In 2006, photographer Ian Macdonald was invited by Eton College to become their artist-in-residence for a year. Macdonald’s work conveys a special kind of truth – whether through his quiet, beautiful landscapes of the North, or his portraits of characters encountered throughout life, a humble deference always puts the subject centre stage with a real and pure honesty.

The result of his time embedded was Eton, a book that has become a seminal reference point both in photography and fashion. Its portrayal of students in their rooms, on the sports field and in the grounds of the college is a window into another world, rarely seen. This unprecedented access gave Macdonald the opportunity to present the college in a totally new way.

Earlier this summer, we visited Macdonald at home, near Whitby, to dig through hundreds of unseen negatives together, the peaceful rumble of the Murk Esk river rolling past outside. Here, for the first time, is an alternate edit of that year.

James West: How did you first get interested in photography, do you remember the first time you took a picture?
Ian Macdonald: I can remember the first photograph I bought. I was working in industry and my mates had motorbikes, we used to drive across the [North York] Moor on a Sunday afternoon. I was walking along Church Street [in Whitby] and there was a door open into a little shop and I just poked my head in, because I’m always curious. There was loads of bare spaces with nails in the wall and then two photographs – one of them was an unbelievable portrait of a man called Mr Storr, he’s holding long taper to his mouth and wearing a beaver skin hat. It’s upstairs [in Ian’s house] you’ll see it – by Frank Meadow Sutcliffe [who took portraits in Whitby in the Victorian and Edwardian period]. One of the most underrated photographers in existence. It’s a fabulous portrait, I said to the person in the shop, “How much is your picture?” “Three half crowns to you, honey,” she said.

JW: Is that expensive? I don’t know!
IM: No, it was cheap! Three half crowns is seven and sixpence old money or thirty seven and a half pence new money, which was then equivalent to about three-and-a- half or four pints of beer. So that’s the first time I bought a photograph. But the first photograph I ever saw that I was really interested in was in Sutcliffe’s shop in Whitby. I used to go on holiday there with my family on the steam train, and I found Sutcliffe’s shop – he’d died by then, it was ran by somebody else – and they were selling his prints framed, they were nine guineas. I thought, “Oh, wonderful,” and I ran home and says to me mam, “I’ve found these photographs.” She said, “How much are they?” I said, “Nine guineas,” [laughs] she said, “That’s the total cost of a week here. There’s no chance.” [both laugh]. So that was kind of a latent interest. I was always interested in drawing, making drawings of what was around me. In fact, I was doing a drawing from one of the piers in Whitby, a little pier called Tate Hill Pier, of the herring drifters on the fish quay opposite. In the late 1950s, during August, Whitby was a hive of industry for the herring fishery with lots of Scotsmen, Geordies and plenty of Dutchmen. I was sat there with this drawing and these people were watching me and one said, “Here, that’s rather good young man! I think you should go to art college.” That was the first time I’d ever heard of art college. I left school with O Level art and woodwork I just went to work in local industry.

Fabien Kruszelnicki: What kind of job did you do?
IM: The first thing I did was in a bobbin warehouse… do you know of Terylene fibre? It’s a man made fibre. Me dad was working in what they call ‘Fibres’ in Imperial Chemical Industries [ICI]. The fibre was spun there and sent off on bobbins to clients and would come back, sometimes it was all used, sometimes only partly used. It’d come back on these waisted bobbins in boxes, maybe 30 bobbins to a box. My first job was to put the bobbins on a conveyor system, called the line, then break down the boxes, flatten them, they would be sent back to the box-making section. The bobbins would pass through washers and dryers and onto the top end of the line, where they would be inspected by experienced lads, re-capped and put onto a cage of maybe 1,000 bobbins and sent back to Fibres. So you were recycling really, it was a great experience. It was bloody rough you know, it was a real wake-up call for getting on with people [laughs] there were always fights. I got smacked in the mouth one day, mind.

