Stuart Roy Clarke

Stuart Roy Clarke is an English photographer from Hertfordshire. His major works include The Homes of Football, Scenes From A British Summer Country Pop Music Festival and Somewhere Across A Promised Land. Clarke works with a Bronica camera on medium format film.

Life

Stuart Roy Clarke was born 19 August 1961 in Berkhamsted, Hertfordshire. He attended Westfield Primary School Northchurch and then Berkhamsted Grammar School, made famous by the writer Graham Greene. On his mother's side the family were bakers, teachers...head seamstress in the local clothes factory. His father's family worked on the railways; his grandfather was the Mayor of the town up until the Second World War and during his time in office commissioned or opened many of the local sporting facilities. Clarke's father Roy helped organise and preside over youth football leagues throughout the region of West Hertfordshire. Clarke's interests as a boy were collecting and drawing things, alongside football. Berkhamsted School however offered a Latin and rugby-playing education so Clarke maintained his football interest playing on Sundays for Berkhamsted Dynamoes and supporting the local professional club Watford FC,"hiding behind the Music School on Saturdays until the cross-country team bus I should have been on had departed for Charterhouse or Harrow on the Hill"[1]

Further education led Clarke through a year at Hertfordshire College of Art & Design at St Albans where his photography abilities and keen eye were seized upon by product designer cum lecturer Richard Seymour...accordingly Clarke proceeded to do a degree in Film & Photographic Arts at the Polytechnic of Central London. In the months that followed graduation in 1984, Clarke travelled widely and during this period, discovered The Lake District – a marriage of sorts that remains to this day. In 1990 whilst in Cumbria, Clarke saw an opportunity to bring together the things he was interested in : art, football and human/nature to become "a project to last me at least 10 years and maybe a lifetime'"[2] ...The Homes of Football was born.

Clarke married and separated in 2001–2002; in 2005 he fathered his first and only child, Ava Beatrice.

The Homes of Football

Stuart Clarke photographed at football grounds throughout the UK in the early years of the 1990s both as an independent artist and as the only photographer to the Football Trust. In this way Clarke built up a unique and distinguished collection of film positives which he set about exhibiting and turning into published work. From 1991 to 2005 he had an unbroken spell of touring The Homes of Football to 89 municipal museums and art galleries – believed to be a record. In 1995 he set about establishing a permanent Museum of British Football, in Carlisle, to consolidate his and other collections – but the scheme came to nothing. Clarke set up shop/gallery/hq instead in nearby Ambleside, in the heart of The Lake District. This was finally closed in January 2011 in preparation for it becoming part of a new National Football Museum in central Manchester.[3] This closing coincided with the release of a hardback anthology of his first 21 years of Homes of Football entitled "The Cradle of The Game".[4]

Work

Since 2005 Clarke has worked on two more full-scale photographic collections to rival his own Homes of Football. "Scenes From A British Summer Country Pop Music Festival" and "Cumbria Surrounded".

Exhibitions

Solo Exhibitions (UK unless specified)

Collections

Books

Television

Critical Response

Unlike many artists,Clarke has had no real highs nor lows nor bowing outs nor reinventions in his career. It has been steady with Clarke always defending his ambition by defining himself as "a late developer." The first national reviews of his work started appearing at the end of 1991 with the national touring of his Homes of Football. Jeff Connor writing for the North West Evening espies a photographic star in the making “Every photograph tells its own story. And make no mistake, Clarke is a master story-teller with a poet’s eye and wit, a genuine feel for the old game and the ability to capture its moods.”[5] Some 30 shows later, in 1994, again on home soil in Cumbria, and staging his biggest show to date, Christian Dymond wrote of Clarke in The Independent: “Lowry’s paintings have come to Tullie House Museum in Carlisle and so have Sebastião Salgado’s photographs and John Keane’s paintings from the Gulf War. Stuart Clarke’s 250 photographs have eclipsed them all.”[6] Scotland too, often wary of English invasions, received warmly his work “I think of all these images, which are enough to make the most hard-hearted factualist drum up a line of poetry, when I survey the beauty and grime and glory captured in these photographs by Stuart Clarke. They represent the myriad charms of the contemporary game, from the industrial backdrop of old Huddersfield, to the vast modernism of the new Ibrox, from the quaint pot-and-kettle backroom of Doncaster, to the teeming fanfare of a Championship decider. There is rioting modernism in these pictures together with slower-rhythmed songs of old. But the home of football remains a constant : sight, sound, smell, colour”[7] writes Graham Spiers in Scotland on Sunday in 1996. Though at this stage Clarke was committed to just the one subject, football, it was clear through his lens he was offering up the vision of something 'more than a game' : “Little can dampen Clarke’s faith in a game that he still regards as a force for good – fulfilling our need for fantasy and a sense of belonging in a society where opportunities for mass gatherings and displays of intense feeling are comparatively rare”[8] writes Chris Arnot in The Guardian in 1998.

