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If you happened to pass the Houses of Parliament over a recent bank holiday weekend, you may have spotted some of Simon Reed’s handiwork.

Simon is a co-founder of Extraordinary Spatial Performance, a company that uses detailed knowledge of architecture, events and digital projection to transform spaces with live, dynamic imagery. Together with his other co-founder David Keech, Simon has worked with a range of clients on all sorts of different installation, using the latest cutting-edge projection technology to deliver incredible, live visual feasts. He also documents these projects on film, with the help of some camera equipment from his local friendly hire company (ahem).

© Simon Reed (Portrait)

One of Simon and David’s most recent ESP projects was actually a pro bono piece – an amazing projection on the side of the Palace of Westminster in support of Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Trust and the Florence Nightingale Museum, celebrating International Nursing Day with enormous images projected across the width of the Thames.

© Photo by Jill Mead

You can check out a wonderful short video of the project here. We were hugely impressed, and were pleased when Simon agreed to chat with us for a ProFile to tell us a little more about ESP and the work he’s been doing. So, let’s get started!

Hi Simon – and congratulations on your success at Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Trust! The images look incredible.

Thanks! With the lockdown, what we really wanted to do was offer something pro bono and do some really positive messaging. We reached out to the NHS Trust, and to our surprise they came back and asked if we’d like to do something.

© Photo by Jill Mead (The display was designed to commemorate the great work of the Trust, as well as celebrating International Nursing Day)

The biggest challenge was that we didn’t realise the sheer scale of their original vision they wanted to achieve! It’s about 250 metres across the Thames, and they originally envisaged about 160 metres wide area of projecting against the Palace of Westminster. If we had done this commercially, a project of this complexity would have been a considerable budget to deliver.

We work with a lot of the technology manufacturers who are normally very positive in helping us out, but a combination of lock-down restrictions and only two working days notice to mobilise meant they were unable to find enough special projectors and lenses in time – so we just had to bite the bullet and hire in the only four 30,000-lumen projectors we could find. Working at pace with our clients, we had to adapt the graphics over the weekend, obtaining all the permissions we needed from the Port of London Authority and the Houses of Parliament – also getting the Houses of Parliament to switch all their lights off! We are grateful to the Florence Nightingale Museum who have since covered our hire cost.

© Photo by Ian Wallman  (The bank of 30,000 lumen projectors at St Thomas Hospital)

The client approached us on the Thursday before the bank holiday weekend, and we were able to work at speed to pull it all together. We had a challenging moment late on the afternoon of the projection when the power failed, but a trip to Halo in Islington, 5 minutes before they closed, supplied us with the 100 meters of 3 phase cabling we required! We felt a huge sense of achievement and loved working with the NHS trust and Museum . We got a huge amount of interest as well as positive feedback from the Trust, and hospital staff. We are especially grateful to, Jill Mead, who took some lovely photographs. We hired a camera from Fixation and did a little 30-second video.

On the back of that, we’re in talks now with other London Boroughs to do other great things. It’s really worked out, and the technology providers who make these wonderful bits of projection equipment are really engaged with us. We’ve had a tremendous amount of attention on social media, so it’s something we want to do again for a great cause.

© Photo by Jill Mead  (A tricky few days – but an extraordinary success)

Going back to the beginning – how did Extraordinary Spatial Performance come about, what kicked it all off?

Both David Keech and I, met when we both worked at [architectural firm] Foster + Partners a number of years ago – I’m an architect and David is an industrial designer. After a while we went our separate ways, and for a number of years I worked for a number of developers and for AECOM, a multi-disciplinary practice involved with large scale developments and public realm including the 2012.Olympics in London and 2016 Rio Olympic Games –  where I saw potential to transform spaces with large scale digital projections.

After leaving AECOM I started consultancy work with Keech Design, David Keech’s firm, who worked closely with technology manufacturers, including the latest generation of laser projectors. We instantly saw an opportunity to combine this technology within the built environment and said, “Hey, we’ve got something here.” We realised we could find uses for the projection technology that even the manufacturers hadn’t thought about. Stuart Harris, a projection mapping genius with a solid events background, joined us early on and plays a pivotal role in our delivery enabling us to do things we did not think of being possible.

