‘Don’t just photograph the obvious’  I got a phone call from a friend saying he had seen loads of Santa Clauses walking towards the law courts in London. I changed direction quickly, and ran across two or three hundred of them, which, on paper, sounds like a photographer’s dream. They were demonstrating for Fathers for Justice, but I realised – after taking a roll or two – that it just looked like a bunch of guys dressed up as Santa Claus. One of the things I have always been told in photography is to look the other way – don’t just photograph the obvious. Sometimes it is better to zag rather than zig. So, I turned to the police who were overlooking the event, plus one solo Santa. I like it because you don’t know what’s happening on the right-hand side of the frame – is it a horrendous crash involving a sleigh and reindeer, or some sort of massacre at Christmas time?  Little did I know that I would end up potentially being one of those Fathers for Justice guys – I’m divorced, and, while I don’t have any problems with access to my child, I understand their plight even more now. But when I’m there taking photographs – and this may sound a little harsh – I’m more interested in taking a good photo than a particular cause. This Santa was just a colourful element.  I spend pretty much every day walking around, without a brief, just seeing what comes up. I train myself to see certain things, or to know a situation has potential and has a pregnant moment – you wait for the climax of that moment, and sometimes it crescendoes, sometimes it falls into a whimper. Street photography holds even more appeal now in the age of Photoshop, where things are more and more fake. It is very revealing to see people not posing, not showing their best sides, just being human.  To be honest, winter is probably my least favourite time of year to work in London. The light goes so quickly – it’s dark by 4pm, but 5.30pm is rush hour when a lot of stuff tends to happen. Also, I photograph in colour, and in winter everyone starts to wear black and grey. Spring and autumn are probably my favourites. Summer is great and garish, but it’s bloody hot. Walking through Oxford Street, one of the most polluted streets in the world – by two o’clock you’ve had it.  Trained: Assisted Marcus Lyon for three years.  Influences: Garry Winogrand, Tony Ray-Jones, Joel Meyerowitz, Lee Friedlander.  High point: “Becoming a nominee at the Magnum agency this year.”  Low point: “Getting divorced in 2009, and losing all inspiration.”  Top tip: “It sounds weird and Zen, but if you go out with a good spirit, you’ll come back with good work.”  ‘I was there two weeks to take this’  This was taken 25 years ago on the Solovetsky Islands, on the White sea in northwest Russia. The place is like a fairytale, with this huge monastery, which you can see in the background, built in the 16th and 17th centuries. But it also has a very sad history – in the 20s and 30s it was a harsh labour camp and prison under the Soviets. That sad history is always one part of the feeling of being there.  In Russia, all the animals are free – horses, dogs and cats, all of them walking everywhere. I was living in the only small guesthouse on the island, and one morning I was having breakfast and looked up to see a dog walking along, carrying a bag. I was told that the dog was owned by a lonely, legless man, who dispatched it every morning to the only shop on the island. In the bag was a shopping list, and the dog walked some kilometres to the shop, gave the bag to the saleswoman, who put the groceries in the bag, and the dog went back with it. Usually, I heard, the list was just bread and vodka.  When I learned the route the dog went, I chose this place with these sheds and firewood and the monastery in the background, and put a can of sardines on the snowbank to tempt the dog to stop. But then it happened that this cat smelled the sardines, and stayed there to feast. I was looking forward to the dog coming: what is going to happen? But it came quietly past on his way home, and didn’t pay any attention to the sardines or the cat. It was at work.  I very much like photographing in winter. It’s not technically difficult – the snow beautifully simplifies the landscape, and there is always enough light. Even the nights in the north are bright because of the snow; the days themselves are short but the dusk is very long. And because I’m from Finland, I don’t like it when it’s hot! Of course, when it is very cold, the cameras don’t work so well. This was taken with a large-format panoramic camera, with only six shots a film. It’s difficult to change the film when it’s very cold, so I had to think all the time: when exactly should I push the button? I was there two weeks and I took 120 shots – nowadays that’s very little.  I have a saying though: the worse the weather, the better the picture. There is more feeling. When you are shooting in sunlight, with cumulus clouds, it always looks like a postcard. But when it is raining or snowing, it gives you something more.  Trained: “At school in the 1960s, where every boy’s hobby was photography.”  Influences: Paul Strand. “When I saw his photographs for the first time, it was like reading the Bible.” Also: André Kertész, Josef Koudelka, Kristoffer Albrecht.  High point: “It’s very common for photographers to be most active between 40 and 50 – their children are no longer young, and they have more time. That was the case with me!”  Low point: “Being 67 – I can’t work so hard any more. You become lazier and slower and you don’t see so well.”  Top tip: “Study photography – think about why a photo has been taken, and why at that moment.”  ‘I was looking for something magical’  I was lost until I found photography. I had a difficult childhood and, during high school, all the academic stuff just didn’t really work for me. I started taking pictures to record my friends skateboarding or racing their BMX bikes, and I discovered that you really had to try to get a good photograph, so that was the main impetus at that point.  