Shooting a portrait series on a Hasselblad
Record producer Oliver Geywitz shot in his living room with a Hasselblad 503CW, 80mm CF lens at f/4 on a tripod with Portra 400 metered for the shadows
What seems like a lifetime ago now, I woke up on the 24th June 2016 to find my country had voted to leave the EU. I went through a whole range of emotions, from anger through to despair, and after a few weeks having it simmer inside me I decided to channel all that energy into something positive. I wanted to show what the EU meant to me as a creative living in London, and set out to photograph someone from each of the other 27 nations in the EU that had some here and made it their home.
“London has been a global city for more than 300 years, and today more than 1 in every 9 Londoners was born in another EU country. Many have made their lives here; buying homes, marrying locals and starting families.
Amidst all the noise about immigration numbers, global trade deals and the infamous 350 million a week, I wanted to get behind the numbers and put a human face on what is happening.
The Europeans is a series of 60 portraits of Londoners from other EU countries. Having chosen to live and make their lives in London, their futures are now uncertain.
What would London be like if they were not here? Or if they had never come at all?”
With the project’s goal established, it was time to do two things - work what to shoot it on, and where to find the people to shoot. Other things, such as what to do with the pictures, could come a bit later.
So, what to shoot it on? I knew I wanted to shoot on 6x6, as I felt that square format would suit the portraits and the final layout of the project really well. And I wanted to shoot it on film, as the dynamic of making a handful of portraits of someone with a medium format film camera is very different to shooting hundreds of frames on a DSLR.
Browsing the cameras on my shelf that gave me 3 options: the Mamiya 6, the Hasselblad or the Rolleiflex. The Rolleiflex was out as I was wanting a more modern look, so that left the Hassie and the Mamiya. The Hasselblad V series are classics in every sense of the word and were the workhorse of the professional photography industry for 30 years. The Mamiya 6 is perhaps the ultimate travel camera, and its mirrorless design allows for bitingly sharp lenses.
As for who to shoot, to begin with I would rely on my friends, many of whom were from all over the EU including Spain, Italy, Germany, Greece and Ireland. After that I was going to branch out to other countries using their contacts, Facebook, Twitter to to ensure I had full coverage.
The first shoot was with David, a chef from Malta who lived on a houseboat on the canal near my home. We arranged to meet at his place on a crisp February afternoon with lovely low sunshine. As this was the first one I shot with both the Mamiya and the Hasselblad to try to work out which one suited me best. I also loaded two film types – Fuji 400H in the Mamiya and Kodak Portra 400 in the Hassy.
Here are two comparison shots taken one after the other from the same spot. These are the scans as they came straight back from the lab. The Mamiya with 75mm lens at f/4 and Fuji 400H on the left and the Hasselblad with 80mm lens at f/2.8 and Portra 400 on the right.
There are 3 things I take away from this:
Firstly, framing - the through-the-lens viewing of the Hasselblad allows for more dramatic framing. The window finder of the Mamiya introduces some parallax at with close up subjects so it is harder to get the relationship between the foreground and the background to be exactly what you want.
Secondly, subject isolation - the slightly shallower depth of field of the Hasselblad at f/2.8 over the Mamiya at f/4 renders the buildings in the background more softly. I actually find this too soft and stopped down to f/4 for most of the portraits in the series.
Thirdly, colour rendition - the Fuji 400H is much cooler while the Portra 400 gives warmer tones and finer grain.
I tried both cameras on a couple more shoots and then threw my hat in with the Hasselblad and Portra 400 for the rest of the project. Personally I found the through the lens viewing of the Hasselblad more suited to shooting portraits than the window finder of the Mamiya. Something about more precise framing, the lack of parallax for close subjects and the ability to preview the depth of field made it work better for me. The Hasselblad is definitely harder to focus on the ground glass, but a 45 degree prism makes this easier. And the warm skin tones of Portra were too hard to resist.
Weapon of choice: my Hasselblad 503CW with Carl Zeiss 80mm f/2.8 CF lens and PM5 metered prism.
After that, my way of working quickly standardised. I would pack the Hasselblad with 80mm lens and 45 degree prism, a tripod and a roll of Portra 400. I would meet my subject either at their home or their place of work, spend a 10 or 20 minutes talking to them about their experiences in the UK and their feelings about how Brexit might impact them, and then shoot a single roll of film with them, 12 frames.
I soon ran out of friends to shoot, so emailed all my contacts to ask if they knew people from other countries who would be interested in taking part - colleagues at work, friends in their social group, even the chef at their local restaurant or their dentist. I also set up a Facebook page for the projected asked friends to follow it and share it. Soon the project was gaining traction and people would contact me through the Facebook page wanting to take part.
Before going to photograph someone I would email or phone them and confirm they understood what it meant to take part - that I would need an hour of their time either at their home or their workplace, that they consented to having their picture published on my website and Facebook, and that in return they could have the photos but only for their own personal use.
From the beginning, I knew I needed to tell a little bit of these people’s stories to make the pictures interesting to viewers. At the time Brandon Stanton’s wonderful Humans of New York series was very popular, but I didn’t want to copy that by having lots of text about each person - at the end of the day I’m a photographer not a journalist - so I settled on just publishing their first name, nationality, occupation and how long they had been living in the UK. I would ensure I had their consent to do this before photographing them and confirm the details in an email after the shoot to ensure they were represented accurately and in a manner they were comfortable with.
The original idea had been to photograph one person from each of the EU countries, but I soon went past that and ended up taking over 80 portraits over the space of a few months. Luxembourg proved the hardest to find, but I was eventually put in touch with a software developer who lived just a few streets from my studio. Out of the 80 I shot I then edited this down to the 60 strongest ones.
I’ve included a selection on here but you can see the whole set online at The Europeans Project.
So what to do with 80 portraits? I had originally hoped to stage an exhibition of some sort to draw attention to the issue. After exploring it for a little while it became clear this was going to be very expensive and would limit the exposure to people in London. So instead I set up a dedicated website to host the project and developed a set of postcards to mail out to journalists and campaign groups. The series also went on to be featured in the British Journal of Photography and won a Silver award at CreativePool.
Here’s some of the material set up or sent out to promote the project:
I hope you find it interesting to see behind the photos, and how a project goes from conception to execution to delivery. Sometimes it can be hard to get inspired to shoot what’s around you, and we feel we need to get on a plane to some far off country to create something interesting, with all the time and money that implies. But projects don’t need to be expensive and time consuming. All the people in this project were just a tube ride from my home, I could fit the shoots in around my schedule and they all contributed their time for free. And most of all I really enjoyed meeting so many people around my city and learning their story. Sometimes the most interesting things are right in front of us.
