This site contains 5 photo essays:-

I was a Teenage Photographer - About 200 pictures taken in the 1960s while I was a pupil at Emanuel school, in south London.

BBC Radio London Revealed - Three photo essays showing life inside the BBC's largest local radio station in the 1970s and '80s.

Walking Round Venice - Pictures taken in 1972.

You can access the photos by scrolling the titles up and down in the box on the right. Click on the title you want to view. Below you will find introductions explaining how and why the photos were taken. You can also find contact details and information about my official website.

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I Was a Teenage Photographer

A few days before I left Emanuel school in south London for the last time a small, but significant, event occurred. The school magazine, The Portcullis, published three of my photos. They showed the school drive, young trainspotters, and the captain of tennis. It was the first time my photos appeared in print.

That was July 1963. I’d begun taking photos four years earlier and can pin down the exact moment I started - Boat Race day 1959. I lived in Fulham at that time - just across the River Thames, about a mile from the start of the race at Putney. So I borrowed a box-camera from my aunt and went and took some photos.

Why did I go? The Oxford and Cambridge Boat Race was a great national event. Each year the BBC broadcast the race to millions of listeners around the globe. As a schoolboy I was obsessed with radio and television. It’s practitioners seemed to inhabit a magical world far removed from my dreary London childhood. More than anything I wanted to become a BBC broadcaster when I grew up. Here was a chance for a teenager to glimpse a famous broadcast going out live.

I chose a bad day. It poured with rain. Anxious to see everything I arrived on the Putney embankment two hours early so I could stand in front of the crowds. I need hardly have bothered. Only a few people turned up. Eventually, the two crews appeared and lugged their boats down to the water while black clouds rolled across the sky and rain pelted down. I took my first pictures, Cambridge going afloat and Oxford splashing up to the start.

But what I longed to see were the sleek, white launches following the crews. Hidden behind a Perspex screen in the bows of one boat sat the radio commentator John Snagge, microphone in hand. He was talking to millions of listeners. Behind him, huddled round grey boxes housing transmitters and electrical gear, crouched the BBC engineers. Spiky aerials decorated the boat beaming radio signals back to the studios. The driver revved the engine. The launch leaped forward, its wake splashing over the feet of the unwary on the towpath, while a green BBC flag fluttered from the stern.

Behind followed an even larger television launch, the Everest, with a fearsome wash. I gazed in awe at the two TV cameras perched on the cabin roof and took a snapshot in the grey light.

The crews and launches glided downstream, turned below Putney Bridge and came up to the start. Over loudspeakers on the boathouse behind me I could hear John Snagge commentating. The umpire raised his flag. Down flashed his arm. The race was on. As the blades hit the water the two crews sped upstream pursued by an armada of launches in arrowhead formation stretching across the river. They swept by leaving a line of boats anchored parallel to the shore tumbling in their wake whilst a tidal wave raced along the embankment. I took another picture. Moments later the boats sped round a bend in the river and vanished in the mist.

As I stood on the embankment, with water sloshing around my feet, I stared mesmerised into the distance. I had to join the BBC and become a broadcaster. But how? I came from a poor home and knew no-one important. I was considered average at school. I little realised the answer lay in my hands - my camera. Photography was the golden thread that would lead me out of the labyrinth of poverty and obscurity into worlds of excitement I could only dream about as a child. Photography got me my first job in a photographic publishers and helped me become Production Editor of The Observer Colour Magazine. My first radio broadcasts were about photography. These led to reporting assignments and a permanent job as a producer and broadcaster in the BBC. A one-man photographic show followed at the National Theatre. The National Portrait Gallery acquired my pictures, and magazines and book publishers printed my photos. My cameras enabled me to meet and photograph hundreds of celebrities and encouraged me to travel and capture life abroad.

But all that lay in the future. As I crawled home, my clothes soaked with rain, I had no idea how I could realise my dreams. My Boat Race pictures were disappointing. My aunt’s Kodak Brownie reflex camera had a single piece of glass for a lens, a fixed shutter speed of 1/30 second, and produced blurred images.

