Mark Epstein Photography

Article by Sean O'Hagan.
The Observer
Sunday January 8, 2006

Video: Steve Pyke's 'Jack Project'

Video: Steve Pyke - Presenting Philosophers

He's the British photographer who has taken over from Richard Avedon on the New Yorker. He cut his teeth on the NME and the Face, and went on to photograph everyone from the world's leading philosophers to the men who walked on the moon. But Steve Pyke's 18-year labour of love is photographing his son Jack's journey from infanthood to adulthood.

Sean O'Hagan explores a life lived in black and white

Steve Pyke, aged 49, has taken thousands of photographs of his son, Jack, aged 17. They are the opposite of family snapshots, a body of evidence, almost scientific in its rigour and unrelenting in its starkness. The tracking of a single face, a single life, from birth, through childhood and adolescence, and into tentative adulthood.

Steve has photographed Jack in the same way at regular monthly intervals since Jack was just 20 minutes old. He sits his son down, positions his Rolleiflex inches from his face, and shoots a single roll of black and white film, from which he then selects one image. The session takes maybe two minutes; the work-in-progress already spans 17 years, and will be exhibited when Jack is 25 years old. Only recently did Jack see the end result in its entirety for the first time, the portraits arranged chronologically on contact sheets by his father, whose eye has governed every aspect of this ongoing project from the taking of the images to their editing and arranging.

'The really strange thing about these photographs, apart from the most recent ones, is that I don't remember any of them being taken,' says Jack. 'I might vaguely remember a shirt I was wearing, or a haircut I had, but that's all. Sometimes my dad will say to me, "Oh, that one was taken in Ireland or London in such and such a year," but I don't remember anything about the time or the place. It's odd because they're evidence of me growing up but they're also a bit unreal. The more I look at some of them, the more it feels like it never really happened.'

The photographs, though, are proof that it did happen. They are evidence of Jack's life, though they tell us - or, indeed, him - very little about the contours of that life, far less than a written diary or indeed a box of fading family snapshots might tell you. Here, there is no context - no beach, no telltale buildings, no family members or long-lost friends, no sense that this photograph was taken in the old family home in Kentish Town in north London, that one in Hastings Old Town. Just that face, those eyes, that stare. And the ever-changing haircuts.

What makes these images literally wonderful is the way in which they show us a person growing up before our very eyes, and how that person becomes himself without us really noticing. The images freeze-frame a life stage by stage in a way that is both utterly realistic and, as Jack notes, oddly unreal. Perhaps, too, they ultimately tell us more about the photographer than they do about the subject, more about a father's compulsion to record and catalogue than a son's willing participation in that same process.

'I suppose you'd say I'm a bit obsessive, but there is always love in the taking of these kinds of intimate photographs. I have another series of less formal family shots which I call "acts of memory", which, in a way, every photograph is. Every image I take is about the person before the camera but it is also about me. For a portrait to work, it has to be some kind of conversation between me and the subject. A conversation that takes place in an eighth of a second.'

Anyone familiar with Pyke's prodigious output may not be that surprised by these photographs, either the scale of their ambition or their almost clinical beauty. Of all the contemporary photographers currently engaged in portraiture, he is perhaps the greatest purist. Though he has photographed landscapes and objects - his most recent project is the beautiful Post Partum, Post Mortem, two books which feature forceps, scalpels and other tools of life and death - he is best known for his portraits, which tend to be both intimate and oddly intimidating.

He has photographed the world's leading thinkers looking like creatures from a brave new world of eccentricity for his best-known book, Philosophers, and he has captured men who have walked on the moon, as well as the last remaining veterans of the First World War. Soon, the former will outnumber the latter. Time, then, as well as age and mortality, are the dominant, if often latent, themes of his work, the core themes of photography itself.

'Time, and the passing of time, that's the essence of photography,' he says. 'It's the transient moment that Cartier-Bresson defined, the moment that is caught in an instant, and instantly gone - the eternal past. The more you take pictures, the more aware you become of that crucial instant and all that is contained in it. I work fast - to think about it too much when you are doing it might get in the way of the instinctive moment. Instinct is not all in photography, but it's a big part of it.'

Now based in Manhattan, where he has succeeded the late Richard Avedon as the New Yorker's portrait photographer of the great and the good, Pyke was born and grew up on a working-class housing estate in Leicester. He cut his teeth as a photographer in the great, but all too brief, democratic moment that was the London punk scene of the mid- to late-Seventies, when he worked for NME and The Face. His first book was about The Pogues, a band whose attitude to life, he says, was written on their faces. To a degree, his work has always retained an edginess and intensity that seems to come from somewhere deep within himself, and he is drawn - though more, these days, in his private, non-editorial projects - to the darker, stranger shores of human experience.

This ongoing life study of his son, though, is the biggest, most intimate project he has yet undertaken. (Duncan, his younger son, is the subject of a similar set of photographs that, interestingly, has thrown up a very different set of results. Where Jack sits still, Duncan moves about; where Jack looks impassive, Duncan pulls faces; where Jack's face is a map of the journey from childhood into adulthood, Duncan's is a more embattled landscape, a cut here, a bump there, a missing tooth, a dented nose, and, on one memorable occasion, two black eyes. 'I got some inflatable boxing gloves as a birthday present,' remembers Jack, 'and I thought they wouldn't work, but they did.')

