Diane Bush - PHOTOTALK

Diane Bush is an American activist, artist, photographer, born in Buffalo, New York. In 1968, at the age of 18, Bush moved to the United Kingdom, motivated in part by her response to the Vietnam War and a desire to immerse herself in a different social and artistic environment. This move would catalyze a significant period of creative exploration and social documentary work that shaped her career as a photographer. Bush's photographic practice in the UK began in the early 70s, which marked her entry to the Exit Photography Group, joining members Paul Trevor and Nicholas Butty, who were committed to long-form social conscious photography. Bush became the first woman to join the group, which we delved into in our chat. I think I just came across the letter I got from, there's a Guildhall School of Drama. I went there. There was the St. Bartholomew's Hospital. I got a letter saying I could go in there and shoot. There was a boys' private school. There was a girls' private school. So that was really fun, going into these establishments and having the freedom to shoot. You know, and I started to get off on the adrenaline, very much kind of like what Diane Arbus would talk about in terms of her, you know, being in people's homes and having permission to be there. It's like it's a passport, you know. After living in the UK for 10 years, working as a documentary photographer and in educational institutions, she returned to the US to attend her ailing parents. Bush's time photographing in England later led to a series of coffee table books entitled The Brits, The Brits in England, Even More Brits, and The Last of the Brits, as well as London East End. Her British documentary work is also held in several major institution collections including the Tate, the V&A, and continues to be revisited in exhibitions and retrospectives. Once back in Buffalo, New York, she obtained her MA in Photography from the State University of New York at Buffalo by documenting local boxing gyms and billiard halls. subsequently a 2024 coffee table book Main Street Buffalo New York 1980 to 1981 was published after graduating from university she spent several years as a staff photographer at the local affiliate of the National Public Broadcasting and ABC stations at the same time she pursued self-imposed artistic projects and established a non-profit art organization entitled Urban Art in 2005 Bush published Warheads which contains images that satirize the America's new censorship of the Iraqi War they were created by shooting TV surfaces with a macro lens at obtuse angles on throwing bleach on the resulting prints and we went into a bit of detail on the making of Warheads in our chat what what can i do uh i realized at the same time that the Iraqi war started so the CNN broadcasting was the first 24-hour news service in existence and i got very excited because I thought, oh, great, I'm going to turn on the TV and we're going to see all this fighting right in front of our eyes like we did during Vietnam. And of course, I turned on the TV and everything was censored. You couldn't see anything. The only thing you could see were these talking heads, the people that were telling you what was going on. Throughout her professional career, Diane has continued to exhibit her work in approximately two to five group shows per year, and has been exhibited and published locally, nationally, and internationally including shows in Japan China Germany Czechoslovakia Spain Britain France Switzerland and Italy since her relocation to Las Vegas in 1997 she has been awarded 15 grants and a fellowship from the Nevada Arts Council she's also past president and director of the Contemporary Arts Center of Las Vegas we had a wonderful and insightful chat about Diane's life and connection to the world through photography and i'm really pleased she took the time to have a chat with me We discussed how she met Paul Trevor and her involvement in the Exeter Photography Group. So I met Paul at the college. He had been working as an accountant, but he wanted to learn photography. So he took a class at the college. But of course, he had to pay for it himself. He didn't have an employer to pay for it. So I didn't see him that much. But he put a notice up in the college bulletin board or something saying, um i'm looking for people to join me uh in this new venture so uh i told them i was interested and i worked with um paul and alex and um uh nicholas uh nicholas batty nicholas batty um alex yeah on the down whopping we chatted about the time she met Joseph Koudelka at the Lord Mayor's my show in london and i remember one time i was um photographing the lord mayor's parade which is you know an annual event in the city and uh bumped into joseph koudelka who was also photographing the parade the same day and time and uh you know i knew joseph um so i bumped into him and you know the one thing that i i remember is he was still kind of struggling then so his glasses were all scotch tape together um because he couldn't afford uh new glasses um but anyway such a sweet man we also discussed her shyness when she was out on the street and how she overcome this and how she gained confidence as a street photographer getting out there and taking pictures so i quit my job well started um getting photographs and uh you know i mean i had some really i remember some really bad days where i i'd go out and never mustered the nerve to approach people and came back with nothing and realized i just had to force myself to do it and we went into a little bit about the exit photographers group strategy of taking pictures when they were out in the street? Shooting together. I mean, one of our trademarks was we would go down to a certain place, like Crystal Perkins and I went to some clubs in the city. I mean, we would work in pairs. And the beauty of that