘Touch’ photographs and counting, it’s become an expansive social experiment into personal space. “If [the subjects] take my hand and put it to them, then they're showing me that they’re very comfortable with someone in their space. If they just hold my hand and hang it in the air, then that gives me a very clear idea of their measurement of personal space - it stops there.”
‘Touch’ challenges the idea that portraiture photography captures the ‘soul’ of the subject - something that Gavin fervently disagrees with. “I can never understand how that notion is still being bandied about. I’ve got a collection of hundreds of portraits, and people look at these and can tell that they’re taken by me, so therefore surely it’s me that’s [reflected in] the portrait and the subject is a measure of myself.”
Another series of Gavin’s that not only challenges the conventions of photography but a whole country is ‘Nightscapes’ - a haunting, desolate glimpse of Kolkata that’s unrecognisable from the mayhem abounding in the daytime.
© Gavin Evans, Sony α7. 'Kolkata, 12 February, 1.55am. 'The Ambassador idles. Chowringhee Road'.
‘Nightscapes’ was essentially a happy accident - the by-product of a jet-lag-induced nap that Gavin and his partner woke up from when most people in the city were doing the opposite. “[We] woke up at 11 at night because we were just knackered, and thought 'OK, let's go out and see what it’s like'. So we walked out, and the whole place was completely deserted. It was as though we'd gone to sleep and something happened that day. We walked out into absolute emptiness, and I realised that you can't see any of this in the day time.”
Gavin shot the photos on an Sony a7R, and upon setting it up on his tripod he knew he was about to capture something special. “The detail was amazing. I could see things on the camera which I couldn’t see with my eyes by zooming in. Think of any European city and there’s always going to be some activity [in the night-time] - somewhere like London there’s not that much, but there is some activity. But when you think of Delhi or Kolkata, you’d never imagine it would be like a ghost-town at points of the night.”
Gavin tells me that he’s hoping to travel back to India to continue ‘Nightscapes’ in 2015 (not to mention continuing ‘Touch’ and working on countless projects in Berlin and beyond), but for now he’s focused on his commission from the Edinburgh International Festival. “It’s certainly the best commission of my profession so far, because effectively I’ve been commissioned to to give a whole new look to the Festival, which has millions of visitors in August and September.” Whatever the final result may be, you can guarantee that it will be far from ordinary.
