Brighton tattoo convention live interview with Daniel

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

In this interview, I'm doing photographic Daniel Keys. He's working through the complex relationship between identity and society and the expectations of class, gender, and culture. Working largely with analog photography, Daniel Craig, striking images that blur the line between documentary and fiction, often reflecting real experiences and the people around him. His work has been exhibited internationally in cities including London, Rome, and Berlin. And he also has a winner of the Portrait of Britain Award from the British Journal of Photography. I loved every second of this interview talking to Daniel and finding out the reason behind his photography and why he takes the photography that he does. And it really struck a chord with how I feel and why I do the job that I do. So this is a little chat with Daniel Keyes Photography. If you can introduce who you are and what you do, what Shane I'm where you come from, know who you are, who you are and what you do.

SPEAKER_01 1:01

Hi, I'm Daniel Keyes. I'm a photographer and teacher. Um I mainly shoot conceptual fine art photography, um, stuff for kind of therapy for myself, like that. Um and then I also teach uh photography at university. So the kind of photography that I do, to be honest, is incredibly depressing. I couldn't be thinking about this. Basically, you know, like how films can be really unsettling and depressing, or music can be like angry or upsetting or weird or whatever. Yeah. Photography, that's the kind of photography that I want to make, which is basically to express something from myself. Yeah. Um, and quite often that is like self-therapy. So it's like something that I'm finding very, very uncomfortable about myself or about a situation. I'll then make photography work about that, often by putting myself in that uncomfortable position. So that's why I do this. Oh, is it? Yeah, get yourself in front of people. So, like, for instance, my most recent project that I'm working on a lot is me trying to self-therapise what happened to my happened to me at school, what happened with like body image, my relationship with straight male friends, where I'm like always putting myself in like a bit of a distance from them. So I'm like, well, maybe they're gonna see something wrong in our relationship or our friendship. So what I've done is basically made this project where I'm forcing my straight male friends to be in a vulnerable position visually with me, so maybe they'll be topless or kind of in their underwear, and we'll be having a conversation about body and about our friendship and relationships and masculinity and all this kind of stuff. And I'm there predatorily with a camera, so I'm like doing all the things that I'm worried people are gonna view me as to reflect back to myself that that isn't the case, and they don't feel that way, and they are very comfortable, and also create that special space, like uh a space for me and that person to kind of have that friendship conversation. People that I've known for like 18 years, and we have that conversation, we talk about all these things and have a really vulnerable, connected moment, and then document it by the camera. So it's things like that. That's the kind of stuff I do.

SPEAKER_00 3:02

No idea, this is amazing. It's that whole oh it's that thing of you when you think people are gonna think the worst, yeah, and the worst thing, and the story that you tell yourself and your brain, and you know it's not true, but it's this is proof that it's not true. But I need to go through the pits of hell and the most uncomfortable thing to be see it's not true.

SPEAKER_01 3:25

Yeah, yeah. It's a document of that, but it also then reflects as a document of our friendship, as a document of that person at that point in their life. So another project that I did, for instance, was um it's called Concurrence, and it's like basically about how the friendships I have are completely coincidental, but it all happened because of Brexit. When Brexit happened, I was like, shit, people are gonna like leave, they're gonna leave the country, and I'm not gonna be able to see them or talk to them anymore, or whatever my brain went. So I was like, Well, I'm gonna force a conversation, I'm gonna literally force us to sit down together in a room and have a chat, just so we can have a chat, a really deep chat, and I'm just gonna document it by putting my camera next to me and then firing it off without looking through it when I feel the moment is correct. So it's all that kind of thing. So it's like making things happen in real life so that I can then sit there and be experiencing of it. And I guess that also comes from the fact that I often feel like I'm not living in the moment and all the kind of usual millennial paranoia, you know, like, oh, I'm not doing this, I'm not doing that. So it's like I'm kind of forcing myself to do that and actually have those that moment with people.

SPEAKER_00 4:27

When did you start doing that? What was the moment where you thought, wait a minute, this is traumatizing, so let's do it. Yeah. This is so uncomfortable, this is giving me so much anxiety. Yeah, so let's do it. When did you start doing that?

SPEAKER_01 4:40

Well, I because I originally I wanted to be a doctor when I was at college. I was like trying to, I did like biology and chemistry and psychology and all this shit, but the school I went to was so crap that my basic understanding of biology was so bad that they were like, no, probably not gonna be able to do that. So maybe think about something else. So I um ended up taking photography and it just came really naturally to me and really easily to me. But then I guess I kind of wanted at the time as a teenager, I was like, I'm gonna prove to people that I can make something beautiful, or I can make something affecting, and I want to affect people, and and have that moment to kind of prove to other people that maybe I can do something worthwhile or something beautiful or frightening or something. I want to have an effect on people because I felt very invisible kind of thing. So that's why I started doing it, but I was doing it in a way that was like tableau work, like um setting up scenes and vignettes and like almost like doing mini films but as photographs. And so I did that for a little bit, and then I went to university and I did photography and kind of tried all different stuff, and I realized that that's fine, but what I was more interested in in what I was doing was actually the document of me and the people that I was photographing, because I was always using my friends and family and people that I know, so it's real, isn't it? Became a reflection of well, I've I've asked you to do this thing, and you've trusted me enough to do that thing, and that's the bit that I was finding interesting, not the end image. So I was like, Well, I want to go more documentary, but not documentary, because I'm not I don't want to do just plain documentary, but I want to do something that's visually interesting. So a lot of my work is very slow, very quiet, and I quite like the idea of being able to kind of document something that is the quiet moment in between places or the kind of uncomfortable moment just off to the side. So it's always that like trying to capture something that I find very visually interesting in the hope that other people do, but it doesn't sell very well because you know people don't really want to buy stuff that's there.

