Bob Carlos Clarke
| Bob Carlos Clarke | |
|---|---|
| Born |
Robert Carlos Clarke 24 June 1950 County Cork, Ireland |
| Died | 25 March 2006 (aged 55) London, England, United Kingdom |
| Nationality | Irish |
| Known for | Photography |
Robert "Bob" Carlos Clarke (24 June 1950 – 25 March 2006) was a prolific photographer, "often referred to as the British Helmut Newton". In his short life he had a strong impact upon and influenced the development of photography from the late 20th Century through to the present day. He authored six books during his career.
Carlos Clarke was born in Cork, Ireland and sent to an all-male boarding school in England at a young age and this experience influenced his photography and his choice of subject matter, both as a student and new photographer and then later in adult life.
After finishing secondary education he went to Dublin for a year, working in various low level positions at advertising agencies and newspapers as a trainee journalist. After a brief spell in Belfast in 1969, Carlos Clarke moved to England in the latter half of 1970 and enrolled in the Worthing College of Art, where he met his first wife, Sue Frame. Knowing that she was a part-time model he "knew he had to become a photographer without delay" and persuaded her to pose for him on a chromed 650cc Triumph Bonneville.
In 1975, a couple of years after this photograph was taken, they married at Kensington Registry Office. By this time they had already made the move to London, more specifically Brixton, where Carlos Clarke enrolled in the London College of Printing. He later went on to complete an MA from the Royal College of Art in photography, graduating in 1975. He initially began photographing nudes as a means of making money; using his fellow students as models he shot for Paul Raymond Publications, Men Only and Club International. Having exhausted the college of beauty he turned to model agencies and discovered that it was possible to flick through a catalogue and essentially ‘order’ a girl from a picture.
It was at this time that his relationship with Sue was beginning to wane and he spent periods renting separately from her. He rented in Brixton before purchasing half a house in Balham for £9,500. Limitations on space meant that his photographic style had to adapt, as he was unable to take a whole picture in one take and as a result began to use photo-montage to create home made fantasies. Carlos Clarke says of the time: "visitors to my grand apartment had to tiptoe around a labyrinth of cut-up scraps of photographs, pots of glue and scattered scalpels". This method saw him take photographs everywhere he went, "of skylines, doorways, highways, rocks, ruins, rivers – anything I might use later in a composition". He wrote of the time: "working in such confined and ill-equipped spaces was most hellish. One of my darkrooms was a tiny bedroom adjacent to a railway where I had to time my exposure to avoid the vibration of passing trains". It was at this time and working in such conditions that Carlos Clarke discovered what he termed ‘chemical abuse’ – flinging chemicals across prints to distress the image. He was not limited by the two-dimensionality of the photographic print.
...
Wikipedia