Jack was born in 1988, at the same time that Steve was using an old Super 8 camera to record images of his mates on the London music scene. 'My original aim,' says Steve, 'was to photograph Jack every 30 days from birth to adulthood with the intention of making a three-minute Super 8 film with the results when he was 25. I wanted to somehow condense 25 years into three minutes. That would have been impossible back then, but with digital technology I can now do it. In the intervening years it has grown into something else entirely.'

That 'something else', he says, has to do with mortality - his own as much as Jack's. The earliest photograph of Jack included here was taken when he was just 20 minutes old. ('I'm actually surprised he waited that long,' says Jack, only half-jokingly.) If all goes according to plan, the last photograph Steve will ever take, in the very face of his imminent death, will be a portrait of Jack. 'If that happens,' he says, as if he has given this some considerable thought, 'and who knows what might occur in between to stop it happening, it will then literally be a life's work. But more than that it will be a project that began when his life began and will end with my death. It's an odd one to take in sometimes.'

I ask him if he has ever considered the myriad possible occurrences, accidental or otherwise, that could fracture this epic work-in-progress. He could, for instance, outlive his son. 'Of course I've thought of that,' he says. 'What else is photography about if it is not about mortality, the passing of time, about life and death? People say, "Christ, you're a morbid fucker at heart," but you cannot help but dwell on mortality if you are serious about taking pictures.'

I have known Steve for nigh on 21 years.We have worked together on assignments, on and off, for the same length of time. I can attest that he can indeed be a 'morbid fucker', but also a scabrously funny one, though he undertakes his work with a seriousness that borders on the pathological. This is a man who will photograph anything that moves - and anything that doesn't. He photographed his grandmother's last breath, but he has never shown me the image.

There have been times when I have marvelled at his gall and his ability, in this age of image control, to charm the great and the good, the vain and the vainglorious, into sitting still with a silent, unforgiving Rolleiflex mere inches from their nose. There is a kind of Zen purity - or Protestant puritanism - in the unrelenting starkness, the seeming sameness of his portraits, but that, too, is part of their power.

I ask Jack if he has ever objected to, or even resented, being photographed by his dad, who can be an intimidating presence when he has a camera in his hand and a certain look in his eye. 'Nah, I never really paid that much attention to the camera because it's been around all my life. My mum's a filmmaker, too, so it was always something that's been there. I always knew my dad was cataloguing something, even when I was really young.'

I ask Steve if he ever felt guilty that he had pushed the boys into a project whose magnitude they could have had no real understanding of until relatively recently. 'It's odd, but, in their different ways, they both seemed to get it from the very start. Duncan's thing was to try and make it more interesting for himself and, in a way, more challenging for me. Jack was always more unselfconscious. There's a photograph of him in a little cardigan, just a few months old, and he is looking calmly but quizzically straight at the camera. It's always stayed with me, that one. He knows. It's in the genes.'

I remember seeing Jack for the first time when he was just a few weeks old. He looked then like his mother, Nichola, and he has kept her deep, dark eyes, even as, in adolescence, his face has assumed his father's leanness. The earliest photograph here that strikes me with any degree of recognition is the one of Jack sucking his finger, aged five. I remember watching cartoons on television with the little boy who sucked his finger silently, removing it only to giggle at the antics of Tom and Jerry. I don't remember the mop of Beatle-ish hair, though, but the eyes were always striking, big pools of wonder and maybe anxiety.

In the photographs on the second composite sheet, the anxiety takes over for a while when the white shirt and dark tie appears, his first days at school, the uniform an intimation of the coming constraints of adulthood. That was my reading anyway, until Jack put me right.

'Usually Steve grabbed me first thing in the morning, because that's the only time he could get me to sit still. That's why I look so stern. I was not a good riser. That was the worst thing about going to school, the actual going.'

For me, the most striking, and unsettling images of Jack are in the third series of nine portraits, which catch him moving from boyhood into adolescence, between the ages of 10 and 17. Two things are immediately apparent: the coming of a certain self-consciousness that was absent in all the previous portraits, and the sudden and arresting brutality of that portrait of him with his head shaved.

'I thought long and hard about including the one where he is pulling a silly face,' says Steve, 'because it is literally the only instance of him doing that in all the thousands of photographs I took of him. It seemed important because it was so out of character. And, it's funny, too.'

'It always makes me laugh, that one,' says Jack. 'That's the day I woke up with a terrible hangover to find my mates had shaved off half my hair while I was sleeping. I walked around for half a day like that, then I shaved the rest of it off myself with clippers. I expected my dad to go nuts when he saw it, but his first reaction was, "Holy shit, where's the camera?"'

Now that Jack is almost 18, the relationship between father and son - as well as photographer and subject - has inevitably changed. For a start, Jack now lives in Hastings with his mother, while Duncan lives in New York with Steve. These days there are months rather than weeks between shoots, months in which the father and his oldest son do not see each other at all, and have to make up for lost time when they do. Jack is now studying photography and film, and occasionally helps his father on shoots. 'I realise now he has a strange technique all his own,' he says.

I ask Steve if the distance between the shoots, and his geographical distance from Jack, is reflected in the tone of the more recent photographs. 'It has to be,' he says. 'We have less time together so we have to make it matter. The sessions take only a few minutes, but it's something we've both been involved in equally from his birth until now, a continuum. It does seem sadder, but that could just be him growing up, or it could just be my sense of sadness that we are apart in between. Who knows?'