normski
Getting a camera when he really wanted a bike, Normski was obsessed by the time he got off the bus home. Practising on friends and family, often without any film, when the UK Hip Hop scene came around he found his perfect subject.
Growing up in North London, Normski saw the legendary photographers of the 60s and believed he had what it takes to shoot his own iconic images. He combined his passion for music with his new-found excitement for photography. When Hip Hop culture spread like wildfire from America, he was there to document the US pioneers as well as the emerging homegrown scene. He eventually got his own break to travel to Detroit and found himself in the midst of the birth of Techno and House music; ‘It wasn't until I met them that I realised that it was like my brothers from another mother in a different country.’
Normski’s style is provocative and exciting, the same perspective never comes up twice. He spoke to us about where he draws inspiration from and how he has evolved his practice over time.
Interview and text by Esta Maffrett | 22.09.21
How did you get into photography?
I fell into photography accidentally when I was really young. I really was interested in music and I was kind of quite a practical toy kid, all my mates had Scalextric and typical boys toys. I never really had many of those, in fact, I never had any of them. I got them in the end, but I was like the last in line. I was always interested in stuff that was mostly practical. I used to build things and I was really interested in the physics of things. Obviously, I used to love all of the action, man and Matchbox cars and all that stuff. But I think when I was about 9 or 10 we moved to Primrose Hill, some of the friends I had around me were a little bit more visual, artistic, creative and also really musical. And so I was in a set of friends who were going to become something. One day, I wasn't very well, I think I was just starting secondary school and my mum wanted to treat me I guess, you know, get me in a better frame of mind. I was really begging for a bicycle, a few people had bikes and everyone wanted a bike and in those days it was quite a big deal. The auction was at the horticultural hall down the river Thames and it was like a massive market auction for household products, toys, bikes, maybe garden equipment. We got there late and there wasn’t a lot left and definitely no bikes. I sort of remember the auctioneer holding up this Kodak box. An Instamatic camera with a little flash and one cartridge of the film all in the box. My mum said ‘would you want to get a camera?’ and I said ‘no. I want to get a bike!’ and she was like ‘there aren’t any bikes left!’ She got me the camera. In its blue and yellow packaging, it felt like a toy, to be honest so I was reluctant and disappointed at first. But then I was also intrigued by it. Around the same time on television, they were advertising the new Olympus Trip 35mm which was a rangefinder camera, designed specifically more of a consumer amateur wants to be photographer, but high quality, highest quality because it has been promoted and advertised by Sir David Bailey, who is one of the original bad boys of the UK British fashion photography and portrait photography scene from the 60s. I was totally brought up on TV in those days and in fact David Bailey lived in the area that I was living in, so I kind of had this real weird feeling that I could be like him maybe. My camera was nowhere near as good as an Olympus trip. But I did have something to look through and as a young boy I had a vivid imagination and creative fantasies, so photography became more interesting to me. And also a magazine called photo magazine was brought out. It was brilliant because it was an illustrated magazine with photographs, illustrations and information about the history, the practical theory from photographs right into darkroom stuff. When I started to see all the diagrams and all that stuff, that was it for me, I think I really loved what I was seeing and so I wanted to know more. I had that little camera for a good while and I remember that I used to actually look through the camera but I didn't take any pictures. I'd be just looking at stuff and pretending to get it. I also remember that there was that one roll of film it came with and I remember my mom saying you better be careful how you use that film because it's the only one you're going to get. We got them developed and I realised they weren't good enough so I wanted to get better. I might have got another film for that camera but very quickly because I'm a bit of a hoarder and went out and earned some money and I got a better camera.
So between the age of 11 and 13, I quite quickly became a hobbyist photographer. I used to walk up Gloucester Avenue - that's the road that David Bailey used to live on and you'd always know because his house was super posh. Across the road was a place called the beehive photography centre that was a little darkroom and a mini studio where they'd have photography clubs. One day I just popped my head in to have a peek, I went down there and walked into a still life workshop. The guy who was running it said they were going to do a short course and if I was interested in learning about developing and darkroom stuff, I should come back and join that. I ran back to my mom and begged her for the money. It was £1.50 a session and there were four sessions with about six of us there. And that was the beginning of it all when I went into the darkroom. This guy said ‘I'm not going to teach you how to take photographs. I'm not gonna tell you what to take photographs of. Your vision is your vision. What I can show you is that you know how to make a contact print and how to make a print’. As soon as I put white paper in the developing tray and when I saw that image first image come up, I was like, Fuck, this is magic. After that, I just wanted to have a dark room.