Without a word against his work and most reviewers seizing on the 'football' achievement – Clarke's ability to bridge the gap between ordinary fan and art gallery, Jonathan Margolis writing in the Sunday Times tried in 1995 to place Clarke amidst a photographic hierarchy “Like Cartier-Bresson, Clarke restricts himself to using standard focal length lens that most approximates the human’s eye view… nothing distorted by fancy optics. History’s judgement may be that Clarke’s photography, in its vast, still only half-completed archive, should be considered a national treasure.”[9]

In 1998, Phil Johnston visiting Clarke's Homes of Football Versus Bristol Museum, writing in the Independent goes if anything further than the Margolis recognition, viewing Clarke's achievement beyond mere photographic artistry : “These are like pictures from another world. In Blood Red Road End, Barnsley, the painted brick wall topped by shards of glass is like a Rothko; its companion piece Yellow Brick Road is as luminous as a Matisse from Morocco. The colour prints shine as if lit from within, and a burger stall outside Highbury looks as if it’s part of an avant-garde stage-set, lit by Caravaggio.”[10]

With in late 1997 the opening and the daily running of a permanent gallery of his own work in at Ambleside, Clarke's move to amaze on the road perhaps takes second priority, even if there were to be another 8 years of touring. The keenest appraisals seemed to be reserved for Clarke's series of publications : “Unlike previous books of its kind it rewards further inspection and captures, more than words ever could, the crumbling magic of the British game. Taken in and around the stadiums we call home, the pictures capture extremes, from the post-Taylor citadels of Celtic and Newcastle to the grim realities of Hull, Doncaster and Port Vale. There’s beauty… and above all there’s comedy… show this to an American and tell them this is why their sport is shite. There’s only one game – the beautiful one. 10 marks out of 10.”[11] This wasn't in fact a fanzine getting its own back on American sport, but the BBC Match of The Day Magazine of 1999 reviewing Clarke's "Passion Of A Nation".

Clarke's intention was to do "the football thing for at least a decade."[12] With the first decade over, Clarke set about the 2000s trying to bring in his other interests based around living and working in above all a rural Britain.

In 2010, on the release of Clarke's first major offering outside of his football subject Scenes From A British Summer Country Pop Music Festival, The Sunday Observer seized on the quintessential Britishness of the work heralding "Clarke is the chief chronicler of the great British festival."[13] Gordon Taylor, speaking as the head of the Professional Footballers Association and perhaps for all of football viewed him entirely as their own : "Stuart Roy Clarke is the finest football photographer in this country."[14] Cumbrian writer and author Hunter Davies writing in the new Statesman in 2010 viewed him more in the line of Cumbrian greats "Stuart is the photographic Bard of The Lake District."[15]

References

  1. ↑ Stuart Clarke, "Football Nation" by Andrew Ward & John Williams, 2009
  2. ↑ A Common Passion, ITV, 1996
  3. ↑ http://www.culture24.org.uk/history+%26+heritage/work+%26+daily+life/tra10320
  4. ↑ "The Cradle of The Game (England Scotland Wales Ireland)", SRC Books December 2010 ISBN 0-9528004-8-9
  5. ↑ http://www.homesoffootball.co.uk/about/
  6. ↑ http://www.nationalfootballmuseum.com/pages/news/latest/savedforthenationcarlisle.html
  7. ↑ http://www.homesoffootball.co.uk/about/
  8. ↑ http://www.fsf.org.uk/uploaded/publications/pdfs/tfs23_web.pdf
  9. ↑ http://www.fsf.org.uk/uploaded/publications/pdfs/tfs23_web.pdf
  10. ↑ http://www.homesoffootball.co.uk/about/
  11. ↑ Match Of The Day Magazine, January 1999
  12. ↑ http://www.culture24.org.uk/history+%26+heritage/work+%26+daily+life/tra10320
  13. ↑ http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2010/may/30/festivals-photography
  14. ↑ http://www.thejuniors.info/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/CRADLE-Book-Release-Dec-2010.pdf
  15. ↑ http://www.widecow.com/all-days.php?count_id=4
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