Thoughts and Contradictions
At a meeting in Parliament on November 27 2024, David Lammy, responding to questions regarding the annihilation of the Palestinian people in Gaza and the impact the violence was having on providing aid, said “there are no journalists in Gaza”. At the time, conservative estimates had numbers of journalists killed ranging from 116-127. Estimates today have the number at over 200.
When I received an email inviting me to photograph a portrait for the New Yorker I was both surprised and excited. Those close to me can attest that the opportunity to reach an audience with my work in the States is one I had been hoping for. Of course I was in. I was less enthused when in a subsequent email I discovered who I would be photographing. David Lammy, a person in all honesty I had much disdain for. The email came with an invitation to discuss the commission over a zoom call and to iron out the details.
In some ways, David Lammy is the perfect MP to look to in order to understand the current iteration of the Labour Party. Following the England riots in 2011, with unsubtle race baiting, Lammy attributed causation to parents not being able to smack their children and said single mothers and absentee fathers were a key cause. In the years that followed I’ve considered most of his dialogue to be little more than transparent sound bites to suit whichever moment he finds himself in. While in opposition it was easy for Lammy to criticise and chastise Donald Trump, or for Starmer to share a photograph of himself taking the knee in “solidarity” with Black Lives Matter, but today, Lammy and his party remain in lockstep with the United States as they enable an ongoing genocide enacted by the State of Israel on the Palestinian people.
On the zoom call, the editor and I discussed my practice and spoke about my desire to work at a slower pace in analogue mediums when making personal work. Refreshingly, I found my desire to work this way would be encouraged. We discussed the shots the publication desired, a standard tight portrait against a backdrop and a standard full length. However I took this opportunity to express my reservations by explaining that Lammy’s profile was different in the UK and that I was eager to photograph him in a way that was in line with how I felt about him as a person. Namely, duplicitous and out of his depth. I expressed a desire to make some portraits at a greater distance, playing with scale and perspective to give the impression that his office was swallowing him. I also wanted to try some double exposure to explore his tendency to wear multiple faces in any given situation. My ideas were well received and I left the call feeling emboldened.
I was well prepared on the day of the job but technically it was challenging. I knew I had a 30 minute slot to make pictures and was able to spend the interview prepping the backdrop and my cameras with my assistant, but the fading light meant that when it came time to begin, the images took longer to make.
I was in professional mode for the job and in a highly focused state that I think many photographers can relate to; so I don’t remember much of what Lammy said in his interview, but I would catch brief passages of the conversation as they crossed the room. In person, Lammy came across as a sort of shifting vacuum in human form. He appeared completely unknowable because everything he said was so transparently manufactured. Everything from forced chest-heavy laughter, to directionless phatic expressions on anything from the trainers I was wearing to the colour of his tie.
It was also clear that he was used to being able to draw on his Blackness in order to link his heritage to his ascension to government office as some sort of personal hero story. In fact my assistant mentioned that he seemed to glance over at us at that point, suddenly aware that there were other Black people in the room to hear his own readily practised self-aggrandisement.
I tend to work slowly, but with little light and working with a strobe, I went even slower, triple checking my inputs. On editorial jobs, getting the safe shots out of the way is good practice, but before I knew it i was running out of time and I hadn’t explored some of my ideas. I realised I needed to abandon some and try something else in the time I had. So I went for it. I was unable to test to see if had even worked. David Lammy had a meeting immediately after and we had to clear the office, I exposed my film roll right up until minute I had to leave, dragging my half open bag, modifier and still connected backdrop out of the room to disassemble elsewhere.
Because of the haphazard nature of the job, I was fairly anxious about everything. Working with film always contains an element of risk, I’m usually just happy when a properly exposed image comes back in focus and competently composed. I ran out of time before I could use all of the film I had so the margin of error was narrower than usual. When I got the images back I was relieved to see that most were fine, including the safe shots requested by the editor, but more importantly my own experiments.
I felt that I had created usable images that could be read a little more adventurously than a standard portrait. Images that perhaps called to the wider context of what was going on. But I had provided the images asked of me too and one of those ended up being the final select.
When I worked through my personal reservations and decided to carry out my professional duties, I felt I still retained some opportunity to use my artistic sensibilities to express myself in a way that could be useful, but in retrospect I was working with differing perspectives and audiences. Perhaps I was a little naive. In addition, despite the difficulties faced by working artists today, there is a legitimate question as to whether to take jobs like these at all. Some things become clearer with experience.
Around September last year when David Lammy announced he would be banning 30 out of 350 arms export licences, to Israel, he was sure to make clear that he supported “Israel’s right to defend itself”. Today, Israel has continued to kill Palestinian adults and children throughout the recent ceasefire which commenced in January 2025.