SPEAKER_00 6:36

But have you but have you explained it in that way? Because what you have just explained, right? You have literally just spoken my soul, right? You made you feel like that this is the route you need to go down.

SPEAKER_01 6:49

Well, I guess I a couple of reasons. So I grew up in an area like basically um the place that I'm from um is an army town, this is Barracks town, so already there was a kind of uh a very different group of people that were I was experiencing around in in real life, and the school I went to was in a council estate. You know, the year that I graduated, I think it was like a 23% pass rate, just very bad kind of school life. Um, and I was physically and verbally very heavily bullied as a kid all throughout school. I had no friends until like year 10 when my girlfriend at the time, like I found a girlfriend, I had a girlfriend, found a girlfriend, and um she was like, No, no, no, you can come on and hang out with all of us widows, and then it was like okay, starting to kind of build my confidence, but then I had this like weird innate need to people please everybody and just like oh, because I've never had friends before, so I'm gonna have to try and make friends and da-da-da-da-da. You know, so you overcompensate, you just go into the crazy kind of direction. Um, but I felt very visible for all the wrong reasons. So I almost wanted to take something visual, a visual thing, and be able to kind of show and prove to people that I could protect myself, I could show something, like I said, that was kind of maybe frightening and like freak people out originally at the time when I was a teenager. So it was like to try and be like, you might bully me physically, you might beat the shit out of me, you might, you know, people be you turning cars and spit on me in the road, shit like that, like really weird stuff, be like, what the fuck is wrong with you? Yeah. Um, and I was like, Well, if I can make something that is visually affecting to them, then maybe you know, whether that at the time was like I could photograph a really beautiful woman and make them feel like, oh, you've been in that situation with that beautiful person and you've got that trust and you've got that inside kind of thing with that person, or you can make something that's actually making me feel really uncomfortable.

SPEAKER_00 8:45

It's like I wanted to make those people feel uncomfortable because that was your projection, you wanted to do it almost the right way, yeah. In a way, it's like it's you get in your own bag, but almost in a way of it's the higher ground, yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 8:58

The most beautiful way in the higher ground, but it's also therapizing myself, going right, oh I've got this issue, and this thing keeps popping up in my head. So, like with the straight male friendship thing, it's just like having mini panic attacks if I feel like I've overstepped the boundary, or like, oh, maybe they feel this way, or maybe if I've said that thing, then they're gonna be really weird about it, you know, and then it's just like almost like this weird over proving to myself that actually look, look at that document, that space, that person had that much trust in you and was willing to go to that place with you, so don't think about it in that negative space almost?

SPEAKER_00 9:33

It's almost like so everyone's brains works the same way on a certain thing and it's patterns, isn't it? And do you think it's you're finding this pattern that's happening, and these photographs are a way of you actually medicating that? Yeah, I mean you're it's medicating the pattern of stopping the pattern. Yeah. So anybody who wants to find your work, where can they find it? And kind of do you are you open to kind of people coming forward saying, Look, I want you to photograph me or this? How would they go about that?

SPEAKER_01 10:00

So, um, my work you can find online, I guess it would be the easiest place. So I've got a website which is DanielHyphenkeys.co.uk um or Daniel Keys Photography on Instagram. Um, and I'm always happy to talk to people and see, you know, like what people think about collaborating. I'm like up for that totally. Um, but what I would say is the kind of work that I make, I guess, is quite a personal thing, and on one hand, that might stop people from relating to it because it's very, very much my own people and this thing, but I'm hoping that actually there is a universal thing to be said about it, like you said. So, yeah, I'm totally up for talking to people and people want to collaborate, but a lot of the people it's people that I know.

SPEAKER_00 10:44

You just look absolutely petrified when you just went, I'm up for collaborating, but do you know what?

SPEAKER_01 10:49

This is a thing, but that's part of it as well. So I feel like the portraits that I was taking is because I didn't feel comfortable taking portraits. This is because I didn't feel comfortable with my straight male friends for some unknown reason. So maybe the next step is collaborations.

SPEAKER_00 11:04

I'm not even petrified of talking to people, right? And having conversations and having that. I don't know. I'm just I am petrified of it, and that's why I think I do. I think I think you've just shrinked me in a really weird kind of way, but no, but I get it, I get it. It's a this petrifies me, but why does this petrify me? Exactly, and I can either hide from it forever or we face it head on and we help other people in doing so. Absolutely, absolutely.

SPEAKER_01 11:32

No, I agree, and I think that's the other thing, you know, like a lot of my problem is like what do people expect from me? So that's why me being a commercial photographer never works. So I was like doing fashion, but then doing it in my own way, and then being like, but these people are gonna hate that.

SPEAKER_00 11:46

Because they want it done this way and their way, but also I'm not gonna do it your way because I'm gonna do it my own way, bitch. Yeah, exactly.

SPEAKER_01 11:52

Pretty much, yeah. So it's that, it's balancing that out. So yeah, that's me.

SPEAKER_00 11:55

We should be heavily medicated, but instead we're creating, and I love it. Thank you so much.