Nonetheless, I was hooked. Photography intrigued me. I borrowed books from the local library and bought an occasional photo magazine. Although there was a photographic society at school I was never a member. I was a loner and self-taught. Over the next three years I experimented with a couple of box-cameras. Family snapshots made up most of my pictures. But in the summer of 1961 my school organised a geography field trip to Sussex - a day’s outing studying landforms at Black Rock, Seven Sisters and Beachy Head. I snapped a few friends with my box-camera at Devil’s Dyke. Again hazy images. I still needed a better camera.

A few weeks later I spotted one in the window of Boots the chemist in Putney. They were holding a sale. You could buy a Kodak folding camera for £5. Scraping together what pocket-money I had I went and bought one. The camera took 6 x 6 cm film and had a three-element f4.5 lens. Now I could take pictures in low light. A multi-speed shutter, with a top speed of 1/200 second, meant I could capture action and freeze moving subjects. From this moment my photography took off.

That August I hitch-hiked over 400 miles to the Lake District with school friends. I took my new camera and produced sharper pictures. Then, apart from a few family snapshots, I put away my Kodak until the following spring. Money was short and I could barely afford the film.

In March 1962 I had an opportunity to take my first action shots - boating on the river. Emanuel’s 1st VIII was doing well. The Master of Boats, Derek Drury, allowed me to go out in the school’s launch, Colonel Charles, and photograph the crew. Emanuel had just won the Schools’ Head of the River Race for the first time. In addition, the crew were acting as a pacemaker for Oxford and Cambridge when the varsity men came down to the tideway to compete in the Boat Race. As well as taking my first action shots I caught Derek Drury, who was fast becoming a legendary figure in the rowing world, issuing orders through a megaphone - my first environmental portrait.

Emanuel's 1st VIII had style. 'The crew certainly looked good,' enthused the school magazine when the oarsmen went to Henley Regatta that year. 'There were many admiring murmurs as they paddled up past the crowds to the start on the first day, their boat and blades beautifully cared for, their personal turnout impeccable, their style crisp and controlled.'

They still look cool.

For the next 16 months, until I left Emanuel in the summer of 1963, I took an increasing number of pictures. I photographed in all kinds of weather - not only sunlight, but on dull days, when it rained, in snow and during a hail storm. Some pictures were taken during my family holiday, but most were taken at school and show Emanuel’s outdoor activities. The school boasted a Combined Cadet Force. You could become a trainee soldier, sailor, or pilot. We schoolboys wore military uniform one day a week, went on training exercises and attended annual camps. Friends, who know me as an adult, may be amused to see me dressed as a soldier - first a sergeant, then a company sergeant major. Those who remember me at school will laugh even louder.

Summer camp in 1962 began with a drama. It was held under canvas 100 yards from the sea at Pakefield Range, near Lowestoft. I went down with the advance party to put up the tents. While speeding down a country lane our army lorry crashed into a builders’ Land Rover coming towards us in the opposite direction. Tyres squealed, metal crunched and the lorry smashed into a tree. I was lying in the back amid rolls of army blankets. These cushioned the blows. Shaken, but unhurt, I scrambled out of the lorry, crept round to the front and wrenched open the cab door. Everyone looked dazed, but injuries were few.

The builders in the Land Rover came off worst. Much blood. While others tended the injured I grabbed my camera. Wow, I thought, a scoop! This was my first news story. I began taking photos. No marks for tact, but a good journalistic instinct that came in useful when I joined the BBC.

Of course, it was impossible to publish the pictures. You can hardly splurge your school all over the newspapers. So I hid the negatives away in a drawer at home. Decades later, I can reveal all.

Once back in camp I took more conventional pictures - morning inspection, weapons’ and compass training - my first attempts at human interest photos. I tried something similar the following year during the Easter camp at St Martin’s Plain. Here I photographed Emanuel cadets leaping in and out of boats and paddling furiously. Like most schoolboys we griped a lot. But look at the faces of the cadets in the boats. They’re having the time of their lives.

During my last term at school Anthony Bird, who rowed at number 2 in the 1st VIII, noticed my interest in photography. Would I, he asked, like to buy a thirty-year old Leica II from his father? A Leica? This was the ultimate 35mm camera - the precision miniature that had pioneered a new kind of photography - photo-journalism and capturing life on the wing. Cartier-Bresson and a host of famous photographers used Leicas. I borrowed £20 from my father and the camera was mine.