JW: In the factory?
IM: Oh yeah, everybody got smacked…

JW: What did you argue about to get smacked?!
IM: We wasn’t arguing, he just thumped us. I’ll tell you why, because I was staring at him and that was the start of me wanting to photograph people. He was such an amazing character. He was a real hard case; short, broad, used to scream Beatles songs all the bloody time. He used to say, “If you look at me again, I’ll bloody kill ya!”

FK: Did you ever draw people as well?
IM: I didn’t then, but I did later – in the blast furnace works – and I became quite obsessed with that idea of using drawing and I could make a likeness. I was at ICI for five years in various sections, on different processing plants. I finished up being on the concrete gang. I was part of a team, mainly older ex-iron stone miners who used to refurbish the concrete roads around the site, a huge site really. We used windy hammers and shovels to break up the battered roads around the site then re-concrete them, the concrete coming by tractor and trailer. I became an art student eventually; I went to art college in 1968. I used to go back each summer and work with the concrete gang and get some money. You got a grant then of course, all those years ago [laughs].

JW: Was art college somewhere you had to show your work to apply to?
IM: Yes, the year before I went, I’d already got a place on the strength of my drawing. But I had to go to night school to do A Level art, and two academic O Levels, I did English language and English literature and I was recently married. I was insistent on going and my wife Sue said, “Go,” because at that time my grant was based on my earnings, so as a mature student – I was 21 – I got a reasonable grant; so that was alright.

JW: When you started art school, did you have an idea of what you wanted to do in the end?
IM: I wanted to be a painter. I love the Impressionists, [Édouard] Manet, well Manet isn’t an impressionist, but you know… I love Manet. And I loved the idea of working outside, because I’d been doing that with the drawings I’d been making around about me. It was a political thing – the change in the structure of art education in the 60s. The college of art on Teesside had applied to change from offering an NDD [National Diploma in Design] to a DipAD [Diploma in Art and Design]. The more modern colleges like Sunderland, Newcastle and Leeds were doing this new DipAD which you needed five O Levels and an A Level for, and you got a diploma, which very quickly became a degree. So, because [Teesside] still wanted young people to go on a ‘college diploma’ course, they were putting lots of things our way. It was quite nice for me just to ride on my pushbike to college and get back to my family at night. But they offered no real qualification – and people used to bang on about qualifications – but the first year was fantastic; it was ran by two people from Brighton, and they took us to Italy to make a film. It was really good. They introduced us to Michelangelo Antonioni and Jean Vigo and I remember the films of Luis Buñuel. I did a lot of etching too. There’s one there [points to an etching on the kitchen wall]. That’s on zinc, it’s an etching, which I did to cover every possible technique; soft ground, hard ground, open bite, I can’t remember all the terms. That was in 1970, and I got a prize for it from the British Institution Fund for engraving for that and another etching.

“It was fantastic and I felt, as I progressed, that photography was my way forward. Through photography I was actually able to say something about the deep feeling I held about the place.”

JW: Did you make a conscious decision to move from etching, painting and drawing to photography?
IM: When you etch it’s quite complex; it used to be a seven-year apprenticeship. I realised later that making a photographic print in the darkroom is also really complex – you can bring things out, you can hold things back. You can do that in the way that you print and the way that you finish it off. It’s amazing, really interesting. So I think etching had a big effect on making me the printer I would become. When I finished this course – which was three years long – I went to Sheffield to study painting, because I still wanted to be a painter. I didn’t get a grant for the first two years, I lived in a van for a while and people put us up and looked after me while my wife stayed at home – I used to go home every weekend. I started there in ‘71 until ‘74, and it was all installation art. I was an out-and-out realist – real life, real people, real drawing. So I could not get on with them, could not get on with them. But a lecturer who was running a new photographic course was more approachable and what I would call an ‘ordinary bloke’, he’d been a photographer in the pits down near Barnsley or somewhere like that. He said, “Have you ever done anything like this?” I said, “Yeah, actually I have.” He said, “Bring me a photograph in.” So I took one of my photographs in that I made when I was at Teesside. “Oh,” he said, “Is this as big as you’ve got?” I said, “Yeah.” He said, “Right, I’ll teach you how to print big, bring your negatives in.” And I just took off with him, he taught me how to print, gave me loads of paper to practice with. I was the only student he had at the time because it was a new department. Fabulous, top- of-the-range bloody everything; I got on then using a Sinar P 4×5 [a monorail camera] with a solid tripod and three or four lenses in a box, just go anywhere with it, you know, take the camera and go. So I’d just come home and photograph around Teesside.

