ALAN LODGE: PHOTOGRAPHER – MEDIA
Alan Lodge is a freelance photographer with interests in the press, social concerns, youth & multi-cultural subjects, and lifestyle ‘alternatives’.
The photo-library includes 40+ years of editorial and commercial photography of events, social issues and environmental matters.
He comes from a free festival and traveller background. Living in old busses, trucks and caravans, he drove around the country on ‘the circuit’ with his family and friends. Since the late 1970’s he has been photographing events and the people around him.
Dealing with aspects of ‘alternative’ lifestyles and sub-cultures. Photographing many free and commercial events, ‘free party’ events (‘rave culture’), environment protest, land rights with surrounding social concerns. He aims to present a more positive view of people and communities that are frequently misrepresented.
With a particular insight into this world since unlike so many press photographers arriving for a dramatic news story; he wants to give a more insightful view that only people who have been accepted into a community can really achieve.
It has not been so easy since many are suspicious of anyone with a camera and their motives. Conflict with the police in more recent years has become a fact of life. Eviction from land and squats, difficulties with children’s education when being continually moved on, all added to the mix.
Also, he is noted for covering political and environmental actions, such protest frequently involving policing operations, especially in relation to surveillance.
Supplied pictures to illustrate articles in a variety of publications including – Guardian, Independent, i-D Magazine, Select, Sounds, DJ, Radio Times, New Statesmen & Society, and the Open University. I have contributed to a number of TV projects with the BBC and Channel4. Work is also distributed widely online, around the internet.
Additionally, work has been produced for galleries, digital and slide projections at events and presented at large scale in public space. Moving beyond photography, he has experimented with a variety of mixed media and self publishing.
A post-graduate of Nottingham Trent University with an MA degree in Photography, Additionally, I hold an Associateship of the Royal Photographic Society [ARPS] and am a Member of the Academy of Interactive & Visual Arts AIVA
Lodge specialised in issues surrounding representation, presenting himself in print and audio-visual format. an active member of the National Union of Journalists NUJ and have a current press card. An editorial and documentary photographer, a photo-journalist and ‘storyteller’ always on the lookout for another tale to tell.
Based in Nottingham UK.
| Please check out my – Bibliography NUJ Freelance Directory – Freelance profile My interests in photography – 6 Questions |
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There are a lot of law changes going on, here in the UK, that affect people while trying to celebrate. Themselves, their culture. just wanting to have a nice time! and let rip with their friends. I am ‘middle aged’ now I suppose, but since I can remember, people around me have said. “Why won’t these bastards leave us alone? all we want to do is, festival, dance, party, etc. We’re not doing anyone any harm”. Thing is, the authorities have never agreed, and they think of ‘free spirits’ as a threat to the state and are treated accordingly.
I had much involvement with free festivals and the events and gatherings at Stonehenge. A free festival at the stones at the Summer solstice that had been happening for twelve years. Hundreds of thousands of young ( and not so young!) gathering for what was obviously a common need to celebrate together. The moral majority! general worthies, the police and the no fun brigade, banded together moved the law about a bit. Then came and hit us with sticks with much blood. It was kind of like a signal and intimidation, to stop many others coming to `play with us in the fields.
Because of our reputation in Britain as having a proper liberal democracy ??, it was news all over the place, that our police could behave in such a way towards unarmed civilians, in pursuit of political ends.
Talking to people in various countries, I know its not just Britain starting to get tough on deviants of various sorts. Although a lot of travelling people have left England because of the oppression of their lifestyles, some are starting to find similar law and prejudice applied to them, elsewhere as well.
Some of the ideas of festivals and travelling that we have done here, have some roots in America in the late sixties with the big festivals (with the free ones building on the edges!), merry pranksters etc. As well as with the ideas of gathering and celebration that go back 2 or 3 thousand years that seem as relevant now, as then.
The music is only part of the mix. Many developed a sense of common purpose and identity. There was an acceptance that modern life was too fast, expensive and polluting to the environment. We had discovered a kind of ‘Anarchy in Action’, and it worked! People began working out and managing relations within ‘our’ communities, without reference to ‘Them??’.
They re trying to squash deviance and dissent here, now. The words `new age traveller’ are dirty words here. Used by the press when they want to be rude to us. Now in `dance culture’, it all goes round again.
Shame isn’t it!
