Do yourself a big favour and go to the Brighton Museum and see the exhibition of Roger Bamber’s photography. I’ve written about him before here: he was a friend, and he died last autumn. The exhibition has the splendid title “Out of the Ordinary”, which is beautifully double-edged, for he would turn settings that were ordinary and make them extraordinary. I wonder if this is why he moved to Brighton: because this is a town like no other, where surreal moments are a daily experience. (I was staying with him when the Grand was bombed in 1984, and, alerted by his News Desk, we raced down to be among the first on the scene. That might not have exactly been surreal, but it was certainly out of the ordinary.)
He was both a news photographer and a – what is the term? Art photographer? That doesn’t seem right, but his photographs are definitely art. I would tease him that his job only took him 1/250th of a second to do, but this was nonsense: he would set up his shots meticulously to get the right effect, often at great personal risk to himself. You look at his photo of men working on the Clifton Suspension Bridge and ask: hang on, how did he get up there? He would scorn safety harnesses, saying they got tangled up with his camera straps. There’s a photo of a microlight pilot achieving the world height record. Look at it without reading the caption next to it and it might not occur to you for a minute: this picture is taken from above.
He got along with everyone. The pop stars here include Freddie Mercury, Bowie, Mick Jagger, Suzi Quatro, but he also captured the working lives of railwaymen (he had a thing for steam trains), fringe performers, toy museum curators, the eccentric and the unusual. These latter he never mocked or ridiculed: he brought out their essence in a manner of pure celebration. He also had a thing for buses, and when he told the editor of Bus Times that his was the most boring magazine he’d ever seen, he followed this up with an offer to take the front cover photo for each issue, the condition being that he be allowed to borrow a bus for a day to get it into an unusual situation. Fittingly, there is a bus named after him now, as Brighton honours its best children: the 25, which takes you to the Amex Stadium.
Brighton was where his heart was. Come not just for the celebrity and news photos, but for the pictures of thew Fringe, the West Pier in flames, the seafront covered under a rare fall of snow. The people in it look like Lowry stick figures: the effect was deliberate. Few people has a way with a camera like Roger did. When his pictures were in the paper (which they were for decades; and he won numerous press photography awards), you could spot it was his from across the room.
Pic: credit © Roger Bamber/TopFoto
The Whistler 