was that while one photographer is talking to your subject, the other photographer can take pictures. You know, the person is distracted, so you can get all kinds of good, candid work. And that's how we were used to working in twos and threes. So the day came for a chat, and I gave her a call, and I asked her what she was up to. Well, actually, at the moment, I'm kind of involved in establishing my legacy. I'm in my 70s, so you have to think about it eventually. And I'm also downsizing, again, because I'm in my 70s. And I'm going through a lot of old documents, you know, getting rid of duplicates. I did manage to get some work in a permanent collection in my hometown of Buffalo, New York. and then I have some other bodies of work and I'm looking for institutions that will you know be willing to house and and take care of some of these other you know bodies of work the negatives and whatever prints I have so that's kind of what I'm doing right now I'm between big art projects and I'm taking care of the paperwork you've had a really interesting journey as a photographer haven't you what would you call yourself now are you you're an artist a multimedia mixed media artist as well now i presume that's what is that what you sort of class yourself as now yeah in terms of media um and in terms of intent i think of myself as an activist artist we used to call ourselves concerned photographers but um that doesn't ring a bell in a modern lingo so um now we're called activist artists yeah you're quite a documentarian aren't you as well documentary features in your work in a sense of current affairs and issues and life with your your bush stuff i've noticed but your installations in your work from the iraq war warheads and and things you you're very into current issues tell me a little bit more about your current artwork and and the stuff you're working on what what have you been okay in terms of you are right you know originally i think of myself now as a multimedia artist you know i started out drawing and painting but um in my teen years but uh i i got really bored with that fast because um you know it sounds like bragging but it wasn't enough of a challenge for me and when i discovered that you could use a camera to express yourself I really latched on to photography because it just was more challenging I'm not a I'm not a scientific thinker at all so learning the science and the math was was kind of exciting for me it was like a brand new world so but now I'm I'm using lots of different materials. I do a lot of fiber art. And my last big project was using toy soldiers stuck on a big red medicine ball, red toy soldiers on the red medicine ball, and made it look like a COVID molecule. And the soldiers were bunched into little groups of threes and fours and they're all fighting each other and you know that's all about this mask anger it's called toxic masculinity a bitter pill because the sphere the ball is a medicine ball so there's some puns and some you know i just got angry with people i mean and in the states they've actually been murders over masks so it can be serious you can see that in warheads your sort of frustration and anger at these people for those of you who don't know what warheads is would you little would you explain that a little bit sure so i uh used a macro lens to uh held at a an oblique angle and a wide aperture uh to get distortion when photographing um the talking heads that we saw on tv so you have to sort of let me go back a few steps here. I grew up in the 60s, and I remember sitting around the dinner table, eating my dinner, watching reporters following soldiers through the Vietnam jungles as bullets whizzed over their heads. I mean, we were fed every day this close, you know, reporting on TV. And of course, that spurred a lot of the anti-war movement that I was involved in. And so when the Iraq war happened, I was so incredulous that we were entering another war. I really felt I had to do something. And if you're a photographer, you think, well, I have to go to the front and photograph. But then, of course, you know, the very next split second, I realized, you know, oh, I can't do that. And I was, of course, in the middle of teaching a semester. I was teaching photography. So I thought, well, what can I do? I realized at the same time that the Iraqi war started, so the CNN broadcasting was the first 24-hour news service in existence. And I got very excited because I thought, oh, great, I'm going to turn on the TV and we're going to see all this fighting right in front of our eyes like we did during Vietnam and of course I turned on the TV and all everything was censored you couldn't see anything the only thing you could see were these talking heads the people that were telling you what was going on the censorship really made me very angry because you know we're supposed to have a free speech in this country and that's that's what started me off thinking well, I have to photograph the war. I can't go there. But instead, what I did was during the Gulf War, I just got in front of the TV and shot every day. So the Gulf War was 43 days. And I know that because I was on my knees in front of the TV for 43 days, shooting the talking heads. And then And what happened was, for the Iraq War, there was a Gulf War. Then the Iraq War happened. I got even angrier because I knew that this was going to go on for about 10 or 20 years. And we were really going to go in and mess things up. So I wanted to leave the country. I saw what was coming. But my husband was not interested in uprooting. So I said, well, if I'm not going to leave the country, I have to make art. I didn't really see the sense of reshooting what I'd shot already. Instead, I thought, well, I'll take those images and I will somehow add something that connotates violence. So I got some razor blades and I started