JW: Landscapes?
IM: Landscapes and people, and this place called Greatham Creek where there were a lot of houseboats people stayed in, really unique dwellings of boats with houses built on the top. Some of them were made really well, some of them quite rough and ready, but just beautiful structures, absolutely. I began making images about the Creek, it’s where I really got familiar with 5×4, familiar with the landscape, and using the camera in the landscape. I would sit on a little seat and very accurately try and draw what I saw, trying to get that sense of space and depth, and then after three or four hours of doing that you get stiff. Of course, when you’re young you can do it, you get up and wander about and I found photos just appeared. I didn’t have to do anything really, though obviously the technicalities of setting up the camera and waiting for the light were important, but wow! Because you’d be looking at – and absorbing – the landscape; seeing the sun go around and watching the light change for hours, and rain comes on, birds calling in the air, tides coming in, tides going out. It was fantastic and I felt, as I progressed, that photography was my way forward. Through photography I was actually able to say something about the deep feeling I held about the place. While away in Sheffield I photographed a lot in the street, I’d go into shops and ask people if I could photograph them and they’d say, “Oh yeah, yeah”. I was only refused once.

JW: These days I guess people don’t want their picture taken.
IM: I think it depends on how you approach them, I really do.

JW: Were they interested to know why you wanted to take the picture and where it was going to end up?
IM: That’s a difficult one isn’t it? Because the reason you want to photograph them is because they look so good! They look great, but you can’t say that [laughs]. The one who refused me was a butcher, he had a great face this butcher, in Sheffield, on Ecclesall Road, and he must’ve been in a bad temper. I said, “I’m going ‘round taking photographs of people, do you mind if I photograph you?” And he said [bangs table] “No!” [all laugh]. That was it.

JW: Don’t argue!
IM: Don’t argue. No I wouldn’t, he had a cleaver! [all laugh]

JW: Did you show people the pictures you took of them?
IM: Not then, because it was so transient.

JW: When you take those portraits are you trying to capture something that’s real and honest about someone, or are you trying to do it in a flattering way? What goes through your mind, why are you taking the picture?
IM: I think what goes through my mind more than anything, is just how great these people look, and just how wonderful they relate to where they are in the way they dress. You can go on about it, but something ‘clicks’ and I’ve got to get it. Sometimes it takes quite a while to build up courage to do it. I can remember we had some neighbours where we lived, two very rough lads, in fact they ended up doing time. But I got a portrait of the two of them. I was stealing myself to go because I had to get this picture, I had to get it. There was another butcher in a nearby street, he was a lovely fellow, he was a Tory, we used to argue like mad [laughs] and I photographed him. I stood him outside his shop, polished the window and made sure his direct surroundings were in the frame. Then I went in with a camera with a 210mm lens, slightly telephoto on 4×5 and did a portrait close up. He had a handlebar moustache, he’d been in the RAF, really decorated, and also a fly fisherman. I took [the photograph] over on Sunday morning to show him and he said, “Oh come on in! Come in!” There was a fireplace and on the top of it were two photographs of him with his forage cap in the RAF, 1944, ‘45 something like that. I had this print and as I passed it over to him and he looked at it I saw his face. He’d been used to looking at those pictures of himself for all this time and, bam. 5×4.

“I think what goes through my mind more than anything, is just how great these people look, and just how wonderful they relate to where they are in the way they dress.”