Changing from a clumsy Kodak to a Leica was like exchanging a trumpet for a flute. The camera was subtle and sophisticated, had a better lens and a faster shutter speed - 1/500 second. Technically the results were superior to the folding Kodak. In my last few weeks I tried to capture the atmosphere of the school - the Victorian architecture, Parents’ Day, the Corps band marching across the sports field, trainspotters at the end of the drive, tennis players, a gym display, boys playing fives and cricket, candid shots of masters and prefects. Three pictures appeared in the school magazine. That encouraged me to continue with photography after I left Emanuel, a decision that affected the rest of my life.

So how well do these schoolboy photos reflect what I was doing at that time? Not much. They fail to convey the sickening worries that afflicted the whole of my youth - the gnawing feelings of failure and the conviction that everything was going wrong. They’re aspirational images - premonitory echoes showing what I hoped to become. My first pictures reveal my obsession with broadcasting. Years later, when I was inside the BBC, I produced 100 programmes with the Boat Race commentator John Snagge. The rowing pictures anticipate thousands of photos I took at Henley Regatta in the 1980s. Those culminated in a book. The trainspotters initiate the photo-journalistic style and overcast lighting I would employ in years to come when photographing people at home and abroad. And Derek Drury was my first celebrity photo. I would take hundreds of those in future.

The pictures show only some of Emanuel’s outdoor activities and none of the interior life of the school - the lessons, and problems and tensions that dominated my time. One history master, Arnold Cruse, is seen teaching at an annual army camp. But boat drill and assembling and firing Bren guns were hardly mainstream curriculum activities. These were spasmodic images taken as and when I could afford the film and something exciting happened, an attempt to break out of the boredom and fears of childhood and move into more exciting worlds.

When people look back at the 1960s they think about the Beatles, Rolling Stones - sex, drugs, rock ‘n’ roll - the Mini Minor, mini skirts, maxi scandals and satire. For some the '60s were a time of excitement and liberation. But for most of us the '60s never happened. We inhabited a different world - school, holidays in Bournemouth and endless boredom. All you had to look forward to was a dreary job and endless work until you retired. Surely, I thought, there were better ways to live.

My life started with these schoolboy images. Photography was the something I could call my own. For the first time I could go at my own pace and please myself. My exposures were accurate, I held my cameras level, understood the importance of timing and was developing an eye for a picture. Most are record shots, but some hit the mark.

Above all these pictures have atmosphere. An emotional charge runs through these pictures like an electric shock. Technical imperfections give a feeling of distance as we glimpse a lost world. Although old-fashioned I was more in tune with the photographic zeitgeist than I knew. In the 1950s and ‘60s professional photographers such as Tony Armstrong-Jones (later Lord Snowdon), Robert Frank, Bruce Davidson and William Klein deliberately destroyed their images - producing blurred and grainy pictures. They used expensive cameras. I produced similar results with cheap equipment and a local chemist who murdered my films. Most of the negatives were over developed. The images were too dense and contrasty to produce good prints in a conventional darkroom. For decades they lay hidden in small metal box. I needed a modern computer to salvage the remains.

Nonetheless, some negatives are good. They contain a surprising amount of detail and can be trimmed many ways. It’s possible to zoom in on details and pick out individuals from a general scene.

With the aid of old school magazines and friends on the Internet I’ve identified many people in my pictures. But dozens remain anonymous. Who are they? Photographers sometimes capture more than they know. Pictures contain secrets, as I found out nearly 30 years later after I left school. I’d travelled to Russia to report for the BBC World Service and took my cameras as well as a tape recorder. On the morning Leningrad changed its name back to St Petersburg I went along to the city council in the Marriinsky Palace to witness the historic ceremony. The mayor, Anatoly Sobchak, was chairing a meeting in a golden room of tsarist splendour. At his side sat a man who never smiled - a man of extraordinary melancholy, like a Russian Buster Keaton. He seldom spoke and looked as if all the woes of Russia rested on his shoulders. After the meeting this mysterious figure melted away into the shadows. Recently I went through my pictures again. To my surprise I found I had photographed Russia’s future president, Vladimir Putin, before he burst upon the world scene and became famous.

