Let's Keep It Nice #1

An occasional series of posts featuring pictures of the USA that have sat in my loft for 30 years.

In July 1994, my partner and I began our Fulbright Teacher Exchange adventure. We both swapped our lives as English teachers in south east London comprehensive schools for a year living and working as high school English teachers in Austin, Texas. We were still relatively young, childless, with a newish mortgage but very few commitments. We didn’t choose Texas - it was chosen for us because it so happened that two Austinite English teachers from different schools happened to fancy working in London the year we applied. We were incredibly fortunate to both be able to work. At the time, there was a perfectly legal loophole that meant we paid no tax for a year, increasing our earnings substantially and allowing us to do more travelling in the holidays than we would otherwise have been able to manage.

Although I was interested in photography at the time, I was not as clued up as I am now. I had seen some great shows at the old Photographers’ Gallery and bought a couple of books. I knew American photographers like Garry Winogrand, William Eggleston, Lee Friedlander and Joel Meyerowitz. I’d not studied photography at university and knew no professional photographers. My dad was a keen hobbyist and had bought a Canon AE1 (like everyone else in the 1980s) and I’d used that a bit. I was given a Nikon EM for my 21st birthday. I later exchanged that for a Nikon FG. Just before going to the States I’d bought a Leica Mini point and shoot. I’d read somewhere that colour photographers favoured transparencies and so I used Kodachrome 64 and Fujichrome films, but my photography was unfocused (excuse the pun) and scattershot.

In some ways, the American adventure provided me with a clear subject. I could only photograph at weekends and in holidays, being too busy with my teaching commitments during the week. However, I decided to begin sharing my pictures with my senior English classes. I would curate slide shows of my pictures every few weeks and carve some time out of the lessons to project the images and talk to the students about what I’d noticed. It was meant to be a cultural exchange after all.

These pictures have mostly sat in my loft for the last 30 years unlooked at. I recently got hold of a decent flatbed scanner and decided it was time to digitise them. I began by sharing some of these scans on Instagram but I’ve decided to abandon Meta, for obvious reasons.

My plan, therefore, ill-formed as usual, is to use this space to combine thoughts about photography teaching generally with occasional examples of my own photographs, starting with one or two pictures from the American archive. My provisional title for this set of pictures is ‘Let’s Keep It Nice’, a phrase I saw on a sign for the small town of Utopia, TX.

I’m going to attempt to use these pictures as starting points for different types of writing, beginning with some anecdotes based on my experience of living and teaching in the USA but, hopefully, developing into other forms and genres too. I may even persuade my partner Kate, who is a poet, to join in, providing some much-needed literary quality.

I’ve no idea if these ramblings will be of interest to anyone but, to be honest, I don’t much care. It’s enough for me that I get something from writing and posting them. They’ll be mixed in with other stuff about teaching photography, exhibitions I’ve visited and enjoyed, books I’m reading, conversations I’ve had etc. I’ve never been particularly disciplined about any of this stuff.

I don’t know yet how often they will appear and I apologise, in advance, if the quality is a bit patchy.

I hope Utopia, TX is still nice.