Emmanuel Cole

0:00 Hi, thank you for coming everyone. I really appreciate it. My name is Emmanuel Cole. Born and raised in London, East London to be exact. Hackney to be more specific than that. It's nice to be back in Hackney. Don't live here anymore but this area was really key in shaping me and who I am. So today I'll be talking about my debut book, Bear and Witness. It came out last year, July 2023.

0:35 But yeah, in order to understand this book I need to go back a bit and kind of explain how the book came to be. So growing up in London I was really passionate teenager. I've always been passionate but the main thing that kind of grabbed my attention of the youngster was sports and that mainly basketball. Basketball was kind of one of those things that just captivated me. It was the first thing I thought about when I woke up in the morning and the last thing I thought about before I went to sleep.

1:13 But the dream of kind of being a professional basketball player was caught short quite quickly. I found out I had some injuries which were related to growing pains and just couldn't continue playing at a level that I thought I was going to make it out. And it's kind of like a running joke amongst ex sports players that, you know, we could have made it pro but we got the injury. So that was it for me.

1:39 So I was a bit lost for a while until I had my breaking moment or a very important key moment for me. I was coming back from a night out in my late teens and I was on a bus, this bus specifically the M4A8. And I met a photographer. He was sat on a bus, he sat beside me.

2:03 He was looking for some images on his camera and I was kind of looking over his shoulder trying to get a look at the pictures. It was the first time I'd seen a professional camera. And he saw I was taking an interest in his stuff so he started to speak to me, show me the work. And we had a quick conversation and he got off the bus.

2:28 But that conversation changed my life. It was a few key things about him but I think it was because he was like quite a confident black guy and I'd never seen a black person interested in photography. I'd never even heard of photography at that point.

2:45 So I got off the bus, walked home and thought, God, I want to be like that guy.

2:52 So I messaged my uncle the next day who was very supportive to me, told him I wanted to become a photographer and I needed a camera so he bought that for me. At the beginning the camera was quite hard to manage and to work.

3:03 I didn't understand the settings. It was all a bit too much for me.

3:08 But I kept messing around with it and not long after that I got my first job at the charity fundraiser knocking doors, doing door to door fundraising. So a lot of people would have seen fundraising standing in the street asking you to sign up to charities but the organization I joined up with which was called home fundraising represented a lot of great charities but they primarily went from door to door speaking to people. So that was my first ever job at the age of 20. I felt like I was a bit late to get a job at the age of 20 when a lot of my peers had been getting jobs before that but nonetheless it was great and not even just great.

3:49 It was a defining moment for me because it was when I learned a lot about my passion for engaging with people. To start off with I was pretty much the worst fundraising in my company's history. My manager made it quite clear to make me aware of that. But within a few months once I realized that I just needed to switch on that passion, that same passion I always had mainly in my sports. Once I applied that passion to my engaging with a member of the public on the door to through the doors everything clicked into place and before you know it I was leading a team, taking my team all throughout the streets of London and just engaging with people and doing really well at it and this is when I discovered my passion for navigation and location.

4:37 So this is, I'm talking about early days, this is before the time of the smart phone so I was basically using the A to Z like the one on the screen there and using that to navigate through the streets and I really loved it.

4:58 So yeah, continued doing that job for about three to four years, did really well and a moment came when I felt like I was just ready to become a freelance photographer so I left that job, got myself a Canon t-shirt and I wanted the world to know that I was serious. You know, I wanted everyone to know I was serious about this photography thing. Looking back at it, it's a bit cheesy now but I thought it was the best thing at the time. You know, I went to Uniqlo, got that shirt and was like yeah, I mean business.

5:27 So the next few years just became about exploring and learning on the streets. I never went to college or university so I didn't study photography but I had to find a way to study and this is where my relationships and people that I met over the next few months and years were very vital to everything that's happened to me since then. So me and my friends would explore London and we'd photograph whether that was going to rooftops trying to find the most interesting perspectives of London in the night and we would shoot from day to night. I mean like 11 p.m.

6:04 And we'd finish like when the sunrise in the morning and we did this like repetitively and that was my education. You know, that was when I would shoot architecture, cityscapes, street scenes, portraiture, a lot of different genres. Still trying to figure out what my style or theme or calling was in the photography world. But having my friends with me and going through that process with them was amazing and I felt like photography especially when it came to asking for permission, it just felt so easy because prior to that I'd been asking, remember the Republic for their bank details.

6:50 So I was like, this is a breeze. I'm asking for permission if I can take your picture.

6:59 This is simple. And it really felt like that. You know, it took me a long time to believe in myself but I have a knack for engaging with people and I think I learned through the door to door fundraising that. I come across as non-threatening and that was very important because that, learning that about myself through fundraising really empowered me.

7:16 So I would, I used the fundraising and the areas I used to visit, mainly working class areas, being from Hackney and being from the tower blocks of Pembria State. The working class community seemed to be what really, is where I got a lot of my success when I used to knock on the doors and it was where the success came. Oh, where the fun and where I felt engaged when doing street fundraising. So street photography.

7:49 So I would go back to areas such as, I mean these two pictures are taken in Kilburn, so either on Kilburn High Street, hitting the markets of like Deppford, High streets of East Ham and being from far East London, you know, fundraising taught me about far West London, going to areas like Southall and I would like take my friends and basically be the one in charge of telling everyone in the morning, oh this is where I want us to go, this is where we're going to go and photograph, this is where we're going to hit up and thankfully my friends just kind of had the trust in me and believed that.