The magic of the projection, if you get it right, is that it occupies and can transform a space, but then when it’s switched off, you’re instantly back in the room which reverts back to its original use and it leaves no trace. It doesn’t have this permanency – in today’s life, everywhere you go you’re sort of followed by merchandising screens. Piccadilly Circus is now in everybody’s living room, on everybody’s journey to work! It’s everywhere and it’s overwhelming, so we wanted to pare it down, step back and really play with the timings of everything. The result is a spectacle – it engages people, delights them, cheers them up, people interact with what we do.

So that was our starting point, and now it’s really taking off!

© Simon Reed (A preview of ESP’s proposal for American airports.)

What kind of role do you take – do you direct the shoots and the overall projects?

At the moment, we bring together all our own practitioners – filmmakers, motion graphics experts, people with installation and projection mapping knowledge. Whilst David Keech and I are the founders, at this stage we’re still very, very much hands-on; I like to get involved right at the very beginning of a project, get the ideas going then, bring in all the disciplines to create something that works with the client’s budget and the space. That space may be an outside space like the Houses of Parliament, or it might be a tiny little room. We love being able to work at all scales and digital projection allows us to use every possible surface.

I like to get involved with the content; I storyboard, I sketch everything out. I’m learning the discipline of a filmmaker from our Director of Photography David Smith, and I now think in frames per second, looking at motion content in terms of what is the optimum duration, to have the biggest impact.

© Simon Reed (The team’s bespoke projector modelling software)

I scripted our showcase trailer for what we do, putting together a theme of a car driving by these colossal urban structures down by Southbank, which become animated and start telling the story of the spaces that we want to change – whether it’s a restaurant or a sports stadium spaces are our stage. This is currently the landing page on our website.

I really like to get involved with all stages of the creative process, and engage with clients all the way through to delivery. For the Houses of Parliament , Stuart and I set up in the afternoon, and we were the last one to leave the site at two o’clock in the morning!

© Simon Reed (It all starts with a hand-drawn sketch…)

Did you find it quite a learning curve, getting involved with filmmaking?

Absolutely. We’ve been very careful to work with the right people and to grow organically over the last few months; the people who make up our team are all exceptional in their trades. These are people who work together; we all read each other’s mind, we have all got the same temperament, and we respond to each other’s input to intuitively to fill in the gaps and make connections

© Simon Reed (The camera set up on location to capture an ESP project)

Filmmaking is something that I’ve always been fascinated by, and to work alongside people like David Smith, who actually have the patience to equip you with such knowledge is a real privilege. It’s something that previously in a corporate world I wasn’t able to do – I was busy winning work and running big offices! As you say, it’s a massive learning curve, but I think we’re lucky in that we’re working with technologies that are evolving, and we’re evolving at the same pace along with them through our own research and development. We are a part of that collaborative process. Amazingly everybody is able to talk to each other in a simple, non-technical way to actually get results.

© Stuart Harris (Projection at Stonehenge)

And it must be so satisfying to see those results come together – I’d imagine it could be almost addictive.

As an architect, I worked on the London Gherkin when I was at Foster + Partners, and that took five or so years of my life. It frustrated me – architecture is very process-driven, and whilst there are periods of incredible creativity, everything takes such a long time. What I like about the medium that we are working with now is that it is almost instantaneous – yes there are processes, there’s equipment, there are the frustrating gateways with the need for client sign off and that sort of thing, but once you’ve got through there is an immediacy of seeing results.

Very early on in the design process, we make little films of our ideas to convince our clients, to take a project forward, and we find that it’s infectious. We’ve never had a situation where we have sat down with a client and their jaws haven’t hit the table and said something like, “Oh my God, how can we do this?”.

It’s nice that it’s a quick process, and you see the results that are totally transformative to a building. And what’s most rewarding is that it’s not highbrow – you don’t have to have an arts background and a degree in architecture to appreciate it. This is universal, and when you see people’s faces and they engage in it, they get their phones out, they take photographs – they want to let others know about the joy they’re experiencing. That is a great, great feeling.

Simon Reed was talking to Jon Stapley. You can find Extraordinary Spatial Performance on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook, as well as their website, espstudio.co.uk.

Born and raised in the capital, photographer Peter Dazeley has London in his bones. He now has three books of London photography to his name – Unseen London, London Uncovered, and London Theatres with a fourth book London Explored coming out this Autumn subject to Chinese printers and the virus, – and it’d be hard to think of many people whose knowledge could rival his when it comes to the city’s hidden-away places.