scratching the surface of the print. I tried ripping the prints. Nothing was working out visually. and then I remembered using potassium ferrocyanide in the dark room with my black and white work I thought what happens if I throw bleach at these prints and I never worked with color prints before and that's what I had to work with, these color prints from the Gulf War so I tried throwing bleach on the print and what happened was where the bleach where the bleach hit the print the result were as the bleach ate into the emulsion layers of a C-print because these were C-prints what ended up was the same colors as fire I mean that's totally random right so where I threw the bleach I was getting reds oranges yellows and whites and there was my violence there was the visual violence so um what I loved about the whole process was that it was random throwing the bleach on a C-print was random I had no idea what the result was going to be I had to have lots of prints I had to do lots of you know variations I had to wash off the bleach before it went white you know I wanted the colors so it was fun it was exciting and it showed the violence so what you end up with is a picture of somebody on TV and it looks like they're on fire and the contrast between somebody in a safe TV studio and and this violent fire graphic was was what i was trying to portray and it worked the work really interesting is the grid system the way you displayed them they're very psychedelic it's a bit of a trip isn't it looking at them they're really sort of playing in a sort of psychedelic and almost sinister way aren't they the visuals that come across as quite evil in a sense these people on the screen do you get that as well is that what you're trying to portray well what worked really well is that i was working with a curved an old fashioned curved TV screen so when i used the macro lens at an angle it distorted the the face and i you know none of this is done digitally it's all done manually and then because the The aperture was at its widest setting. You get a thin area where the pixels of the TV screen, which you can't even get anymore on the modern high-definition screen, but you see the pixels up close, you know, in their red, green, and yellow, you know, formation. So there's lots of things going on. Do you remember Max Headroom? Oh, yeah. It's a very similar finish style to that sort of thing, isn't it? It's very robotic. I love it. I think it's a really great concept, actually. You're still creating images. You're still doing stuff. You've got some great projects. What I want to do is go right back to Buffalo, New York. I want to go back to the beginning. I would like to know how your world from Buffalo connected to the photography world and where that journey took you. I'm fascinated by your journey in England, your involvement with the Exit Photography Collective, how your time in England was spent, and how you took that to the next step when you moved back to the States, and looking back and reflecting on that time and what you took from it. Tell me about the pictures, and I'd like to hear that, and I'd like you to just go back now to New York. I guess the largest influence on me was I have an older brother who's an artist. He's also a pretty remarkable guy and very charismatic. He excelled in art and math and philosophy and wrestling. And he was the sweetest older brother you could ever have, your little girl. So I was pretty enamored with him. He was a huge influence on me. And during the Vietnam War, he was the head of the local chapter of a group called Youth Against War and Fascism. A very kind of strict Marxist group, but it was a national group. He was the local head of that group. He was so charismatic that when he wanted to enlist in the army, they wouldn't let him in. Of course, his aim was to infiltrate from within, and they knew that. But he was a great, and he still is, he's a great artist. It seemed like the only real natural skill I had was in the arts. I kind of knew that from day one. So he got me started, and I also had an aunt in New York City. My dad comes from Brooklyn, so he has family, and he had family in New York City, and I had an aunt who was an art teacher. And whenever I was in New York City, because we were only eight hours away from New York City, so we would drive, the family would go into New York, or later I'd fly. but she would of course drag me to every art museum and every gallery in New York so she was an influence as well so that's how I got involved in the arts well you know I started drawing from probably age three and then I kept drawing and I was still drawing and painting in high school but then what happened was I had my first trip away from home to see a girlfriend in Florida and of course when you go on a trip you're supposed to take a camera with you and so somebody gave me a camera to take it was I don't know what what it was but I put the camera up to my eye and realized hey wait a minute I can do other things and just take snapshots so that was kind of the first awakening I had that photography could be used as an art form but it wasn't until I met my future husband that when, as recorded, he taught me how to use an SLR. That, you know, that was just the start of a, you know, a long career. I mean, I pretty abruptly gave up the drawing and painting for the camera. I have another older brother who avoided the Vietnam draft by going into the Peace Corps. I guess you're, are you familiar with the Peace Corps? i i've heard of the peace corps yeah i've actually worked with the american peace corps in cambodia oh okay so anyway um my older brother my other older brother ron went to the peace corps and uh to avoid the the vietnam war draft he came back after two stints after two stints you can't do a third you can do two stints each stint is four years no each stint is