Can you talk about when you visited Detroit and discovered electronic house music and watched house and hip-hop spread across the globe?
Before electronic house music it was hip hop. That was actually what I saw happening that I was part of happening. Talking about it for me in those days was strictly by photography. We were living the scene, we never talked about it, we were just doing it. We never reported on stuff as we were doing it. But now and again it became something that was reported on. I went to Detroit from England and that was one of my first trips to America. That was like an epic thing, so much so that when I went there, I didn't even know what fucking techno was. I found out very quickly that it was quite closely related to Chicago house music that was also quite closely related to hip hop. The gateway drug machine that is like the root of nearly every electronic beat you've ever heard yet was the Roland 808. In 1985 my part-time job was working in an electronic music shop in London, selling that drum machine and other recording equipment, having no idea what it was that was going to end up being made with this machine because it was brand new. So it was really difficult to try and start talking about stuff back then because we didn't really know what we were talking about. It was just that it was all evolving. It was all happening. In Detroit, I got called in by the record company, because they wanted to get the right people out there to capture the right vibe. And they figured Norm is the right kind of guy, because Norm does all the black music in the UK and he's a really good photographer, give this guy a break. So I got my break out there. Thankfully, I accompanied Matthew Collins, a fantastic author, writer and journalist and was very interested in the early electronic music scene way early, as well as probably a music musical reviewer on lots of other music formats as well. And it was when we went to Detroit he sort of filled me in a little bit on who the people were and what they were about. But it wasn't until I met them that I realized that it was like my brothers from another mother in a different country. Doing what we were trying, wanting, to do in England, but a little bit more ahead of us? Because they had more kit or because we had a different thing going on over here. So hence why a lot of people have always said we were following the Americans, but we've got our own sound, we've gone off in our own directions. But great minds do think alike, you know.
It's taken nearly 30 years maybe for people to even realize what happened forty years ago. It's quite surreal that it was such a long time ago. People are just starting to play techno and just starting to get into it. You just never would have thought that you would be part of something that was gonna explode in such a way. A lot of people I know that were doing hip hop back in the day, now they don't even do music or they've moved into something like soundtrack music. It's a beautiful thing to see that some people have stayed on their journey. And the journey is a foundation of much, much of the world's electronic culture. It's a weird one because sometimes we all want to move on but right now you realise no, you don't actually. You live a full life and then you celebrate it before it's over. And you make sure that you share everything, all the good things you've done to the utmost.
'Sometimes we all want to move on but right now you realise no, you don't actually. You live a full life and then you celebrate it before it's over. And you make sure that you share everything, all the good things you've done to the utmost'
You’ve seen all kinds of youth culture come into fashion but you say hip-hop you knew was your time. Can you tell us how it felt when you finally felt aligned with a scene that was for you?
