Tim and Barry
Trying to get hold of Tim and Barry is like trying to… Well, it’s Hard. I had been trying to meet up with the two of them for two months before an actual meeting was in place. But this is because of a very valid and simple reason; they’re busy. Very busy. They have recently launched their own online TV station called dontwatchthat.tv which gets thousands of views and is made up of sub-channels that include contributions from PWBC (an hilarious skateboarding-based channel) to high fasion designer Jean-Charles de Castelbajac. After getting over the hurdle of actualy meeting these widely sought after and very original photographers we sat down and talked about how they started doing photos together, musicians they would like to work with and their close affiliation with the grime scene.
So how did this all start?
Barry: We met at LCC doing a degree in photography. We ended up meeting on the first day, Tim was a bit homeless and we just ended up hanging out. Then during the second year we had a lecturuer who suggested that Tim should go and see Mark lebon (the photographer). So Tim went over and met Mark and got a job assisiting him without even realising he was up for an assisting job.
Then Mark was on a big shoot one day and had to build a table or something like that, and Tim suggested I come and help, so I ended up bulding this table and we both ended up assisting on the shoot. That was it really, it seemed to work really well with both of us asissting Mark, so we continued to do that while we were still at college.
When we were near to finishing our degree, Tim got a commission from i-D magazine to shoot a producer called Wookie. Tim suggested we should do the shoot together, so I said yeah fuck it and we ended up coming up with an idea. Unfortunately it fell through because Wookie left the country or something but then i-D got us to shoot a tapestry artist. We came up with an idea, shot it and got them to credit it as Tim and Barry, and that’s where it started off.
Tim: It wasn’t really too planned, it just kind of rolled.
Barry: And then during the summer that we finished college, I started doing some work on a Low Rider exhibition, and got Tim to come along. It was curating an exhibition with a load of Low Rider cars that had been brought in from LA,which was basically Cyprus Hill’s car club called ‘Lifestyle’. So we did photography, film, video…
What were your ideas behind photography at the time? was it any different to what you do now?
Barry: Photography’s quite a funny one, because of the photographer’s presence – they put their stamp on it. But because there’s two of us and generally the people we photograph or projects we get involved in, we’re really in to. It’s not about us, it’s about who we’re photographing.
Tim: When we started photographing I guess we did a lot more documentary-style stuff. A lot of our early stuff was documentary and portraits, but then we started to move more in to studio stuff. I think our style is more about our approach to taking the photographs than how the photographs actually look. If you look at anything we’ve made from studio, on a high budget, to something taken on a camera phone, there’s always a certain feel to it. We’ve got lots of different styles, but the photography is about the person themselves rather than the concept.
Would you say the no-concept thing is relative to the grime aspect of your work?
Barry: Well, when we start talking about making something, we don’t go through what we want to do as much as what we don’t want to do. We thought ‘what do we not want our videos to be like?’, and that was MTV videos, we were sick and bored of them. Then we started thinking about what we liked, and it was The Tube, The Word, Rapido all these programs from when we were growing up. The Tube finished in ’84 and I vaguely remember it. Another thing that influenced us was Lord of the Mics and stuff like that, but we wanted to make something more visual than that.
So how did you guys get in contact with grime artists?
Barry: Tim was Djing at Electricity showrooms in Old Street, he’s had a residency there for five years and a DJ called Twin B used to come down and he was really in to it. Then people like Jammer and D double E started to come down. We were playing Bashment, Hip Hop and RnB and Garage as well. Twin B was really excited and young, and always asking what tune was what etc. And then one week he said he was a DJ and gave us a mix tape we thought was really good, so we got him down as a guest resident. He found out we were photographers and asked us to get involved in a project called Split Mic, which was English MCs over American beats. We did the photos for that, then the photos for i-D for the same project, which was the first press they did on the grime scene. Through D double E and Jammer we met Skepta, JME, slewdem and Tynchy. It’s a real tight-knit scene, so once you meet one person you quickly meet them all.
Then you did the Jean-Charles de Castelbajac shoot for i-D…
Tim: Yeah I think I got my first [Jean-Charles de Castelbajac] piece from ’99/2000. I used to buy his pieces a season after they came out when they were in the sale, ’cause I could never afford them. I just loved his stuff.
How did it happen then, did he get in contact with you?
Tim: It happened hrough radioclit. We’d see this guy with a plaited goatee beard at grime raves, these two kids, and be like ‘who the fuck are they?’. They came to this big warehouse in Whitechapel where I lived and my flatmate at the time, Jethro Haynes, an illustrator was doing all of their album artwork and was mates with them. We started talking and showed them a book of all our photos from the grime scene. We started talking about how Castelbajac was popular on the scene- Wiley wore him, Temps wore him, Lethal Bizzle wore him…and when More Fire did ‘Oi’ they were all wearing Castelbajac on Top of the Pops. This guy said ‘No way that’s my friends dad’. This was when Castalbajac had quietened down, because he was big in the 70′s and 80′s. He had a retrospective at the V&A and he knew all about the grime scene. It was surprising that this French, arty designer guy in his late fifties knew about a little underground scene going on in England. We were really stoked just to be in contact with him. It went from there really – we went to a show in Paris where we took pictures backstage and he really liked us. He ended up commissioning us to take photos for his retrospective. And from that, he’s got his own channel on dontwatchthat.tv
Barry: At his shows, he’s always make sure he talked to everyone who had come over from the UK. He’s great at engaging with people and it was great to see someone of his age still really interested in youth culture. That’s what he encapsulates with his work.
