It’s a cold, bleak night in January, and you have to go and shoot portraits for someone’s upcoming tour. A studio is out of the question. What do you do?
As is often the case on a cold winter night in London, my first thought was: “Head to the pub.”
First, let me digress. My friend Josh Rouse was in town, having played a London gig a few nights before. He’s an accomplished singer-songwriter who released a string of excellent records in the late 1990s and 2000s. I first met him over dinner at a Nashville diner in the weeks after the 2000 US Presidential Election, the days of the Florida Recount and “hanging chads”.
Rouse’s 2003 album ‘1972’ remains one of my favourite records of all time – a dozen songs influenced by artists who would have been in the charts in the year of his birth. Its follow-up ‘Nashville’ is another LP stuffed to the gunnels with great songs.
Around that time, I got to know him better, and started shooting his live shows and soundchecks. For the next record, 2006’s ‘Subtitulo’, I shot the press photos for the album at a studio near Battersea in South London, with his wife Paz as wardrobe assistant. I shot 90% of the day’s pictures on a Kiev-60 SLR, a 6×6 camera that’s a kind of Soviet equivalent of the Pentax 67.
It was the first time I’d done an artist shoot like this, and it was lovely to see some of the pictures popping up in music magazines in the months afterwards.
Fast forward to 2025. Josh had a summer tour of the UK and some US dates looming, and needed some fresh images for his social media. The budget didn’t quite spring for a studio. And he wanted them on film. So I figured some Kodak Portra 800 and Tri-X would cope with the conditions as long as we could find some reasonably direct light, and brought along the same Kiev-60 that I’d used nearly 20 years ago for the studio shoot. All three of us, back together again.
A pub that had been a regular bolthole when I do the Cameraburo pop-ups at Aperture Printing was about to close down, so I thought I could sweet talk the manager into letting me shoot there for a roll or two… but when we got there, surprise surprise it had already closed down, with the interior already partly demolished.
We found a pub a few streets away where I was able to snap some flash-free shots under the lights (you really don’t want to be handholding the Kiev with its flash sync speed of only 1/30). The pub lights, while fine for atmospheric drinking, proved a little too low for portraits.
But the Tri-X? I had quickly shot the roll a few yards away from our initial intended location, using the light from a nearby street lamp. The front window of an Italian restaurant added some interesting texture in the background. This shot, I think, was the best of them: enough light from the street lamp to produce some compelling catchlights in his eyes, and deep dark shadows to accentuate the winter mood.
I'm a New Zealander who has been living in London since the mid-1990s, shooting film seriously since the year 2000. Kosmo Foto was launched in 2012 and has since become a film brand, with the release of my first films Kosmo Foto Mono 35mm (2017) and Kosmo Foto Mono 120 (2019).
I’m doing everything I can to promote film photography in the 21st Century, and help it survive and thrive. If you want to write something for Kosmo Foto, please drop me a line at foto.dowling@gmail.com.
