Our Story…
That’s a bit of a clichéd title, we know. If you want a general, ‘what we do’ introduction, our About page might be better.
We’ll keep adding to this until it’s up-to-date.
Recently, I was at Impressions Gallery, in Bradford to be around the Café Royal Books exhibition. It was the annual photo book fair and a party to celebrate the show. I was asked to talk about Café Royal Books. It’s pretty fast paced here, day-to-day, and it’s good sometimes to have a reason to look back through the archive. We’d really need a few weeks to put the early years into some kind of order though, but I managed to find some bits.
I know a lot of you have been here from the start, and thank you, but it occurred to me that I’ve never really talked that much about why it started, and how the early publications began to form what we do now. It’s not a standard route in to publishing photography, if there is such a thing.
Café Royal Books is 19 this year — the official start date is a bit hazy. For 12 of those years we’ve published a bit more than a new book each week — 60 books a year. There are a few moments, which were pretty important along the way, so over the next few weeks, I’ll try to twist them into some kind of history.
These first photos are some of the few I have of my studio. Having returned to Southport around 2001, from living and studying Fine Art in Leeds, to begin working as 3D workshop technician and teaching at a local college. Without any reason not to — painting, and some drawing, was what I always did. Painting felt like a puzzle and the physicality of the material was pretty consuming.
Painting.
The paintings I’d been making for several years, were white. I didn’t want colour to suggest anything or create any kind of story or meaning that wasn’t there. Some of the work was large, around 240 x 150cm. The work was really only about it’s self, as a process and the materials, layering and physicality of material — the process of building up a surface over time, hiding marks beneath but allowing the texture of previous layers to build up and be present. I could talk for days about the work — a major part of life for many years.
I’d had several shows, and did ‘ok’ in terms of exhibiting. As I was reaching what I felt was a conclusion to the series, I was asked but two curators from Liverpool, to be part of a show, Ten, at Loop Gallery, as part of the Liverpool Biennial. Great. Then I found out who else was in the show, among them some painting heroes at the time — John Hoyland (whose last words to me were, “you know Rothko didn’t kill himself”), John McLean, Maurice Cockrill…A show about painters who make work about painting.
Around the time of the show, 2004, the ‘freedom’ of university had long disappeared and real life had started to build. Work, mortgage, thoughts about the future. The idea of spending days and months making paintings, ultimately for myself, felt a bit self indulgent. The paintings were big, heavy, expensive to make and store and transport. I didn’t really like exhibiting them more than a couple of times, because things had moved on by then. And, exhibiting as a thing, seemed a bit odd in ways. Galleries could be elitist, could be intimidating and making this work, each painting was a single thing, available in only one place at a time, too heavy to go overseas so limiting an audience if that’s what I wanted. As much as I loved it, it was causing itself a lot of problems — I made a totally unconsidered decision to ‘quit’ painting. Got rid of everything except a few sheets of paper and handed back the studio keys the next day.
Drawing.
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