Shot Up North

In this episode I talk to Brian Griffin about his book Himmelstrasse.

I first met Brian when we were both guest panellists at Format Festival.

A while later we had the pleasure of having Brian as our Curating Judge for Shotupnorth’s SUN Awards 27.

Of course, Brian Griffin is one of Britain’s most influential portrait photographers… his style of transforming workplaces into stages and his subjects into actors, is one which acquired the name “Capitalist Realism”.

That style propelled him into the music world too, where he photograph bands like The Jam, and Elvis Costello and others, who also chose to dress in suits and ties.

His work has become iconic, and is held in prestigious collections like the National Portrait Gallery.

So for the viewer, Himmelstrasse comes as a shocking departure.

Himmelstrasse, Heaven Street, is the cynical name the Nazis gave to the railways that transported millions of Jews and others to the extermination camps.

As we sat in his Rotherhithe home, with a pot of green tea, looking over the Thames, on a February afternoon…

…I asked what had drawn him to the bleak forests of Poland, haunted by the traumas of the Holocaust?

Dan Prince has been one of Shot Up North’s consistently successful photographers in recent years. Ed Horwich met him to chat about his work, his work ethic and his passion for photography.

So grab your favourite beverage and join us as we talk about risking all to get a career of the ground; how putting your head in a fridge can turn into a winning image; and how to deal with LA production values whilst being parachuted into the back lot of Back to the Future film .

But our chat begins by deliberating if its even possible to do justice to photography in an audio Podcast...

To see the images that we were talking about just go to shotupnorth.co.uk, where you can rifle through the archive of the Shot Up North’s SUN Awards all the way back to 2000, and see not just Dan Prince but the work of many many top professional photographers from across the UK