two years long so he did four years and then he came back to the States and he brought with him a friend of his who was in the Peace Corps. And they got an apartment together back in Buffalo after they came back from Africa. They were in Ghana. And this fellow, this friend of his took a shine to me. And I was 17 at the time. He was about 23 or 24. So he was an older man as far as I was concerned. I was still in high school but he took a shine to me and uh started to court me um with my parents you know permission and knowledge uh just you know basically going to concerts and concerts i mean classical philharmonic stuff but he showed me how to use an slr what happened was uh as the relationship grew so did the draft board's interest in him. Eventually, he had two draft boards fighting over him, one in California, one in Buffalo. By the time he had to leave the country to avoid service, I was in university, my first year of university. So the day after I finished my exams in uh december of 69 we we uh we left the country illegally took a flight from toronto to london and the reason we were going to london because a lot of draft dodgers of course went to canada but the reason we were going to london is because my husband and my older brother ron both had met these two Englishmen in Africa. So these Englishmen were looking for a rare species of frog in the desert, and I guess they actually found it. But anyway, this English connection gave us somewhere to stay when we were in London, and we ended up staying with the Ken Livingston and his family in West Norwood. That's West London, yeah. Yeah, Red Ken and his whole family put us up. So it was quite an experience. It was winter. There was no central heating in the house because London had gone smokeless. And you just had that little electric bar. And I don't think I slept for the first several months because I was so cold. It must have been quite a culture shock. It was quite a big thing then. Well, I was very happy to get away from my folks because they were very overprotective. So that was the other element that spurred me on to leave. And, you know, there was an ocean between us after I landed in the U.K., and I knew they weren't going to cross it. So I was safe. I was really interested in my independence. So it was perfect for me. I didn't really want to get married that young. I saw myself as a very independent young woman, but at the same time, I had to be married in order for the work permits and visas and everything to work in our favor. So we got married probably, I don't know, maybe a couple months before we left. that way uh we could stay in England because uh my husband had a had his degree in geology he ended up getting a job uh in uh King's College on the Strand doing um biological research at college and then his work because he had a work permit i was able to get a work permit because i was there anyway they might as well put me to work right but we had to um we had to leave the country for a month because as you know you can't enter the country without a work permit he uh you know it's against the law but uh he did look for work while we were there on a visitor's visa then we left the country and stayed in Paris for a month living on bread and cheese and and cheap while we waited for the work permits arrive in Paris and fortunately they arrived after a month of just eating bread and cheese. I had a hot meal. Presume when you came over, you came over with your camera. My husband had a camera. I did not have one at that time, but later I had my own camera and then we added different lenses to our arsenal. And it was funny because when we finally split up as a couple, four years later, All I asked for was the 135mm lens, the 28mm lens, and the macro lens, and a camera body, and that's all I wanted out of the relationship. At what point did you sort of start thinking, I'm going to get out on the streets here and start taking pictures, because it began a really long journey for you, didn't it? You know, I blame Paul Trevor, who was the origin, who was basically the instigator of the Exit Photography Collective. I had been previously trying to emulate photographers like Ralph Gibson. I really liked his style. You know, I'd been reading Creative Camera and studying other photographers. and I just like Ralph Gibson's sense of composition. And so most of my photographs were architectural studies and shadows and things that didn't really involve confronting other people. I was very young. I was very shy and I had very little self-confidence. How did you meet Paul Truffer? My first job in the UK was at the London College of Printing. I was a file clerk, but I was terrible at it. So as soon as I got my work permit, I think I was there for a month, I looked for something else. And I discovered there was a job for a photographic technician at the Paddington Technical College, which was up on Edgware Road. My husband and I had built a darkroom in our kitchen and we had been going to camera club meetings and we had been experimenting with all the different fancy techniques you can do in the darkroom. So I had built up a little portfolio and I marched off to this job interview and showed them my portfolio and they said, yep, you're our person. So I was working as a photographic technician at the college, and we were serving students who were in the day-release program, where one day a week your employer would release you to further your education. And we were teaching two different classes. I think one was a studio photography. The other one, I think, was a more scientific photography class. But, you know, I was handing out lenses and mixing chemistry and testing chemicals, things like that. So I met Paul at the college. He had been working as an accountant, but he wanted to learn photography. So he took a class at the college. But, of