The Interview: Greg Funnell’s Gauchos
All pictures © Greg Funnell unless stated.
Greg Funnell is an editorial and advertising photographer with a London based studio, working globally for a roster of international publications and clients, ranging from high end commercial clients to charities.
Thanks for talking to Contact Sheet about your beautiful Gaucho project. Tell me how it came about? Was it your own thing or was it based on a commission?
Yeah good question. I’d managed to pitch a commission to shoot in Argentina for an airline – Norwegian – and they have an in flight magazine. They were just starting a route flying direct from London Gatwick to Buenos Aires. I realised that they were going to be looking for content from Argentina, and I had a friend of mine from university who’s a wine writer living in Mendoza. I'd been meaning to travel to Argentina for a long time, so it was kind of like the stars aligned and I saw this opportunity to get out there.
So the magazine commissioned you for the Gaucho story?
I didn't pitch a story about gauchos, but instead we pitched a separate story that I knew the client would be more likely to run with. So we worked on a brief that we then put to the client, which was to do with a national park in Iberá in the north of Argentina, the wetlands, which were being returned to the Argentinian government on the understanding that they would be looked after and maintained as a national park.
So the actual story I was commissioned to do had more of a travel / wildlife / conservation angle. I said to the client, listen, I will go out and shoot the story and then you just book my return flight for this date [to give me time to shoot my own project], which obviously doesn't make any difference to them. So I went out there, shot the story for them, and then myself and Amanda went off to do this separate project on gauchos.
I flew out on their maiden flight which was interesting, because I was sharing it with a bunch of influencers. They were busy filming their footwells and overhead locker space and taking selfies with a glass of champagne, and I got on like a grumpy old man and put my eye mask and headphones on right away and went straight to sleep!
What got you interested in documenting Gauchos?
It came about through wanting to do a project on the Gaucho way of life. I've always been fascinated by these kind of cultures that are quite self-sufficient and are perhaps dying out for want of a better word. Ways of living that I feel we have a lot to learn from, but perhaps are no longer necessarily that feasible. And there's something inherently romantic I think about the Gaucho as a character and as a way of life. I was just really interested in exploring it, and I knew that it would be something that visually I'd be drawn to and you could make interesting images from.
Before I did it I didn’t know it was going to be turned into a publication. And in some ways, I wish I'd had more confidence in it to know that that's ultimately where I ended up. I think I would have shot parts of it differently, and had I known that it would have been a great motivator at times. Because sometimes when you're there shooting something and it doesn't have a home as such I find it becomes more of a mental battle for me to push situations.
Tell us me more about that? How do you know when to push for something?
If I've been sent somewhere by the New York Times or The Guardian, and you're shooting on assignment, you kind of feel like you have a right to be there. It sounds arrogant, but you feel like you have a purpose and that you're legitimate, basically. And I'm not somebody who likes sticking my camera in people's faces. I don't like upsetting people that I'm shooting.
But equally, my style of shooting with this project was very fly on the wall. So you need to be in a position where they're comfortable enough with you being around that they just kind of ignore you. I'm not setting anything up - none of these situations were set up. They're purely me kind of trying to document what I'm seeing.
In some ways, I think if I'd known I was going to turn it into a book, and really kind of understood that in my in my mind's eye then it might have given me a bit more, to push to see what I could get.
So had you planned any shots or just wait and see what grabbed you when you got there?
And as I said I wasn't going there to set shots up. But it's good to know ahead of time that the guys are going to be coming back in with a flock of sheep at this time of day, because if you don't know that, then you're suddenly having to react to scramble into a position where you can get a shot and then you might miss the moment. And that might be your one chance gone. So even if you're not setting images up, you still need to have an idea of what's happening, when it's happening, where it's happening, what that might look like. Even just in your own head, so you can prepare for it.
As a story comes together, you start to have in your mind's eye what images you need and what you're missing, and what you need to be looking for, what you're searching for. And it might not just be a picture, it might be an emotion, it might be something that's symbolic and represents a theme that you're trying to communicate. I feel like when you are putting together a photo book or a magazine or anything that's a photo essay, it's effectively like you're writing a book, and just like writing a book, you're going to have certain areas that you want to discuss and talk about, so you need to have the images that represent those ideas. And if you're not creating those ideas, which you’re not when you're documenting stuff, you've got to find them. And to some degree, you need to already have that in your mind so that you're aware of them and looking out for them in order to grab them when they happen. Because if you're not prepared for it, you're going to miss them, and then they might not happen again, you know?