JW: Detail.
IM: Detail! [all laugh] And he was knackered you know, really knackered. 30 or so years, following a war, of very heavy work, killing and butchering beasts he’d bid for and bought at the mart. I laid the photograph there and I thought [makes pained noise]…

JW: Don’t show photos to people?
IM: Be careful. I took another one round, a chap who was a fisherman – I took it round like six or nine months later. I knock on the door and his wife came out. I said, “Hi, I photographed John with his son,” she said, “Oh, he’s dead in’t he, he died”.

JW: It speaks to the power of a photograph, doesn’t it?
IM: Absolutely, you just learn so much from showing photographs to people. It makes you wonder why you’re doing it, what’s the purpose, what does it mean. But I can’t get away from being so attracted to how wonderful these people look.

JW: That’s a nice thing.
IM: Well, I think it is, and I like to think Sutcliffe felt the same, because his portraits of fisherman are fabulous; really nice pictures of people. Then I admire people like Paul Strand, great, really great pictures of the Hebrides, just bloody fabulous. The main body of my work is from the area that I grew up in, or where I was studying, like at Sheffield. I was very much in that environment, very much part of it. These people were that environment. Now, in saying that, there are loads of people who I wouldn’t photograph because they’re not right. It’s hard to explain, [laughs] they’re not right for me, they might be right for somebody else but not for me, the people I shoot are part of the environment, as much as a building, well more than a building actually because they inhabit it, so I want the photographs to do that justice.

FK: I suppose there’s an accuracy as well in capturing people who are part of that lifestyle. Quite a few of your books feature industrial settings [The Blast Furnace, 2010, Smith’s Dock Shipbuilders, 1987].
IM: Yes, the industrial pictures are a testament to my father and my grandfather, saying what their lives were like. People who were doing a ball-ache of a job but they got on with it. They lead their lives through that and the branches go off, they go to the club and they go to the dance, they garden… I want to do a picture that does that justice, I want to honestly portray them.

JW: How did the Eton project come about?
IM: Well I was at art college for seven years I think, three at Teesside, three at Sheffield and a year’s postgraduate MA at Birmingham. Then I did a teacher training because no way did I want to be a photographer!

JW: Why not?
IM: Because I don’t think I’m a photographer in the accepted sense of that term. I use photography for private, personal purposes, I don’t use it to sell something for somebody else. If somebody says, “We want you to take a photograph of this,” that’s not for me, that’s for them. I never wanted to do that. I mean, I did do portraits in the House of Commons for the House of Commons Art Library, they have an art department – it’s a great set up – and they commissioned me to photograph the committee who looked into the financial crisis about three years ago, it was great photographing them. I went into this committee meeting. They didn’t want to let me in but the art department said, “This is what we’ve decided and it’s going to happen!” They put it off, put it off… I went twice and I didn’t even get in. Finally I got in, it was November, dark as hell and pissing down outside. I was in this bloody large room, they were round the table, “You can’t use flash young man,” one of them said [all laugh]. “You can’t do this, you must keep this…” I took a 35mm and when I processed them I said, “Look, this is no good. What I suggest if you’re interested, is that I take individual portraits of all these people in their offices in the palace.”

JW: And they said yes?
IM: Yes.

JW: And then everyone felt special and you got some time.
IM: This feeling special, it’s a very dodgy thing in industry. If you choose the wrong person first you’re in trouble [all laugh] you’ve got to be very careful. And that’s why I like to be embedded, as they call it in the journalistic trade. I was in the shipyard for six months, the blast furnace for six months, doesn’t mean I went there every day for six months.

JW: You get to know people.
IM: You get to know people very well, particularly in the blast furnace.