course, he had to pay for it himself. He didn't have an employer to pay for it. So I didn't see him there much, but he put a notice up in the college bulletin board or something saying, um, I'm looking for people to join me, uh, in this new venture. So, uh, I told him I was interested and I worked with, um, Paul and Alex and, um, uh, Nicholas, uh, Nicholas Batey, um, yeah, on the Downwapping project. But if you look at the Downwapping book, you'll see these architectural studies. Obviously, those were mine, and I didn't do a lot of the people shooting. So what happened was when we started our second project, which was about the city of London, just the area within the walled city, Paul basically said to me, if you don't shoot photographs of people, we're not going to use you anymore. so he left and then Chris Hill Perkins joined that's right and we started shooting this project which Paul you know Paul was confident we'd find the funding for it but we never did and what happened to me was I was trying to get photographs of people on the weekends but if you go down to the city of London on the weekend it's completely deserted I mean it's the financial section of London so you know no one's going to be there on a on a Saturday or Sunday um so i was having a lot of trouble so i quit my job wow started um getting photographs and uh you know i mean i had some really i remember some really bad days where i i'd go out and never mustered the nerve to approach people and came back with nothing and realized i just had to force myself to do it that was 1974 yeah well where were you in the group then you were you still working yeah i was still working when um when we did down walking yeah and then uh when we started the city that's when i realized i couldn't do both you're right well um my you know my husband i realized we could manage with just his salary so i quit i quit the uh right the Paddington Technical College job which might really upset my father a little bit but uh that's okay it's funny he would write me letters i just came across some old letters he would write me letters saying can you really make a living in photography you know Cindy Sherman is a millionaire but you know he wasn't sure just trying to put it in some order so i can follow it then Chris Thew Perkins came in that's when they did the survival programs around the country isn't it that was a sort of that was later on yeah yeah so what happened was i was shooting all these photographs for the city project and that's what you'll see in volume one through four of the Cafe Royal books that are published those are mostly photographs i took for that city project but um the city project was canceled yeah um we never found the funding paul didn't shoot that much because he was building dark room nicholas was busy writing the grant for the survival program a project the city project was basically just um canceled shooting what we now call brits england more brits even more brits and the land of the Brits as you call now Cafe Royal books you have which features almost a selection of the black and white work you did What was it like doing it then? What was the feel like? How did you sort of fit in and around? Were you searching for something? Because you're still an American in London, and you're a young lady And what were you looking for? Well, I was, you know, basically I kind of looked at it as being on assignment You know, I was on assignment for Exit and they wanted people pictures I'll get them people pictures because I knew that Exit was important You know, it was important to me. And through my work with Exit, I was recognized as, you know a woman photographer in London that had something to contribute. So it was through my involvement with Exit that I was invited to participate in a women's photography group that was working with the Half Moon Photography Workshop and Gallery. and I did I contributed work for two of their shows one called women that was all by women photographers and then another show called men photographs by women um so I knew exit was important and um you know having shown the Down Wapping work at the Photographer's Gallery in London that was huge right you know even though it was in the smaller gallery uh we got reviews in the British Journal of Photography. I have photographs printed in Spare Rib magazine reviewing the women's shows. So there was some decent press, both in the Daily Telegraph. So I knew exit was something very special, and I wanted to fulfill the assignment. So if I had to make myself uncomfortable and be frightened out of my wits It's about approaching a stranger. That's what I had to do. You got involved with lots of different things, didn't you? You were following pensioners around and organized trips. You were just wandering the streets, meeting people and going to pubs and finding kids down back alleys and stuff like that. You must have really wondered, where was your geographics on that? Where were you wandering specifically? So, you know, Paul had printed out a huge list of everything within the city walls of the city of London. So in that sort of ring of city, the financial part, yeah? Yeah. I mean, you know, there's a historical city of London boundary, and it was anything within those walls. And so, you know, I had, I think I just came across the letter I got from, there's a Guildhall School of Drama. I went there. There was the St. Bartholomew's Hospital. I got a letter saying I could go in there and shoot. There was a boys' private school. There was a girls' private school. So, you know, that was really fun going into these establishments and having, you know, the freedom to shoot, you know, and I started to get off on the adrenaline very much kind of like what Diane Arbus would talk about in terms of her, you know, being in people's homes and having permission to be there. it's