Yeah. I love that and really thrive on that kind of way of working.
Yeah, yeah. It's very exciting to be really in the moment like that. It’s like a form of meditation or mindfulness. It’s probably the closest that I come to that idea of being fully in the moment, You are so in tune with what's happening at the moment and noticing so many things. So it's almost like this form of Zen. And it's very rare for me to get on a job where I get that kind of higher plateau. I reckon it probably only happens once or twice a year, where I feel like I'm totally in the zone and it's I guess it's what people talk about that kind of idea of creative flow.
I was about to bring that word up. It's when you're in that state of flow, and it's extremely satisfying.
Yes, and addictive! But hard to attain.
So tell me, did you have an idea of what kinds of pictures you wanted to make before you started? Did you research other people who had photographed this kind of thing and understood a little bit of what you wanted out of it?
Yeah, I did have images that I wanted. When I'm excited about something, I tend to do a lot of research and visual research and collect kind of mood boards and ideas of what I want to get. But the funny thing is, when I look at the work afterwards, it's so different to what I wanted to get. But that's because the element of who I am comes into it. I'm never going to get those pictures that other people get because they're their type of pictures, and I've got my own type of pictures. And so when I look at the project now, I couldn't have imagined in advance most of the pictures I took. Some of them are more, I don't want to say cliché, but they're more the kind of classic or iconic shots that you would think of. And there's a few that are wonderful moments of serendipity and happenstance with, you know, complicated framing and everything coming together.
I like this one shot in particular, that reminds me very much of a famous Sam Abell photo that he's shot back in the 90s on a cattle ranch in America. I don't know if you're aware of it?
Is it the one of the guys kind of branding cattle? Yeah, I love that picture.
You've got this one with a very similar composition, which I'm sure was coincidental rather than a deliberate sort of homage, but it is kind of interesting.
Actually, I think sometimes you have these photos in your mind's eye, don't you? Unconsciously, because I haven't seen that photo for years but it obviously left an impression.
Sam Abell / National Geographic © Sam Abell
Greg Funnell - Gauchos
One of the photographers whose work I really like, and I find interesting and exciting because it's so difficult to do well, is Alex Webb, who is constantly trying to create these complicated layer-upon-layer narratives in his images.
It’s astonishing the way he manages to capture these compositions within the composition. And there's like three independent things going on in the photograph that all work together.
Yes it's insane. It's like he's creating order out of chaos. It’s the epitome of the idea of the decisive moment, it's like suddenly there's this thing that shouldn't work. There's too much stuff going on. Yet he manages to create it in such a way it's just like, wow, it's this perfect moment in frozen time.
Nuevo Laredo, Tamaulipas, 1996. © Alex Webb / Magnum Photos
I often find when I try to pursue those kinds of photos it means I miss the more basic, or the more obvious shots that actually would be quite powerful. Because I'm going for this thing that's just a little bit out of reach. When you’re limited on time you’ve got to get the balance right.
Interestingly, I was reading Untold, Steve McCurry’s book that he published last year that goes behind the scenes on some of his famous stories. And there's a section about the Indian railways in the early 1980s. He spent five months travelling the railways in India to shoot it. There’s one particular photograph that's very famous of an old steam train going past the Taj Mahal, with two railway workers in their red turbans sitting on the front and it's a truly wonderful photograph. It turns out that when he discovered that the railway lines went right past the Taj Mahal, he sat there for five days photographing every train that went by to get that shot. And you kind of think, when you have the luxury of five days to get a single photograph before you move on to the next location, it obviously helps a great deal in creating iconic photos.
OK, so tell me a bit about what it was actually like shooting the project. How many days were you shooting, how many different locations or estancias or whatever?
Sure. So broadly speaking, we hit three geographical areas. The North, I mean like the wetlands around Corrientes and Ibera, and then down towards San Antonio, which is about an hour and a half out of Buenos Aires, and then the last phase was in Patagonia. And logistically, obviously, those are quite disparate areas. So getting around was a bit difficult. And in the north, it was a lot of riding. I probably first rode a horse when I was in my early 20s. So I'm not a natural horse rider.