JW: Have you kept in touch with them?
IM: Just one front sideman, the furnace keeper, it’s closed down now the furnace and most of the lads I photographed are unfortunately dead or have moved on. This was 40 years ago… but back to Eton – so when I left [education] I didn’t want to be a photographer, I didn’t want to be a teacher. I wanted to be an artist, but that was no good; we had two kids. Very luckily, because we were both working and we had some savings, we were able to buy a little terraced house, two up two down, we had to buy a washing machine and stuff like that. I determined I didn’t want to be a teacher but that seemed to be the only way I would get time to be able to do some photography and some art. So I went into teaching, which is why we came to live where we do, it’s fourteen miles away. It’s a comprehensive school and I started to take photographs of the kids there because they would just [bangs table] blow your brain like. The way they used to wear their ties and adapt their uniform, just amazing and so very pertinent to themselves. I taught art of course, the lad I taught art with was just a wonderful teacher, I learnt so much from him.

Around 2004 I was approached by a chap from Eton who telephoned and said, “We’ve just bought six of your pictures for our collection.” He told me a little about himself and that he was familiar with my work. He then said, “We want you to come and be artist in residence.” I just laughed and said, “You’re joking.” I didn’t say ‘piss off’ but… [all laugh] that’s what I meant. He said, “Oh! Well that’s a shame” and that was that. The main problem was I lost my mam two years before, and my dad was going pretty fast, he was old and unstable and I, and my sister, were looking after him, Carol more than me. I couldn’t go away anywhere. Dad died, and after a while Jamie, our eldest son, said, “Well, why don’t you call them and offer them an exhibition and go from there?” I had an exhibition in Newcastle called Nightscape of large scale photographs made at night using very minimal light. I was going to say to Eton, “Take this and exhibit it at the college.” But even before I did, this guy called again and said, “We’d really like you to think about coming here.” I said, “Well, to be honest I’ve changed my mind a bit.” He says, “Why don’t you come and have a look?”

So I went, and it was just amazing, so different. If you ask anybody what Eton College is, everybody has an opinion. I had this idea that it’s Tom Brown’s School Days and all that – posh prime ministers and all that stuff. I thought, “Do I really wanna do prime ministers…?” Anyway, I went, and they gave me a fabulous lunch [laughs]. Then they took us around the drawing schools and it was beautiful, beautiful, a big gallery, big studios. Took us upstairs where they had this new library, all the books you want to read about Cézanne, Picasso… whoever. That library, it wasn’t the school library, it wasn’t the college library, it was the drawing school’s library. Every department has their own bloody library as well as the very established school libraries. And I broke down. I said, “Yesterday I was teaching 30 kids clay work in a room half the size of this, and you’re telling me this is your bleeding library?” What do you do? So anyway, I decided I would go. What they offered me financially was not a great deal, but that was hardly the point. I had a commitment to teach about sixteen lessons a week and no more than four kids at a time. They built a dark room to my specification and I organised the loan of a 4×5 enlarger.

JW: I guess the students didn’t have any experience of photography?
IM: No, I think I had sixteen or eighteen lads, maybe twenty. That was lovely doing that.

JW: Did you stay on the campus at Eton, or nearby?
IM: I lived there yeah, I had my own flat. Everybody lived in, the staff have houses in the complex. There’s ever so many houses, 50 or so lads in a boys house, looked after by a house master and helpers, but there’s twice as many staff looking after the estate, as it were. There’s teaching staff, estate staff… I think it works out that there’s maybe two staff to each boy. You know, like people cutting the grass for instance and all that goes with running a large estate. A good friend came round one time with me, he said, “How much are the fees here?” I said, “Expensive” he said, “And how many boys?” I said like, “1,200.” He said, “Hang on, I don’t know how they do it. You can’t do it for that.” He said, “The vastness of this place, mathematically it doesn’t add up.”

“I don’t think I’m a photographer in the accepted sense of that term. I use photography for private, personal purposes, I don’t use it to sell something for somebody else. If somebody says, “We want you to take a photograph of this,” that’s not for me, that’s for them.”

JW: Donations, I guess? From wealthy families who want an art library.
IM: Maybe. I think so.