like it's a passport you know to be in places that you normally wouldn't be in and it can be very exciting yeah you must have been quite a novelty wouldn't in the american female walking around well and then the other the other part that's pretty interesting is that people do not see me as a threat in the sense that they might see a man with a camera as a threat and And sometimes I would just totally lie and say, oh, I'm just doing this for student. I'm a student, you know, and I'm just shooting an assignment for my student work. But yeah, I had a huge afro, you know, I dressed like a hippie. You know, they twigged I was not English when they heard me speak. So I had a little bit of an English accent by then, but it was never 100%. What did you go to lens-wise? So I started out with the 35, but I really love the 28. You know, I rarely use the telephoto because you're not close to your subject. But, you know, sometimes I did have to use the 135. And I remember one time I was photographing the Lord Mayor's Parade, which is, you know, an annual event in the city. and uh bumped into Joseph Koudelka who was also photographing the parade the same day and time and uh you know i knew joseph um so i bumped into him and you know the one thing that i i remember is he was still kind of struggling then so his glasses were all scotch taped together because he couldn't afford new glasses. But anyway, such a sweet man. It was fun. What film were you using? Oh, so I was usually shooting Tri-X or Ilford 400, and I would push it when I needed to do 800 and developing microfins. Yeah, HP5. Yeah. Yeah. It's interesting talking to other photographers from that period. It was HP 5, 28mm lens. And I love 28 and 35 for prime lens documentary work. It's wonderful. It just takes you, it helps your eye see what else is going on. And it brings in other things to play with what you're focusing on. Well, you need a wide-angle lens because our vision, you know, is horizontal. We've got two eyes side by side. So you need a wide-angle lens to look a little bit more realistic. I mean, I tried the 24, but it was too wide. It was too distorted. Yeah, and you don't realize how close you have to get as well with the 24 if you want to get near people. Did you know you were sort of creating a piece of history there with the work? Well, you know, I'd always hoped that, you know, if I'm not recognized at the time, that, you know, maybe, you know, in 50 years the work will be looked at as valuable. And if not valuable, then people who just want a nostalgic look back will find value in it. What happened after the exit group and you shot the pictures, then what happened from working? You stayed friends with Paul Trevor, the guys. Oh, yeah. Then you moved from that to when you went home, packed up your negatives and went back to America. Is there a bit in between there? Were you continuing to take pictures? Oh, yeah. So what happened was, you know, the city project was cancelled and Exit got a grant from the Gulbenkian Foundation to shoot survival programs. And basically Exit photographers, instead of shooting together, I mean, one of one of our trademarks was we would go down to a certain place like Crystal Perkins and I went to some clubs in the city. I mean, we would work in pairs. And the beauty of that was that while one photographer is talking to your subject, the other photographer can take pictures. You know, the person is distracted, so you can get all kinds of good, candid work. And that's how we were used to working in twos and threes. Well, with survival programs, the idea was that we were all going to split up and go to the worst slums imaginable across the United Kingdom. them. And I said, well, screw that. I'm, you know, I'm going to get raped. I, you know, there's no way I'm going to go by myself to, you know, these really horrible slums with a camera, no matter how much black tape I smother it in to make it look like a piece of crap, you know, I'm going to get raped. And I just said, well, I have, I have to leave the group. It's not something I'm willing to do. So, you know, they weren't going to provide security for me. I left Exit. I started a kind of Exit-like group of my own called Reflex, because now I was living in Manchester. So the other thing that happened was, despite my breakup with husband number one, he had moved to Stirling University in Scotland and decided we should try to patch up the marriage. And I thought, well, you know, I took that vow. Let's give it a shot. And I wasn't, you know, an exit anymore. I'll go up to Scotland. And that only lasted a month. So I was headed back down to London because I didn't know what else to do. And I stopped by to see a girlfriend from the I knew from the London Labour Party. She was living in Cheshire. So I stopped to see her. And she said, oh, why don't you stay here and she had the room maybe you can get a job in Manchester so that's what i did i um ended up in manchester i was there for about four years um there and then in Hebden Bridge in West Yorkshire commuting into manchester for work and started a group called Reflex and that's where i met um Aileen Faraday another important photographer yeah how was the picture taking then what were focusing on in manchester picture-wise so i actually got a small um i got a small grant from the Yorkshire Arts Council to do a project on mill life um you know i'm talking like 150 pounds maybe um and then i was also doing a project on all the different co-ops in uh manchester because there was food co-op there was a book co-op there were little food co-ops and here and there and it was kind of a thing so you know i i started a few things uh but nothing really um culminated in something solid but i had a lot of photos yeah uh along the way and i was still shooting while i was up in manchester i was still shooting for both