And this is only a small part of a varied, storied career. Dazeley has been a successful advertising photographer for many years now, as well as exploring the worlds of fine art and still life, including a fascinating series on the paraphernalia owned by notorious East end organised crime kingpins, the Kray twins. Dazeley was even awarded the British Empire Medal in the Queen’s New Year’s Honours List in 2017 for his services to photography and charity.

Dazeley has been a regular face at Fixation over the years, and we were thrilled he found the time to chat with us about his life, his career, and most importantly, photography. So, let’s get started!

Portrait of Dazeley by Sarah Ryder Richardson

Thanks for taking the time to talk to us, Peter! Let’s start by going back a bit – what made you decide that photography was the career for you?

I went to Holland Park Comprehensive (now known as the Socialist Elton), which was the first purpose-built comprehensive in London. There were two and a half thousand kids, with a swimming pool, three gymnasiums, woodwork, metalwork, engineering, domestic science, a technical drawing office, laboratory, and… photographic studios and darkrooms. And so I got into photography from that – many years later I discovered that I was wildly dyslexic, which made a lot of sense as to why I was so hopeless at school, and then when I was 15 years old I saw an ad in the Evening Standard and went along with my mum for an interview at an advertising studio at the bottom of Fleet Street. And they gave me a job as an assistant photographer.

Had you picked up much knowledge of photography by that point?

I think it was kind of like I’d fallen into it. At school we used to photograph on glass plates, and at my first job we printed from glass plates, and I was just given a great opportunity and encouraged to do little bits on my own and work my way up.

© Peter Dazeley  (Burning Typewriter, illustrating the concept of fake news |  Fruit in Water shot for M&S  | Jacket on chair shot for Vendome and menswear brand Hackett)

Do you think that had an influence on the way you now work in so many different spaces – still life, portraiture, advertising, fine art, etc?

I’ve had assistants over the years who were at university or college and were encouraged to be specifically a portrait photographer or a lifestyle photographer, or a car photographer. The thing to me that seemed more sensible was to take on anything I could get my hands on. I have friends that are food photographers that just shoot food all day long – different clients see me as a different type of photographer.

©  Peter Dazeley (Dancer: Lisa Welham)

©  Peter Dazeley (Labour Party election campaign poster)

©  Peter Dazeley (Godon Ramsay ad, shot for Gordon’s Gin)

Working in still-life, both commercially and personally, I’m curious as to how you approach the challenge of assembling your compositions. Is it a lot of planning?

I guess it’s problem-solving. The idea is to be a problem-solver, not a problem to the client, so that you’re really taking care of their needs. And so I’m surrounded by a selection of freelance set-builders, stylists, location-hunters – all sorts of different people who bring different things to the party. I have a retoucher that works for me, and she actually brings some of the work to life. I could never be as good as she is at doing it. It’s really about bringing all those things together.

So it’s quite a collaborative process?

Yes. The crazy thing about being an advertising photographer is that I’ll be working with an art director and we’ll be going down a certain route and I’ll be thinking, ‘This looks terrible, why are we doing it like this?’ And then a couple of months later, I see the ad and I think, ‘Wow, doesn’t that look great? That’s taking me somewhere I would never have been.’ That’s the wonderful collaborative side of working with art directors and designers.

© Peter Dazeley (Dove Campaign)

I’ve also been so appreciative of the wonderful service I’ve received from Barry and his team at Fixation over the years, it has been a delight discussing my work with Fixation. For someone who is wildly dyslexic and hates reading instruction booklets, to have them up my sleeve has been fantastic!

Are there any shoots that have been particular highlights?

We did a poster campaign for the Terrence Higgins Trust many years ago. I’d been messing around shooting nudes with an anamorphic lens, which is like a widescreen cinema lens – if you spin it around one way you have long, thin people, and the other way around you get short, fat people. It’s a nice little device because it just looks slightly odd, not too weird, and then we shot it completely out of focus so that you couldn’t recognise anybody. We heard that in the Gay Pride march people were taking the posters off the walls, which was a lovely compliment. Shooting things that were completely out of focus was pretty weird, but it won awards.