After that, I enrolled in a photography class. Two of my tutors entered my work into a state contest and I won. All of a sudden, I was on a roll: I felt supported, and I haven’t looked back.  Taking photographs helps me to sort through my emotions. It also provides me with an excellent excuse to explore the world. I’m fortunate enough to be able to spend the day driving around, looking for something magical to photograph – such as this peculiar pocket of east Washington, which I was immediately struck by. Unlike its neighbouring towns, it remains completely untouched – free from the bullshit Walmart or Home Depot stores. I was instantly drawn to the place because it transported me back to my past. I grew up in Ohio, in a new suburb that was built in the middle of large cornfields during the 1970s. This duality between suburbia and the middle of nowhere is very curious to me, and is expressed in much of my work.  As a photographer, when you find somewhere that moves you, you come back to it. I’ve continued to go back to that crossroads for the past 10 years, at least once a year. I tend go in the winter, because I live in San Francisco now, so I love to visit places where it snows. The morning light in this particular shot – which pierces through the fog that was lifting quickly that day – is so spectacular that it took me by surprise. I also love how it seems as though lightning has shredded that tree.  I took the photograph through the windscreen of my car using an analogue camera and developed the film in a darkroom by myself. I have a warm feeling when I look at it, as I do with many of my pictures. But then, I’m a very vicious editor, so I don’t let anything go out into the world that I feel halfway about.  Studied: California College of the Arts and Crafts, Rhode Island School of Design, and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Massachusetts.  Influences: “Photographer Larry Sultan, who was my advisor at graduate school and became a close friend. He taught me how to draw from within – how to use my own life experiences in my work.”  High Point: “Having a large, mid-life survey of my work published [Intimate Distance, 2016] was very special. I spent a long time sifting through my archive to compile an edit that felt right – context is just as important as the photographs themselves.”  Low Point: “My first photography job, which I was told I’d be paid for and never was. It was an interesting learning curve straight out of the gate.”  Top Tip: “Follow your intuition and don’t look to others for the answers because you already have them, you just have to believe that you do.”  • Intimate Distance by Todd Hido is published by Aperture.  ‘I was interested in dramatic rivers’  I had recently moved from Japan to Dartmoor in Devon, and I was very interested in these dramatic torrent rivers that flowed off the moor – rain pours off the land due to deforestation, because there is nothing to stop it. I wanted to get away from the distance that the camera lens can create, and I decided that this landscape at night could be my darkroom. So I put silver gelatin photographic paper straight into the bed of a river, and illuminated it with a microsecond burst of light from a flash – I would get all the flow forms and detail of the river, even passing pebbles and twigs, exposed directly on to the paper.  I would tape the paper to a sheet of aluminium and lay it in the water, then once I was done, I would put a lid on it and take it back to my darkroom to develop it. I once left a wet lid in my studio, and the next morning it had frozen over. I decided to expose that block of ice. I turned it upside down on to a fresh sheet of paper in my darkroom, and gave it a flash of light – this image was the result.  I also wanted to get away from large-format landscape photographs. I had a desire for a completely different relationship with the landscape – being involved with it, rather than looking down on it from a privileged vantage point. Going out in the landscape at night is a very magical experience – one’s senses wake up a lot because you are not relying on vision – and there is a photographic quality to the landscape, in terms of events carving themselves out into other materials.  You might see a vortice in water, and also a print of that in rock, because that vortice has been operating in that place for hundreds of years. On the top of the hills, water freezes in rock and expands and cracks it, and the wind will then carve and sculpt these extraordinary forms in it over time. You have this powerful, fluid, weather-related stuff going on, and then this much deeper geological time, revealing those processes in a physical way.  Landscapes are so complex you can’t really say anything about the totality of them, so I think the best way to make any kind of response is to have a very intimate involvement in it. It’s more honest.  Trained: Studied painting at Chelsea College of Art, and the Slade School of Art.  Influences: Helen Chadwick. “She was very intelligently and playfully dealing with this art and science – there’s a really visceral tactility in her work.”  High point: “The River Taw period. It was something quite powerful that has informed what I’ve done since.”  Low point: “Six years ago, Ilford started halting its production processes, I became allergic to the chemicals I was using, and digital technology started to replace the medium I was working with.”  Top tip: “Go for what really interests you, no matter how mad, irrelevant or ridiculous it may seem.”
A lone Santa Claus, a dog carrying vodka, a peculiar pocket of east Washington and the flow of a river – Matt Stuart, Pentti Sammallahti, Todd Hido and Susan Derges explain the stories behind their favourite photographs