the the women's show and the men's show in London so I would commute down to London and meet with those people and those photographs are sprinkled in the Brits books. How was the work being exhibited at the time? Well I actually started the first photographic gallery in Manchester it was I was working at a radical bookstore called Grassroots in Manchester and I convinced them to give me a wall for a photographic gallery and there might have been about 10 different shows there starting with my work and then i also showed my women photographs at the Royal Manchester Infirmary they had an art program it's interesting period isn't it that when you're looking back at that time we just had a free reign then we could just wander and do things and there wasn't the restrictions now there is you know when you're walking around and meeting people people were less suspicious of you weren't they then it was much more of a community did you find this when you started around the the London period like and i said before you must have been quite a novelty having this American girl here you've probably only really seen Americans on the films mostly sort of teenagers and did you find that was an advantage for you when you were shooting and did you feel any hostility in a sense did you ever feel like you shouldn't be there because it must have been a real new world to you wasn't it was that also part of the focus and the intrigue to find out more about British culture well you know that just happens finding out about British culture just happens by being there for 10 years but um you know again like i said i i wasn't seen as a threat i was only in my 20s you know i was a young girl and the other thing is that there weren't that many women photographers because SLRs were expensive back then. I couldn't afford one on my own I mean, the only reason I had an SLR was because, you know, my husband had the buying power. And so as a group, the women photographers were small. There really weren't that many of us back then. Who were your heroes then? Who was it looking back really influenced your documentary taking well i've just loved um looking at um you know people like Bruce Davidson, Man Ray for his compositions uh Robert Frank The Americans was mind-boggling Margaret Bourke-White, Eugene Smith, the series on the mercury poisoning in Japan you know Bill Owen, Suburbia. I saw an amazing show by Lewis Hine at the Photographer's Gallery, and the prints were probably two by three inches. But, you know, they were just so inspiring. But, you know, I followed Creative Camera, British Journal Photography, Bill Brandt, of course. You know, there weren't that many people shooting in color that I was interested in at that time. but of course it's that changed London must have been a really interesting time to be out there and your other photographers friends and stuff because there was a lot happening with photographers wasn't there in London well you know of course i i traveled in a very very small circle of um photographers that had no money you know i mean um you know people talk to me about London in the 60s but I think I went down to Carnaby Street once just to look at it I went into Biba's once just to look at it but you know I would never have dreamt of spending money on clothes and things because I didn't have it especially after I quit my job and was you know a single woman again swinging London i knew it was there but i didn't partake uh i think i went to one movie i think i saw one musical that was it for you know over 10 years which is crazy and we didn't have a tv never had a tv so i didn't learn about Monty Python until i came back to the states which is crazy right i mean i would go to work and people would say nudge nudge wink wink and have no idea what they're talking about. So at some point you packed up your negatives and you went back to America. Yeah, yeah. What was your journey then? How did Coffee World Books come about? So basically I got to a point after 10 years where I wasn't happy with my job. I actually got another another um college technician job in Salford outside of Manchester um I think it was the Salford College of Technology whatever you know it's like you can't go home again it wasn't the same didn't like the people I was working with didn't have a boyfriend that meant that much to me and and at the same time I found out that my mother was having health problems so I said to myself well i could go back and uh help out my mom come back to england maybe i can make some money in the states and i come back to england buy a little cottage or something that was kind of the the thought that's what i did but i didn't i didn't come back to england you know i never managed to do it because in order to keep my residency in england current i had to return to England, like every two to four years, I just couldn't afford the transatlantic fare, especially once I started going back to school in the States when I was a student. So I just had to let the residency fall to the side. And it was huge. You know, going back to the States was almost as painful as going to England. It was a huge culture shock. I had no idea what anybody was talking about they you know if they talked about politics i didn't understand what they were talking about they talked about movies and TV i had no idea what they were talking about i was lost so it took me two years to to get my feet back so to speak so you've got a culture shock going back to America oh it's terrible terrible wow it's interesting and the worst part was the politics um all my friends had fallen into a Reagan me too not me too me just like the me generation yeah you know me me me me me it was i just found it very selfish and i was kind of horrified no one wanted to uh if if there was any reminder of Vietnam or the war that was a taboo so anybody who