"Four people, two metres apart, in a car park outside a hospice. It is the least glamorous photograph I have ever taken and probably the most travelled."
May 2020. Deep lockdown, the country shut. For a hospice that is not an inconvenience, it is an emergency. The Prince of Wales Hospice in Pontefract costs around £3,000 a day to run, and almost every way it had of raising that money had gone. The charity shops closed, the events cancelled, the collection tins nowhere to rattle.
The Idea An Artist, A Florist And A Printer
By then the Pontefract artist Rachel List was painting NHS murals on walls around the town, nurses depicted as superheroes, and they were being shared well beyond Pontefract. She put that artwork onto a run of limited edition mugs, made with Michelle's Flowers and Picsons Printers, with every penny going to the hospice.
I was asked to photograph the launch. Easy yes. I have always given time to good causes and I would do this one again tomorrow.
The Shoot Everything At Two Metres
I could not go inside the building. Nobody could. So the whole thing happened in the car park under the hospice sign, with everyone stood well apart and stepping forward one at a time to hold a mug up. The hospice's chief executive at the time was there, so was Michelle, who had been fundraising for them for years.
Looking at the pictures now, the distance is the whole story. At the time it just felt like an awkward set of directions to give. It has aged into a document.
Afterwards Where The Pictures Ended Up
Rachel List's murals became a national story that year, then an international one, appearing in round-ups of pandemic street art from around the world. The photographs from that morning travelled with the coverage, into papers and websites I have never read. Almost none of them carried my name.
That is simply what happens to a picture once it is swept into a news story. But if you are a photographer about to give a day to a cause you believe in, and I hope you do, agree the credit line before you turn up rather than after the pictures have gone out. Names do not usually get removed. They fall off somewhere between the press release and the page, and by then there is nothing to be done.
"Give your work away gladly. Give your name away by accident and you will never see it again."
The people who made it happen: artwork by Rachel List, mugs organised with Michelle's Flowers in Pontefract and printed by Picsons Printers, in aid of the Prince of Wales Hospice. This was a 2020 fundraiser and the mugs are no longer available.
More of this sort of thing: the rest of the work that got picked up elsewhere, including the years I spent photographing hospice fundraising, is on my featured and press page.