When I was younger, musically, I loved a lot of black music, I also liked a lot of English pop music. I was growing up in this country but I didn't relate to a lot of it. I didn’t relate to the skin stuff but I loved the funk. Obviously, being a Jamaican, reggae music was a no brainer. When I was getting into photography I was also playing the drums, I wanted to be a musician in a band. I was in a band but we were really a creative bunch of people, there were so many of us that we had this group called the TMC Telepathic Music Campaign. It was loads of mates that would just jam. About three different people played drums, everyone could play bass, we would swap instruments and have a right laugh. The first time we saw breakdancing and Electric Boogaloo. Whoa. Kids like us. Something you never saw in England. They sounded different and they looked really cool. Remember, we're on the transition of analogue and tech, not tech tech, technology, we're moving to the electronic age. We made this time, my generation made this time, we were born into it. I still got my Casio LCD, liquid crystal display. In the 80s, you got MTV Music Television. Michael Jackson made that bigger with the biggest video of the time. He was incorporating some crazy body-popping moves. If you were young you loved hip hop no matter what colour you were. You loved it because it was the most exciting thing to hit the world. Reggae, hip hop, MC’s, DJ selecting tunes and it’s all about bass bass bass. I was at home in hip hop. Def Jam, Public Enemy, hip hop just took over the world. Next thing you know, they're getting banned because we're saying stuff that no one's ever said on record before. First time a parental advisory was put on the record. That's the voice of the street and that's where I come from. It was a big big thing to be part of, I was injected with life. Things that before we couldn't attach ourselves to we had our own version now. We got to get our own watches, kits, trainers, Puma suedes. To this day this country buys all of that culture, sells it in TK Maxx. Just shows you how powerful a pair of suede Pumas is. So yeah, I had something that was my uniform. You know, even if you weren't a ghetto kid. Hip Hop made you feel like you were if you were a ghetto kid, you had a voice that was touching everyone. People had not accepted that we had a youth culture. And that was the moment when they had no choice.
Your photography is really dynamic in its style. Was this a way to keep yourself excited or were you searching for new ways to tell stories?
What happens is certain things appeal to you and it's reflected in the way you express yourself. Some of the photography that I saw growing up was very dynamic. I've always liked wide-angle shots, I've always liked those mad perspective shots. A lot of the strong 60s photographers would have these really ridiculous perspectives in this sort of stark photography. Then, when it comes to the street, I think I just tried to even think about it. I didn't really try, I would just be there taking the photograph, you know. I go back to the guy running this photography course, when he said to us, ‘I'm not going to teach you how to take photographs, or tell you what to take photographs of, all I can give us a few tips on how to get that picture onto a bit of film’. He said some people like taking pictures of the water. Some people like taking pictures of sport, it’s two completely different things. He said you only need one lens to take a good picture. That posed a bit of a question in my mind because I loved bits, all these different lenses that can make a photo; macro wide-angle, semi-wide, fisheye, zooms and all this stuff. He said you need one lens and if you want a wide-angle shot you just take a few steps back and if you want to get a real nice close-up, then you need to fucking get close. You’ll see it the way I shoot it. I get really close to people when I shoot, I like to be up amongst it, you know. I got so carried away with being in the fire pit, which is right in front of the stage. Another thing that I've worked out with regards to how I go about getting an alternative perspective on my photography is that when I was doing photographs at events, or gigs and stuff like that, and there was a lot of photographers there that were really professional press photographers, like big paper photographers and you know, big mags and stuff, they kind of were like a wall, you couldn't get around, they were all holding the same position for the best shot. I love my style from not being one of those guys and having to find a way of creating an image that was sharp, looked great and, without trying to sound too big-headed, did not look like anyone else's fucking work. One thing I just tried to do was make sure that my picture did not look like someone else's picture. I need to change it. So I would do stuff that was maybe not the right thing to do. But I just did it. I broke the so-called moulds. As far as I was concerned, I was free to do what I like with my camera.
I’m scanning all the time. See a shot before it comes and I just go towards it. I try not to look at things from the level of perspective your average human sees things because I find that extremely boring but I also find that sometimes something can be a bit overexciting so it’s a combination and a balance and I love that. That's what keeps me interested; photography is an infinite medium. I love what photography does for me. And what it does for me is it allows me to just soak up the world around me. And to be present. During instances such as an event, any time and place, I can make a walk 20 times more interesting just by the fact that when I'm walking I'm thinking there might be a good photo here.
If you could put one object into the Museum of Youth Culture what would it be and why?
I think one thing that would need to be present in a collection of youth culture would have to be a 12” Technics 1210. Because you know even though it’s all gone digital now and with all this stuff that DJs are using now, they wouldn't have been able to do that if it wasn't for that turntable. A Technics 1210 turntable, an original old school first generation battered one.
Let Normski take you on his journey through growing up in a newly electronic age and the lasting influence on music. Written for Google Arts & Culture Electronic Music Project in collaboration with The Museum of Youth Culture