JW: Was it how you expected, or did your perception of it change when you were there?
IM: I struggled at first to place myself within that environment. I mean, I’d grown up on a council estate and gone to a secondary-modern school. Left at sixteen; most of me mates left at fifteen because you could then, but I stayed on a year. So I didn’t really know, I said I had an opinion about Eton but I didn’t really know. I’ve always thought that the South of England and the Home Counties is England and we aren’t in the North East, we’re the North East, and the North West is the North West, and Scotland is Scotland. I’ve always felt that. So going down there was very different. But they were very accommodating and helpful. I could just go anywhere and photograph. I rode round on a pushbike, camera over my shoulder, because it’s vast, you know?

JW: You must have become a character that people started to recognise.
IM: I stood in front of all the staff the first day I was there, and they asked if I wanted to say anything. I said, “What I’m trying to do is make photographs, and I want everybody to ignore me. I’m not here. Completely ignore me unless I talk to you and if you do not wish to be photographed please let me know… and because they’re so well disciplined and so polite, they just ignored me. Which was great because I could just go take photographs and nobody would be bothered. The fact is, I was so visible with this pushbike and dark cloth, going around, you do become a bit of a character. They just took us on board. Although I got good photographs early on and some of them are in the book, it wasn’t until between Christmas and Easter that I felt comfortable.

JW: Did term start in September?
IM: Yes.

JW: So a good three months.
IM: And in fact, I hurt me back during the Christmas recess quite badly but I went back. I always say if you’ve hurt your back, there’s something else wrong, something bothering you. I was bothered and I wasn’t comfortable. So I had a week off, I came back home for a week and did nothing. Then when I went back down I started to feel much easier, and by the time half term came, I was feeling so much better. There were some awkward people, some old-school masters who obviously didn’t think that I was the right sort of person to be there, but very few. Probably three who were antagonistic. The headmaster was a really, really nice bloke who offered much reassurance.

JW: Did the pictures and book turn out how you wanted?
IM: I don’t know what I expected. When the book came out in 2007… it was 1989 when I did my previous book, so quite a bit of time between publishing my work. When I finished all the work, I went to the Vice Headmaster and said, “I’d really like to do a book of these pictures.” He said, “We’ll try and raise some money.” I went away and just did it, one of the masters scanned all the images for me, he had an A3 scanner, which was fantastic because I print a lot of 12×16, so by the time you’ve got the border it’s about A3. I had the drawings for the layout of the book and the sizes I wanted, the blocks of text, I had everything prepared. He got it, double page up, I said, “Right, that picture’s going there, that one there.” Scan, bang; three-and-a-half hours, from about half-past-ten at night into the night. It was great. Then the next morning it went off to a printer. If there’s one regret I have about that book, it’s the endpapers. I do wish they had been Eton blue instead of white. I tried to rush it through, but I didn’t have a Pantone colour, so I was trying to explain the colour to them and they were saying, “Give us the Pantone number!” I didn’t have it, so they just did it in white. I think it would’ve looked great, it would’ve really finished it off.

JW: I’m sure it’s only you that it bothers. [laughs]
IM: No, no! [laughs]

JW: After a year of pictures, how did you edit them down? The book feels so considered.
IM: I think it was because it was complete. I wouldn’t be doing any more photographs there, I’ve never been in that situation, it’d always been like, “Oh, you can go back and do some more.” But this was a different body of work, it had a timescale that I had to work to and it was done, finished, an entity in its own right. So I was able to get the prints, I think I started off with 12x16s. I had loads of space, which is what I tend to do now, I cover the studio floor with pictures and just say, “That doesn’t go with that, that does go with that”… and I had ideas and I like to work in pairs across the pages of a book as it were. There was a photograph of a bust of Harold Macmillan, which I wanted opposite someone really sharp, a King’s Scholar, the crème de la crème. Then there is the language of school always at the back of my mind – for instance there’s three terms in a year but they call them ‘halves’, lessons are called divisions, examinations are trials!