So where did you get the ideas for that kind of stuff?
Tim: We would meet loads of creative people just doing their own thing at the Ice Palace in Whitechapel. We thought the Tim and Barry TV stuff was going quite well, so we thought we should build our own site and do something in dependant. Someone asked if they could put their stuff up there, so we came up with the idea of putting channels up there. The site only started in May but already it’s building up. We’re still not entirely happy with the functionality or the design, but once we are we want to really promote it. We are In dependant though, a lot of people seem to think we have money behind us or something, but we haven’t, it’s just me and Barry, so everything is funded by the photography we do and other bits and pieces. We can’t just launch on day one, get loads of people to do stuff and pay for a big marketing budget, and because of that, it’s not really our style.
Barry: The good thing about our TV is that if you plug in your speakers to your computer, you really will get a whole different experience. The sound is really key and we think it;s really important to get a great sound. In 2 or 3 years time where everyone will have their computers jacked in to speaker, that’s when people will be like ‘fucking hell, we’ve missed all this’, coz those little speakers on your computer will play you the track, but when you plug it in, that’s where you get the depth for the videos. They’re really well produced.
When we were getting in to documenting people, and getting in to scenes by going down to pirate stations and raves, we realised the MCs had so much energy when they were performing and we felt some of the videos that were being made weren’t necessarily doing them justice
because they were miming. We thought, why get artists like Tempah to mime when they can perform anywhere live, with so much energy.
The Uk at the moment, is musically so rich and if you look at the US and what’s going on with RnB and Hip Hop there, it’s become a generic sound. Obviously Uk people are being influenced by that, but they’re also being heavily influenced by Jamaican music and music from all over the world. Now what is blatantly going to happen is American artists looking over here and saying ‘I want to write a beat for that person’. There is such a rich production sound coming out of the UK at the moment.
Are there any artists out there at the moment who you would like to work with?
Barry: We’d love to go to Jamaica and do a series of stuff there, Ideally we want to take Tim and Barry TV all over the place. Thanks to the Internet, all this stuff is possible…
Without the Internet how do you think you guys would have operated?
Tim: I don’t think we would be making films at all. We always said we wanted to make films, bit never had the equipment or the money. And we still don’t now.
Barry: A lot of people are worried about copyright and free downloads and all of that stuff and I think it will change the way music and video and film is consumed. The people who are screwing at the moment are the record companies and soon it’s going to be Hollywood, because they had a massive piece of the pie and now they have a smaller section. I think for small, independent people like Tim and myself, The Internet can only be a good thing.
Are there any films out there that you’re big fans of?
Barry: There’s some brilliant directors out there, but I think we get our main inspirations from people around us and kids on the street.
What musicians would you like to work with in the future?
Tim: We’d love to do stuff with African musicians- there’s loads of stuff that’s outside pop music. Also, Jamaica… I’m a big Dancehall fan. We’ve done Movado already, and we’ve got a couple more people in the pipeline. It’d be great to work with people like Vybes Kartel, or maybe some more eighties ones like Bounty Killer, the great producers out there like Dave Kelley, King Jammy… It’d be interesting to do stuff with some American artists, it’s just hard to work with them because of their management and lawyers and all that shit makes it quite tricky.
Have you tried in the past?
Barry: Photography wise we have, with Mobb deep, twister,Isaac Hayes, before he passed which was an amazing experience. UK-wise, We’d like to do a project with Wiley – we have worked with him but never anything full-on. I like that Rigley kid from Birmingham, he’s good. There’s loads of new, good dubstep people, it’s almost a case of there’s so much and it’s so fast, it’s hard to keep up. Especially when we do so much in so many different areas. We’ve got a new channel called Ritual which is a new metal channel which is going to be really good. Twin B has a channel coming up, there’s one called CCTV, a cooking channel.
Who’s the chef?
Tim: It’s a cat as a chef.
So I take it your websites going to be the main focus for now?
Barry: For the meantime yes, but we’re still doing a lot for photography. We’ve just done Dizzy’s album and all his singles. There’s a lot of people doing photography in the grime scene this days as well.
Which way do you guys see it going from here?
Barry: It’s so hard to know what way anythings going….everythings changing so fast that our website could be massive in a few years time, or it could just be on the shelf. Who knows? We’re going to carry on with what we do, regardless. Anyone can apply to be a contributor on our site, so if you’ve got something good to contribute, the go for it. Hopefully, we’ll keep on getting good content and start to get the budgets to produce and promote. Because what we’re doing at the moment is quite ambitious, it’s going slower than we want it to be, but it’s all worth it.
Interview by Shane Connolly, Photos by Tim and Barry