© Peter Dazeley (Solarised Platinum Man, printed by 31 Studios)

You work on plenty of your own personal projects too – I’m thinking in particular of your still-life work on the memorabilia of the Kray twins, which is a fascinating study on the way objects reveal character.

© Peter Dazeley (Ronnie Kray’s Intimidating Glasses)

Yes – a big part of my life is trying to come up with new ideas, new people, new places or objects to photograph that I can make something of.

What does it take to put a project like that together? It must be nerve-racking at the start when you’re not sure if it’s going to work.

Part of my life is schmoozing. To talk about how things developed, I have a flat on the river Thames overlooking Battersea Power Station, and I managed to wangle getting in there and get let loose in there for a day, and it’s just an amazing place, with what’s left of this art-deco building. It created a wonderful set of pictures, and then my agent sent it around with a newsletter and Creative Review picked it up and ran it. Then of course a lot of people stole it and looted it, but that was how my first book started. It just seemed to me to be a lovely thing to photograph my London, so I set about finding a publisher and we managed to produce the book Unseen London, which took about four years.

© Peter Dazeley (Crossness Sewage Pumping Station, being restored. Picture from Unseen London)

How did you go about selecting locations for the book – was it a big list you had to whittle down?

I’m a born and bred Londoner. I thought I knew London well before I produced Unseen London! A lot of the places in that book you can’t actually get to see, like the Ministry of Defence and the inside of Downing Street. So as a reaction to that, I did my second book, which was London Uncovered, featuring places that you could go and see. Having done the first book, it was much easier to do the second one, because I could show them the book and say ‘We’d like to put you in one of these.’ So that one only took me about a year.

In the first two books we included some theatres, and afterwards my publisher suggested that it be nice to do something on London theatres. And that was one of the most exciting books I’ve done. The books are a bit like a hobby; they’re not vastly money-making, especially not when you think about the effort that goes into them.

I’d say the book London Theatres was a highlight of my career, as the writer I worked with on the book, Mike Coveney, managed to get Mark Rylance to write the foreword. I would have been happy with a paragraph, but he wrote about a thousand words of beautiful stuff about what he looks for in a theatre, how the boxes must have people in them rather than technical equipment, how the ceiling affects how he’ll be able to speak and more. We did a book launch at the National Theatre, which for me was a paid gig to be on stage with Sir Mark Rylance talking about theatres, then we sold a whole load of books, signed some books and then had dinner together. So that really was the highlight of my career!

© Peter Dazeley (Royal Opera House Auditorium, from London Theatres)

And a theatre does feel like a dream subject for a photographer.

I think as punters, we walk into a theatre, we buy a ticket, we go and we sit down, and we just look forward. We don’t see the beauty. They are amazing. Though such expensive things to run – heaven knows how they’re going to be getting through this virus, how long it’ll be before people will be able to sit down next to each other again.

I also wanted to ask about your fine-art work, which you produce on platinum prints.

Well, I don’t produce those prints. I have a wonderful company in Gloucestershire called 31 Studios that produces platinum prints which is quite a time-consuming process. A quick description is: you start off with handmade French watercolour paper, then you apply the emulsion with a very special brush – it takes a kind of genius to actually paint an emulsion onto a piece of paper with no ridges or any marks on it, completely smooth. And then you print it under ultraviolet light – for want of a better word, it’s a recipe from the 1800s, it’s like kind of alchemy really. It produces a print which you put in the developer and it comes up in a flash. It has amazing tones and longevity.

© Peter Dazeley (Solarised Aladdin Tulips, printed by 31 Studios)

I’m sure it’s quite something to see in person – even the scans are gorgeous.

They are wonderful things. But the expense…

I can imagine. So is there anything you haven’t tried yet that you’d like to? Any dream projects?

I’m gearing up to try and work on another book. I think I’ve got a list of about 200 different ideas that I would like to photograph. Sometimes when you research an idea, you find that it’s not that photographable or that interesting, but a lot of times you go and you discover a whole load more. As I get older now and I’m working less commercially, that’s probably what I’m going to do.

© Peter Dazeley – Cover of Dazeley’s fourth book, London Explored, being published by Quarto Autumn 2020. Cover features: Crystal Palace Subway and the Ceiling of Drapers Hall

Peter Dazeley was talking to Jon Stapley. You can see more of his work at www.peterdazeley.com or buy his books from here