I was going to ask about that. So were you on horseback for a lot of it?
Oh, yeah. In the north we were in the saddle for like, eight hours a day. And I mean, that definitely toughens your buttocks up quite quick! When you get them in a full flow in a gallop it's an amazing thing, but it's kind of terrifying when you've got camera bag on your back.
The other issue I always find when I'm shooting on horseback is you have to try and shorten your camera straps as much as possible because ultimately they end up slapping against your hips, and you end up with the worst bruising on your hip bones, especially if you've got two cameras and they just slapping on the same spot for eight hours.
Ouch. Were there any other challenges while shooting?
In the north I wanted to get the shots in the water of the of the gauchos, riding through the water. In the end, those shots weren't what I hoped because I was having to move with the with the horses as they were swimming, which meant that there was too much disturbance in the water to get the kind of dramatic shot they had in my mind's eye. But all the while I was being bitten to bits by whatever it was in the water and had all sorts of weird insect bites.
Then one of the horses in our group was being led by a young 13 or 14 year old boy. The horse suddenly reared up on its hind legs because it accidentally disturbed a caiman [similar to an alligator – ed.] and it snapped at the horse's legs. It suddenly made me realise I've been in the water all this time and there are caimans in it!
And the land is so flat out there that I took a drone to get a shot to show the scale of the landscape. But of course, that meant taking off from small bits of wood, or anything that I could get could create a flat surface on. I had to take off and land from a rowing boat and literally had about a three foot by three foot area to land in. I don't fly my drone that frequently so yeah it was a little bit hairy in places thinking that I was going to drop this thing in the drink!
Did you feel it was coming together as you shot it? Were you pleased with what you were getting at the time?
The frustrating thing when doing a project like this is sometimes you'll end up in a situation where you get a lot of great pictures. But you can't use them in the edit because they're all too similar, or they're all from the same place, or of the same thing. And then when you go to other places you only get a couple of frames and you’re not happy with any of them, but they're the only ones you’ve got of that particular thing.
So for me it started off strong and then when we went down to Patagonia became a little bit harder. They were so used to tourism down there, I had a feeling they were just putting on a performance.
In the end it always comes down to time and access. And quite often on these kinds of projects you don't have much of either, and that's why people do long term projects and keep going back. So you have to realise that this was shot in a matter of probably a two to three week period.
Tell me about how you edited the shoot and made the zine when you got home.
Sure. I like to be able to come home and not look at the images for a bit if I can, if I've got the luxury to do that. Because for me it's difficult to edit something when you're still too close to it. So my usual process for something like this would be to do quite a large edit and then to print them all out as six by fours. And I tend to then take over the studio floor and spread them out. So we probably had over 200 six by fours in the studio for a while as I did my edit, and then brought in other photographers I share the studio with to get their opinions. And then once we'd narrowed it down, I worked with a designer that I've worked with a couple of times, Angus MacPherson, and he ultimately was the person that I chose to put the zine together for me. So he would come down to the studio and we would do these final passes where we would go through and start to create almost like maquettes, you know, like mock ups.
Part of the reason I like creating printed final products is that it's really nice to be able to play with the flow and the and the lyricism of the images and the way that you kind of move from one to the next. That's something that is totally lost in the digital world, because you tend to see images on their own, or disjointed. If you look at images on Instagram, it's very hard to get a narrative. So that's why I enjoy doing that with books. But I do find that it's easier to do that off the screen, on something physical that you can hold.
Amanda wrote the words for it, and Angus did all the design, and after a few iterations we did a print run of 500. It’s on sale on my website, but I’ve really been using it as a thing to leave behind after a meeting. If I get in to talk to somebody and show them my commercial portfolio, at the end of it I say this is something I've been working on myself, you know, it's always nice to have something that's more personal to you. And I think it generally was really well received. Because people are so used to seeing everything digitally now they like actually having something tangible that they can hold and smell the paper it's printed on.
I also think that the creative process of putting something like this together is really important to do. And it’s a really interesting learning experience and really interesting from a creative point of view just to understand the way that images work and the way that kind of images flow.
There's something nice about creating something that's printed as well, just from a point of posterity. You know, you're creating something that you've done, and it lives. And that's it. You can kind of close that chapter in a way and move on to the next thing.
