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Stuart Roy Clarke is an English documentary photographer, author, exhibition-artist, speaker. His major works include The Homes of Football [1] and Cumbria Surrounded [2] and Glastonbury All Mine [3] .
Clarke was born in Berkhamsted, Hertfordshire, on 19 August 1961, the youngest of three children of Mary (née Punton-Smith) and Roy Percy Clarke, a quantity surveyor. Clarke's childhood was at 61 Egerton Road, Berkhamsted - the family home for all of 61 years. Clarke's paternal grandfather was head of the town Council 1935-1939 when many of the town's facilities (cinema, swimming-pools, football grounds) were opened.
After several years of working for local newspapers in Hertfordshire and as a freelance photographer for the magazine Time Out in London, Clarke went to live in The Lake District, where he began The Homes of Football in 1990. [1]
Other bases include Hathersage in Derbyshire and Louth in Lincolnshire. The home for the work has been above all at Armathwaite - in Cumbria.
The football opus, documenting the changing face of the game, was self-funded initially but then evolved into a touring exhibition hired by various municipalities and shown in 80 museums and art galleries over a 15-year period. In 1997 Clarke also opened a permanent gallery to his football work in Ambleside, in the English Lake District. The gallery closed in 2012. [4]
In 2005, he started Cumbria Surrounded, which went on to win the Lakeland Illustrated Book Of The Year in 2010.
The Homes of Football is composed of photographs taken entirely on medium format film, without cropping, using a Bronica camera and a standard lens. Latterly Clarke has utilised iPhones to modernise his work.
Clarke began The Homes of Football in the wake of the Hillsborough Disaster and the resulting Taylor Report. The earliest photograph in the collection is of four boys at Kilbowie Park, home of Clydebank, in 1989—a club and ground that has since disappeared. During the 1990s, Clarke made thousands of trips to football matches, photographing the crowd and the grounds themselves. The focus was on the ordinary football supporter, rather than the more 'glamorous' side of the game. Clarke was also the only official photographer for The Football Trust from 1991 and its successor The Football Foundation until 2005. The collection has been supported by the Professional Footballers' Association. [5]
John Motson called the work "A unique and wonderful collection of football scenes. Stuart Roy Clarke puts a new perspective on the game." [10]
Bryan Robson, the then manager of Middlesbrough, wrote in 1996 that “Stuart Clarke has brought to life the international game of football with a series of outstanding, innovative and often witty photographs.” [11] Mike Foster, General Secretary of The FA Premier League added in 1998 “The exhibition really is paradise for any lover of football. The feelings I had were not dissimilar to walking into an empty stadium; soaking up the atmosphere and letting your imagination wander – you really do lose yourself in the surroundings” ... and in 2010 on the release of an anthology of Clarke's Homes of Football work adds "I never tire of looking at the photographs. They are captivating and evocative of a football lovers’ halcyon
Kevin Roberts, CEO of Saatchi&Saatchi, described the Ambleside gallery as "an amazing experience" [12] in a 2009 article about Clarke's work.
Philip Köster, managing director of '11 FREUNDE - Magazin für Fußballkultur' wrote that "Clarke depicts football at its core, which eventually makes its indestructible: passion. Whatever he takes photos of he always searches automatically for the emotional centre of the picture. Clarke is a documentalist of change, an incorruptible contemporary witness with a camera.” [13]
The young Stuart Roy Clarke soon decided that much more interesting than events on the pitch at Vicarage Road was the strange stadium architecture and the antics and characters present in football crowds. He began to take his camera to games to make his own extraordinary photographic record of the menagerie of Britain's varied clans of football supporters, and of the mainly eyesore stadiums to which they seemed so deeply and mysteriously attached. He was already on what was to become his Homes of Football [1] journey, recording and reporting on British football stadium life from the ground level up. Relying always on single-shot colour film and employing no fancy 'improving' technology, he captured what was, by then, a rapidly changing fan and stadium terrain. Clarke was able to produce a vital visual record of the before-and-after impact of Hillsborough and the Premier League era on stadium architecture and culture. [20]
His commission, via The Football Trust (the public body then charged with distributing small public grants for the national stadium modernisation programme in Britain) was to chart the impact of this public investment, including the transformation of the national stock of elite British football grounds. Few major clubs at that time kept detailed historical records or housed even amateur historians; none had convincing museums. Times have changed since. Certainly, very few British football clubs were likely, faithfully, to record their own immediate past at this critical juncture or to chart, through photography or other means, the bumpy road into this challenging new future. [20]
Clarke was now carefully recording the key features of historic British football stadiums before their modernisation or potential destruction; he was on hand to report on the demolition of some great, historic, British sporting buildings. He had also developed a keen eye for capturing historic local sporting spaces in decline: sagging stadium storage sheds or merchandise shops; shabby, but distinctive, ticket offices; grisly food outlets; strange toilet facilities; stretches of weed-infested terracing. He was skilled at seeing the abstract beauty of vivid newly painted stadium walls and stairwells. These were buildings, passageways and spaces that most fans might only see in passing, or might regard as barely functional eyesores, some of them awaiting likely (and probably deserved) demolition. Clarke's photographs somehow revealed their wider cultural value and historic significance as if they should be preserved at all costs, perhaps even listed as national monuments. He was becoming the visual record keeper of the sport, its homes and its people. And all at a critical moment of convulsive change. [20]
Clarke went on to develop a remarkable visual map, a portfolio of photographs of fans and places, with supporters, volunteers and workers often captured at lesser outposts. [20]
Certainly, his images of British football culture and venues in a period of rapid change in the early 1990s are routinely poignant, frequently humorous and typically respectful of both places and his human subjects. As well as stadiums and fans, there are also careful studies here of mainly lower-level, otherwise 'hidden' club employees and service workers: bouffant tea ladies, spectacular young burger flippers, laid-back match stewards, insistent club programme sellers. His interest as a chronicler of a sport in deep transformative change was never in the occupational lifestyles of the elite players, or even in the spectacular youth fan subcultures of the stadium. This highly visible inversion of the traditional football hierarchies - the role of workers and ordinary tans highlighted and represented over those of owners, directors and players - is central to the ethos of Stuart Roy Clarke's wider football project. [20]
Football photography can capture great goals and wonderful achievements, but images can often be more powerful when they show the crowd, or general football scenes. During the 1990s and 2000s, photographer Stuart Roy Clarke attended games looking for moments to capture. His images often show the culture of football in a way that regular matchday photographers did not at the time. The image shown here (and at St.George's Park, with Clarke stood before it) came from a Sunderland-Coventry game in 1996 and captures a fleeting moment when the anticipation of what could happen can be seen all over the faces of the Sunderland fans behind the fences at Roker Park. [21]
This image is a wonderful example of Clarke's passion for making the ordinary special. No one in the photograph is posing, or seemingly aware of being photographed. They are engrossed in the game and Clarke has captured a moment all fans can recognise. [21]
Over time the significance of this image, and the rest of Clarke's work, has increased. [21]
This photograph is part of Stuart Roy Clarke's The Homes of Football series. These images were taken on a Bronica camera with a standard lens and were not cropped, with his first photo in the series being of four boys at Clydebank's Kilbowie Park in 1989 (also shown). Like Roker Park, this is another ground that has since been demolished. Other grounds, such as Maine Road, were also captured in their final days by Clarke. [21]
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