Are there, I wonder, any Vladimir Putins in these Emanuel photos - anonymous individuals who later sprang to fame and fortune, or even notoriety? This question is less absurd than it sounds. The man who invented the Internet and changed the world, Tim Berners-Lee, went to Emanuel. Unfortunately, I never met, or photographed him.

But what of the others, those nameless faces who stare out of my photos? Will they emerge from the shadows? Let's see as these pictures seep out into Cyberspace.

CONTACT ROGER GEORGE CLARK VIA HIS OFFICIAL WEBSITE AT:-

rogergeorgeclark.com

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BBC RADIO LONDON REVEALED - PARTS 1, 2 and 3

BBC Radio London was the UK capital's first modern local radio station. It opened in 1970 and stayed on the air until 1988. Radio London - or Big L as it was sometimes called - was the BBC’s largest local radio station. It started three years before the commercial stations began broadcasting.

For 18 years BBC Radio London blazed across the airwaves. I say blazed. Spluttered might be a better word. People were always trying to close us down. Money was short and we had to make do as best we could. Nonetheless good programmes were made. Pop stars, politicians, actors, writers, sportsmen, artists, gardeners and even James Bond and a Nazi war criminal appeared on BBC Radio London. One afternoon Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother dropped into the studio while we were live on air and inquired what we were doing. The station pioneered phone-ins, and access and minority programmes. It also reported the rise of the controversial left-wing politician Ken Livingstone.

Hundreds of broadcasters started their careers at BBC Radio London. It was a wonderful training ground - a university of the air. Some went onto fame and fortune. Others faded, or vanished. One became a government minister. Two became millionaires. Another committed suicide. Only the disc jockey Tony Blackburn remained the same - a fixed point in a changing world.

But what went on behind the scenes? These photographs will show you. During the 1970s and '80s I worked at BBC Radio London as a producer and broadcaster. I also took photos - thousands of pictures. What you are about to see is a lost world - the world of pre-digital radio. There were no computers, mobile phones, CDs, or iPods. Nobody had heard of the Internet. Journalists pounded away on manual typewriters. Reel to reel recordings were edited with razor blades and sticky tape. And everybody smoked. You had to grope your way through the fug to get to the microphone.

Radio London was the BBC in miniature - with a dash of anarchy thrown in. That’s why some people wanted to close us down. We were experimenting, pushing back boundaries. Sometimes things went wrong. But a lot went right. And many people who started their careers in Radio London now hold key posts in broadcasting. Their influence is everywhere.

Nobody claimed Radio London was glamorous, but what an exciting place it now seems. Big L may not have been the best local radio station in the world, but it certainly had the best-looking staff. Reporters and technicians looked like film stars. Prime ministers dropped in. Secretaries sipped champagne. And I have the photographs to prove it!

These pictures show a few moments snatched from over 6,5000 days that BBC Radio London was on the air - my interpretation of Big L. They’re pictures taken in the cracks between programmes - those moments when I had a few minutes to spare to record on film what was going on round me. Others may have seen Radio London differently and must publish their own photos. In the meantime here are more than 700 my own.

And how did I come to appear in some of these photos? Well, I set the controls on my camera, handed it to a colleague, gave precise instructions and hoped for the best. Sometimes it worked.

This photo essay is the most comprehensive set of photos taken of Radio London; it's also one of the most comprehensive set of pictures ever made of a radio department in the BBC. Photos of broadcasters at work, as opposed to publicity stills, are much rarer than you might think. I've arranged the exhibition in three parts. Parts 1 and 2 show you the personalities and what went on behind the scenes. Part 3 contains portraits.

So sit back and enjoy the lost world of BBC Radio London. Find out what happened behind the microphone. And discover the faces behind the voices that once filled the London airwaves.

CONTACT ROGER GEORGE CLARK VIA HIS OFFICIAL WEBSITE AT:-

rogergeorgeclark.com

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WALKING AROUND VENICE - SEPTEMBER 1972