Maverick documentary photographer Marc Vallée recently delivered the latest of our PhotoTalks to an appreciative capacity audience. In his talk ‘From Zine To Gallery Wall’ he told the long and at times circuitous journeys that his work has taken over the years.
Beginning with his collection ‘When I Was At Art School’, Marc explained how he discovered a box of old photographs he had taken of friends when he was studying for his Masters. Intimate, casual portraits shot in his and their student flats in the 1990s, that provide an insight into youth queer culture of the time. Deciding that he wanted to self-publish a photobook of these images, Marc was steered in the direction of the Martin Parr Foundation to get his negatives scanned. From these and prints made at Metro Imaging he worked with a designer to put together the photobook.
Having already had some success getting earlier zines into The Photographers’ Gallery, Foyles and a number of European gallery bookshops, Marc was able to place this book successfully. A book launch led to a themed soirée, which in turn led to a fortuitous meeting with a gallery curator, which led to an exhibition at Liverpool’s Open Eye gallery. Sounds easy? Well, it was in the retrospective telling of the tale, and Marc pointed out how lucky he had been that many constellations aligned on the way. He also stressed that if he had not taken the first step of printing the book and put in the legwork of getting it into bookshops none of this would have happened.
After a break, Marc showed work from a series of photographs he took of graffiti painters that formed the basis of one of his zines’, ‘Vandals In The City’. Having gained the trust of these notoriously elusive nocturnal “vandals”, he spent evenings photographing their clandestine spraying activities and building up a significant body of work. Eventually, Marc selected the best of these to form the basis for his second zine and the first he managed to get the notoriously picky Photographers’ Gallery bookshop buyer to stock. A curator at the Barbican who was putting together an exhibition of photography of nighttime London, happened to see a copy and approached Marc to see if he would like to be included in the show. From having a few images selected, he went to being the poster boy, with one of them being used to advertise the whole exhibition. This led to a solo show at Metro Imaging, where a major collector of photography saw the work and purchased the whole set!
Certainly luck has played its part in the extraordinary journeys both of these collections of Marc’s photographs have taken. But, he repeatedly said that without the initial decision to produce zines, they might never have progressed to being shown in prestigious galleries which are so difficult to get into.