John Spinks is pretty much the visual front of Unbelievable Truth. With not much talent in the visual arts between the three of us, we prefer to defer to John's artistic eye. All of the covers of our records have so far been his photographs, and all of the best photos of the band have also been taken by him. Here's the first part of an interview with him...

I was born in Boston, Lincolnshire, in the Midlands, I went to school there, an average comprehensive.
> Were you interested in photography at this point, or maybe art?
It was funny really, kind of, but my inability to draw got in the way of that really. What it was was that at school I was getting to the stage where I didn't want to hang about lunchtimes in the playground, I'm quite happy in my own company, and there was a darkroom there that didn't actually work, they had an enlarger there and chemicals, the chemicals were pre-historic though, none of it actually worked, but it was quiet and you could go there and be on your own if you wanted to, so I used to hang around in this dark room. There were a couple of lads who knew about the process and showed me some of it, I was about 16 at this point.
It was taken for granted that you'd go off and do A levels at the local college, that did everything from English to hairdressing, and I started doing A levels in Psychology, English Literature and Photography, for no other reason than that I'd been hanging around in this darkroom, I didn't know anything about it, I just thought I might as well do that. It was always presumed that I'd go into something like Anthropology or Psychology. It was something that was talked about when I was a kid, my interest was in that direction. There was someone who taught photography at college who presumed a very high level of debate about the whole thing, which wasn't about it's technique necessarily, but about what photography could be used for and what it's place was, a very elevated sort of rhetoric, really, you were asked to think at a quite high level, that had never really happened before, because a comprehensive education which was coming out with the facts and answering the question, you were never really asked to think about what you were doing, so that was a bit of a shock, because in all the other a-levels, you were just asked to answer the question, and I started looking at photography, people you never hear about unless you're really into into, people like Robert Frank and Lee Friedlander and Gary Winogrand, and looking at American photographers of a certain type and from a certain time, and you start looking at those images and thinking that this is something you can channel certain things through. Technically I learned everything I know in the first year, when I was 16 or 17 and I've never really advanced beyond that point. I'm very non-technical really.
>What technical knowledge are you missing?
There's lots of things you can do, commercially speaking - record covers, magazine work, the work you do to earn money. America and Britain are very different in the way they approach taking photographs, in America it's a much more technical approach, what film do you use, what developer in combination with that film, what paper do you print it on, because there's lots of different papers and lots of different effects you can achieve by doing certain things, but the British, and European, sensibility is "don't f**k about with it too much". I've always viewed it as the shortest distance between you taking that picture and the person who ends up looking at it, and if there isn't too much getting in the way then hopefully someone has a fairly instant emotional response to the picture, and that's what it's all about. I've never wanted to impress people. Especially now, it's much more to do with computers and re-touching things and things that are to do with the impossible and I just don't find it that interesting really. It goes out to impress, to make you go "Wow! How did they do that?" and... it bores the f**k out of me to be honest because there's an abdication of humanity in that sort of stuff. Technically there's a million and one things you can do - post-flashing things, the way things are lit, using movement and flash - and I've got a rudimentary knowledge of that sort of stuff, but It was never really that interesting to me. It's taken me long enough to master doing 'nothing'.
