Phil Penman ... Leica, Lycra and Legacy ...
- Chris Hilton
- Feb 8
- 4 min read
The German fashion photographer Chris von Wangenheim said "I thought we were selling dreams - not clothes" ... Phil Penman has sold both ...
A local lad from the Weymouth stable ... there must be something in the water down there!
How can such a small place turn out so many good photographers? Peter Dench, Si Jubb, Iain McKell to name a few, and other than the funny water, the thing that binds them is that their images are all about the story. I guess that when you spend your formative years in a small tourist town, you are not only surrounded by other people's stories, but fascinated by them.
And whilst the Briantspuddle boy studied photography at Weymouth College and swept the floor after Dorchester market, he dreamed ... he dreamed big, he dreamed of the big apple, he dreamed of being the British paper's man in New York City ... and not just any paper, The Independent.
In short, Phil Penman dreamed up a big pair of shoes ... now he just had to fill them.
And after a couple of brief stints in Legoland and Los Angeles, he was there, freelancing for the British papers through a NY Photo agency. Bag always packed and by the door, he was ready to fly anywhere in the world at a moments notice, he was on the celebrity trail ... and when he wasn't abroad he was riding the streets on his pushbike to see who he could find. It was those shots, taken with the long lens on his Canon that put the down payment on the house ... the one he risked when he literally bet the house on his first book ... but next to the Canon was his Leica M9, and it was with that that Phil started to take the images that would fill his soul. He started off by using it to document 'behind the scenes', to show what the job was really like.
And that theatre analogy is apt ... as his personal work developed, he started to see the city as a stage, first he would observe the set lighting, then notice the actors, and be ready to record the narrative as the story unfolded infront of him. If Shakespeare was right and "all the worlds a stage", then Phil Penman was front and centre in one of the craziest ones on the planet.
Then 9/11 happened ... and Phil was there, watching one of the towers crumble through his lens, transfixed at the "film" that was playing in his camera ... present, yet somehow disconnected at the same time ... exactly the same thing that war photographers have been known to say.
As Phil made his way through the dust and debris he constantly questioned himself ... Can I take these pictures? Can I photograph these distraught and vulnerable people? Why am I here? Is there a reason? But as a photographer, your job is to document, to tell the story. And telling those stories that day, led to lifelong friendships ... carved from the carnage and terror ...
As the "stage" got more interesting, the day job got more problematic, especially in the run up to the second Iraq war. Editorial decisions were getting journalists and photographers involved with some underhand dealings that would affect voting at the United Nations and Phil, couldn't and wouldn't be a part of it ... so that's when he started selling clothes ... Lycra ... because his other big passion was the bike he kept riding around the city. There was a reason that Phil was often first on the scene with that bike; not only had he spent a decade as an avid racer, he'd reached the dizzy heights as the New York State time trials champion! That connection with the bike world served him well as he spent three years as a Lycra ambassador for an Italian bike firm. It was during that time that Phil built his new career ... making his personal work pay ... that stuff he'd started shooting on the M9.
It was around that time that that Phil got a break with the makers of that M9 ... Leica in New York. The shop in the meat packing district of NYC is no ordinary camera shop, it also houses a world class gallery. They invited Phil to exhibit and shortly afterwards to talk and run workshops. He has been an ambassador for the Leica Akadamie ever since.
Phil had been thinking about legacy, he'd previously spoken to the Library of Congress and was surprised to find that it wasn't the slick Instagram images with tens of thousands of likes that they wanted but the ones with a sense of place, the ones that really told the stories of our times. The stories that Phil and his Leica were capturing.
2019 was another milestone ... it was when that book came out, the one he bet the house on. Street ... and it sold ... big! It was also the year a film came out called Official Secrets, one that documented the very reason that Phil had temporarily laid his camera down.
Then Covid 19 happened ... Phil had learned from 9/11 that if you were photographing momentous happenings then you needed to point your camera at everything, as sometimes, you just wouldn't know what was important until after the fact ... 20,000 images later, Phil's second book was born ... New York Street Diaries ... in it, one of the best images I've seen to come out of the pandemic. Twelve hundred people had died that day, a thousand the day before ... nobody knew where it was going or where it was going to end up, but Lady Liberty was in the background, looking down, this time on the 'un' huddled masses ... and with a bit of luck, everything was going to be OK.
The third book, is out now and the fourth is on the way ... the boy from Briantspuddle that dreamed big has ten exhibitions worldwide this year, he's a Leica ambassador that leads workshops all over the world. He's a heavyweight in the world of photography with a humanity that means he knows the names of the homeless people on he passes in the street ...
The boy done good ...
Our next speaker, Andrew Mills will be live at the club on the eighteenth of March ... as usual, non members are welcome. Details on the website ...