looked like a hippie or you know was stuck in the 60s that was evil bad bad medicine i was i was pretty sad when i came back and found out what had happened you know socially politically you continued your photography education when you came back you did a master's yeah yeah um so what happened was i got back to Buffalo and showed my work around you know this is all the the Brits stuff black and white Brits some people loved it the people in the arts hated it it reminded them of the 60s so what happened was um i showed my work and some people liked it and i got a little show at the local theater showing the Brit stuff and i had one art critic who just loved the work loved the work and I was encouraged to show the work to a professor at the university at Buffalo and I showed it to him and he loved the work and he convinced me that I should enroll at the university for a master's degree ensuring me that after two years I would have a degree which would allow me to teach and this would allow me you know a profession and a career so kind of talked me into it i thought okay i wasn't really thinking sticking around buffalo that long but i thought okay two years i can do that and as soon as i turned up uh to enroll the first day of school i found out that he had buggered off to california professor left in uh his um wake absolutely hated my work what's interesting is your time back in america even now you know in las vegas you've never really gone back to documentary street photography have you i did one i did one project for my my master's degree thesis show because it was the river wasn't wide enough to turn the cart cart around you know i it was it was too soon for me to completely change my my working mode so i did one last black and white project for my thesis show which was called Main Street and it turned out great and I got you know an A and I got my degree but you know getting through those two years was extremely painful. You've never really pursued it the real way you pursued it in in England isn't it? I'd be laughed out of town I mean they laughed at me for doing the Main Street they literally laughed at me because because black and white documentary work was so taboo in the art world in what was fashionable at the time was setting up little vignettes in your studio and shooting that that was hip that was hot but they did not want reality no reality was the taboo and you changed your practice then didn't you so you stayed in education and you you pursued you've sort of taken it on another level with your media your multimedia work and your photography and stuff you've you've used it on another way and how did Cafe Royal books come about then because this is what 25 years 30 years later yeah um you know i've been talking to paul about what i can do to find a publisher because i i saw that there was a renewed interest and um in these vintage 70s images he told me about cafe royal books so i um shot over some images emailed craig some images and you know it was no problem sure you know and the reason i went with cafe royal books this is funny you know uh he told me about cafe royal books i looked at it and then i'm thinking well um i'll i'll get one and see what it's like i'll buy one so i bought one just to look at the quality and paper and everything And I got one, and I said, okay, this isn't bad. And then I saw that Martin Parr had a Café Royal book. So I thought, well, if it's good enough for Martin Parr, it's good enough for me. If it's good enough for Martin Parr, it's good enough for you. Absolutely. Absolutely. So that was it. And now I've got five books, and I'm working on a sixth right now of images that don't have any people in them. Yeah. It's a great feeling. it slots in really nicely to a lot of the stuff they've done from that period because given photographers who were shooting in that period a voice and we're going to look back at that and have a you're going to see how many people were actually taking pictures then the world's changed and with people like Craig running Cafe Royal and Blue Coral Press and lots of other small independent publishers now and other place, press there's a real outlet now for people creativity we're starting to educate each other as well about each other and i find it really fascinating period it's amazing that work like yours gets out there you know and that really fascinated me when i sort of looked at the work and then i looked at who you were as an artist and i was thinking wow what an interesting period of Diane's life what's the next installment with Cafe Royal Books what is it under Cafe Royal top secret embargo what are you working on with them now i'm going back through my um negatives from my time in the uk and i'm looking for that kind of Ralph Gibson inspired um compositions and you know i don't know if it's enough for um Cafe Royal books to to do a whole book but I'm you know I'm curious to go back and pull out photographs that are not people keep me informed on that I know I look forward to that and just want to say Diane it's been a it's been a real pleasure talking to you you know I was so fascinated by your story the way you took that period of your life out and educated yourself through photography on another culture I just found it really fascinating and especially the format and the medium you were shooting on black and white i wanted to find out what it was about and what it was like for you and thank you for taking the time to just give us some insight into you into your life and thank you very much it was a real pleasure um talking to you and thank you for the insight and i can't wait to come to vegas yeah no it'll be fun uh you should come and um thank you for the opportunity i really appreciate it have a lovely weekend in vegas enjoy the sun it's two degrees here yeah 20 here have a have a lovely weekend all the best