After A levels I decided that I wanted to do photography full-time. I was famous as a kid for starting things and not finishing them, so this didn't go down very well with my folks, but gradually they came around to the idea. My father was more against it, I think he thought I was trying to get out of finishing my A-levels. I went on this audio-visual course which was appalling, it was the first year it was ever run, in Nuneaton. There were some positive things to it, it allowed me another couple of years of doing photography. I applied for college in Bournemouth and didn't get in so I went back to Nuneaton for another year, so I spent four years there in total. Bournemouth was a very commercial course, an HND, to turn people out for "the London market", which was fashion. I'm very glad I didn't get in because it probably would have driven me up the wall. I ended up going to Farnham in 1990, where the emphasis of the course was very much documentary based. Farnham's in the stockbroker belt, so it was used as a finishing school for lots of very rich people, sop I didn't really spend a lot of time there. I would turn up for the first say week of term and the last two weeks or something, and spend the rest of the time either in Nuneaton or with my girlfriend in Hull, and in my final year I travelled around Ireland and stuff, so I avoided the place like the plague. But there were some really good people who taught there, people like Chris Killip, John Davies, Martin Parr, a lot of very interesting people came and did either term-long or year-long tutoring jobs, or they came and did lectures on a Wednesday morning, and that was fantastic, I would get into as many of those as I could. But it was a funny environment; I never really stayed in contact with anyone from college, there was one person who I still see, who I'd call a very good friend, but everyone else... I don't want to sound fascist about it, but it annoyed me that you were given three years to go out and discover who you are as a photographer or artist, and they were happy to stay in this little town and masturbate, it annoyed the hell out of me. I get annoyed easily, don't I?
When that finished in June 1993 I moved to London, that September, after a period of extreme anxiety, and started working in a studio as an assistant under some dole scheme that was run in Nuneaton. I got £10 extra on my dole, and Metro, the company who owned the studio bunged me £50 a week, so I was on about £80 a week - oh, the riches - and I did that for a year. Through that I met a lot of people who came in to hire the studio, and because there were only two studios you were in close contact with quite a lot of people, you got to know them because there weren't a hundred studio assistants, and eventually somebody recommended me for a job with a photographer called Juergen Teller, and I assisted him for two years, which was an amazingly valuable experience. He's very famous now, and I worked for him on the cusp of that, in the second year, 1996, he had a retrospective of his work published, and most of that year was putting that book together, sorting prints out, and finding stuff. The good thing about working for Juergen was being very closely involved with the whole process of producing photographs, he's a very very strong personality, with a very well-formed idea of who he is and what he wants to do photographically, so it was a very valuable experience.
>It must have been exciting working for somebody on that upslope, just as they're really getting into gear...
It is good to see someone at that stage because they're the person that they used to be and the person that they're becoming, and to see that change and to see people really appreciating what someone does after a lot of effort... it took Juergen 8 years of hard slog to get to that position, and because it was such a long gentle slope up it was a very solid way to do it. You see it, more in music really, bands that are lauded and hyped, and then they don't know what to do, all those experiences that you wrote those songs from, or took those photographs with, you're not having them anymore because you're in such an ivory tower.
>Did working for him at that time give you a sense of the possibility of 'success' in photography? In a lot of arts you kind end up in this rut where you don't know anybody who's 'made it' and you not really aware that it's possible...
In a lot of ways it was spoiled, because the things that I've done and the photographs I make, you've seen such a high level of success, and you always find yourself wanting, and it can be frustrating, but I'm getting to a position now, where I'm very happy with the work I'm doing, and that kind of commercial work, though obviously financially it's enormously important, as a photographer it's become irrelevant. I'd much rather go and teach and make money that way, and then go and make photographs of the things I want to make photographs of, because working for magazines can be very frustrating because you really are working within a defined range. I suppose that's what makes a good editorial photographer, someone who knows how far to push those things.
After working for Juergen, I started a collective, which is a group of people who pool their resources and work as one, with two other guys I knew from college in Nuneateon, who were about two years behind me. We called ourselves 664, and whoever produced a piece of work, it would be credited to 664. That lasted for almost exactly a year. We did a show at a little gallery under a Paul Smith clothes shop. What we wanted to do was show how uniform tries to suppress elements of individualism, but people customise their uniform by wearing them in different ways. We took pictures of schoolboys who were 12 to 15, that stage where you're beginning to decide who you are. What we were also trying to do was deal with issues surrounding male identity as well, because over the past few years men have been subjected to something that women have been subjected to for a long time, which is a lot of imagery about what a man is and what his role is, and also those notions of what a man's roll is have been questioned in the past few years, so we thought that was an interesting thing to do.

end of part one. --next--