JW: It all sounds like another world.
IM: It is, and I got fascinated with that. No matter what a boy liked, there was a society for it. I remember going to the Japanese society because I am fascinated by Japanese culture and work. I had not been in school for long. I went in to the meeting and sat there for about half-an-hour and the guy running it said, “Excuse me, I don’t know you, who are you?”

JW: [laughs] Very polite.
IM: All these societies, you could just go to them. Well-known and even famous people are invited to speak, there was lots of opportunity.

JW: Whenever you see Eton, it’s very buttoned-up, but I feel like the book has this much more relaxed, intimate feeling. Was that a specific choice? You get a real sense of these guys living there.
IM: I definitely wanted to do them justice as young people in their environment. I wanted to photograph them in their environment, as I did the blast furnacemen or the shipyard workers. It was nothing to do with it being Eton, posh, whatever, it was to do with photographing young people in that very specific environment of their school, just as I’d been doing in comprehensive schools since 1977. That was the richness of it for me. It’s privileged, of course it is. You can’t deny that, it’s there. But these people are still kids learning and growing, are intelligent, many highly-so, and they have the confidence to be curious about so many things. They have this formality of ‘Soc. Suppers’ at Christmas time and you’d be invited by a house to go to their supper, 60 or so people all sat around for supper. It was just really civilised and proper. There was a quiet formality about doing things properly, which my photography gave me access to that I’d never have experienced otherwise.

“I definitely wanted to do them justice as young people in their environment. I wanted to photograph them in their environment, as I did the blast furnacemen or the shipyard workers.”

FK: It must’ve been quite fascinating at the time, to see that.
IM: It was.

FK: How did you decide what you wanted to take pictures of? Did you just take pictures of everything?
IM: No, not everything, you couldn’t and I made a lot of negatives that were rubbish [laughs]. There was an Indian lad from East London who was a very high-flying maths boy, he’d got a special scholarship. He was amazing, he wasn’t privileged or anything, he was just very bright. I think Eton has changed tremendously, even from when I was there during 2006/07.

JW: In what way?
IM: More open, realising what’s around them. I’ve been back three times since doing different bodies of work, another two books.

JW: Really? I haven’t seen those.
IM: You won’t have done because they were private projects for the college. One was about a year in the life of a house. So I used to go every three weeks for a week and just be with the lads, on the football field, in the classroom. The brief I set was to photograph every lad in his room, because they all had their own private rooms, and every lad within some part of the environment. Whether that’s a footballer or a cricketer, and that’d be done in colour, so I shot that in 35mm colour and shot the rooms in black and white.

JW: They must’ve been happy with what you did the first time around.
IM: Yes. There was a guy I’m still in touch with, who was very welcoming when I first went. He wrote a lovely essay about the first book, which was very perceptive, mentioning Philip Larkin, my favourite poet.

JW: Is this the one that’s in the book?
IM: No, it’s separate, it appeared in a school magazine. For the book, the headmaster did the foreword and the provost did an afterword. Then Edward Dimsdale, who was a pupil in the 80s, wrote the essay A Singular View. Ed is a photographer, a lecturer in higher education and writer on the aesthetics of photography.

JW: So you made that book just for the people in the house?
IM: Yes, we printed 350 and I signed and numbered them all. They were printed up in Newcastle and we had to get them back so they’d get to the families before Christmas. Then after that, I was commissioned to photograph diversity in school, those photographs are up there now, in the new reception area. At the same time I was doing that, the librarian, who I was working with said, “In this particular house called Jourdelay’s, there’s 53 boys, and in the First World War, 53 boys – from that house – were lost. The idea was to give each boy in the house the name of a soldier that was lost, and they had to write an essay about that man. What do you think?” I said, “I’ll tell you what I think, you need me to take a photograph of the boys in the house to accompany the story, and then you’ve got the boy from 1918 and from 2018.”

Interview originally published in HERO 26.