8:23 I kind of knew what I was saying. And we all had a good time like photographing high streets and stuff but again I was kind of mixing the genres and not really focusing on one particular style of photography.

8:33 So yeah this is Brixton and Ilford and just a few other places.

8:43 I also realised that in doing photographing in loads of different areas I was very passionate about photographing in the tube.

8:52 I only got my driving license a year or two ago and I'm thankful for that because having an OISR card empowered me, it was like it allowed me to travel, hit the tube, I would even go and visit relatives or friends or people I didn't really want to see, too tough but I just thought if I can give myself an excuse to get on the tube I'll go visit that person and it was like a reason to be on the tube so all of this was very important in my education in learning how to photograph the streets but still I didn't have that, I didn't know which style or which avenue in photography was my niche.

9:30 So I decided to travel, I visited a lot of different countries from Hong Kong to Turkey, spent a lot of time in Istanbul and places like this made it clear that my calling was to photograph people and not to photograph architecture or cityscapes which I enjoy but there was just something more empowering about connecting with people and knowing that you could disarm somebody, even somebody that looked quite difficult to photograph, I knew I've always felt that I've had the power if I wanted to to grab to them and just use a few words and be able to disarm them and get the photograph I want. So and that was why travel was really important for me to hit these countries and to realise that people were my focus.

10:26 So after the travelling I came back to London and it was clear that I was going to photograph people only and so I did that for a long time without slowing down, without helping my friends, we all documented London whether it would be hitting markets, hitting high streets or even my favourite event of the year in London which is the Notting Hill Carnival and going to that every single year for the last 10 years and making it my mission to capture some of the best pictures that anyone in London has ever got from that carnival. So fast forward to end of 2019, start of 2020, we're in the COVID pandemic and everything slowed down for me at this point and I thought like what do I do? I wasn't the most inspired as well at this point in my life if I'm being honest but I knew I was sitting on a body of work and being an avid collector of photo books I wanted to make a book myself.

11:30 So I started putting together a concept of a book, started doing a bit of tweaking on InDesign, very crap at using InDesign by the way, I won't show anyone the concept but anyway the concept was good, it gave me the understanding of how the book could look but it had different genres and it didn't really make sense.

11:59 So I put that to the side and in the year 2022 I was contacted by a lady called Kathy, me and Kathy had previously worked together on a job for Adidas in 2016, no 2014 and she back then had said to me what do you think about representation, do you want me to represent you?

12:23 And I was like at the time I was like representation, I can't lie I was a little bit, I didn't have to put it nicely, I kind of just, I didn't have an understanding of the word representation, I didn't know what an agent was and I just didn't understand any of that, I was just taking pictures for the fun of it and didn't have any education about the world of freelancing, whether it was inversing, all of that.

12:45 So I said no basically and so she reconnected with me in 2022 and put me forward for a job with BMW and that job changed my life, like that job really changed my whole life and my commercial trajectory really accelerated from that point and so after the campaign and the work I did with BMW and Mini I reached out to Kathy and said Kathy I've got a book, I want to make it real and I also remember our conversation from like years back where you asked for representation, will you represent me? And she basically said no.

13:25 So I tried again to put her arm, took her for a meal and she basically said yes the second time round and the yes became very big because I then was able to tell her about the book, the idea for the book and she sat me down and she started to say look let's get rid of these streets, city scapes, let's get rid of the architecture, let's make it focus on London and the people of London and I needed that because being that person that didn't go to school for photography I really didn't understand about how the educational system teaches you how to photograph for projects rather than photographing and then making a project later out of it. So she did a lot in terms of helping me to put together the work for the book and so we started working on front covers, you know the content was all good now, we'd sorted out the content but the front covers took so long, you know I had so many images I connected to for so many different reasons but this is where someone important comes in, my brother-in-law, he's a writer and I sat down with him and told him the story about the book and my idea and where I wanted to go with it all and yeah he took it all in and the next day he just sent me a whole like a bio and I read it through and I saw the words bearing witness in the bio and I was like wow that's the title, we're going to go with bearing witness.

15:06 So once the bearing witness was nailed down I knew that the image that was going to go with the bearing witness had to be this image of the guy holding his you know covering his face with it being ironic especially and there's a lot of humour in the book as well you know I wouldn't consider myself a funny person but a lot of the work in the book does have a bit of humour in it so I just felt like it all worked really well and this is just a few, this is like the last part where we're just trying to get the last final cover ready and obviously selected the yellow writing and the book was made and this is a massive massive thing for me because being an avid collector of photo books, being somebody that is very passionate about London, meeting that guy on the bus years back and not even knowing that that conversation with him was going to lead to this, like I'm very thankful for everything and I'm very thankful for the chance encountered, the chance encountered with Caffee, the chance encountered with the guy on the bus and the main thing I want to say just to end this is I feel like anyone in this room that had the passion or had something that they worked hard on you can make anything a reality, I had no idea that I could make a book or make something, a solid body of work especially without going to university and studying and learning how to do things the right way, maybe it meant that I took a bit longer but I got there in the end and yeah any of you could have a personal project waiting in your archives, you could be sat on something now that's ready to become something bigger than what you think so double check and have a look and you know you could make something happen. Thank you for listening.