Category: Photography

I met Noel Fielding at Croydon art college, then we lived together when we were at Buckinghamshire College of Higher Education, along with Nigel Coan who went on to do all the Boosh animation. Noel and Julian Barratt did an improv night at the Hen and Chickens, in the lead-up to writing their first Edinburgh fringe show. In 1998, they won best newcomer at the city and subsequently brought the Boosh to radio and TV.

The first series was on late on BBC Three. I played various characters including an Australian zookeeper called Joey Moose, a monster called Black Frost, and a fire and a naan bread as part of a running gag. I’d do all the choreography and dance routines. The reviews for the first series were pretty poor, so we assumed no one was watching, but we decided to take it on tour anyway. All the while, I’d been doing graphic design and a bit of photography. I ditched my job and joined the cast with Noel, Julian, Rich Fulcher and Noel’s little brother, Mike. We had been used to our little London and Edinburgh comedy bubbles. Suddenly, we were in these beautiful Victorian theatres and weird sports halls and community centres. It was a real mixture.

This photo, called Backstage Belly, was taken in the Sands Centre in Carlisle, which had a 1970s red-and-cream vibe to its backstage area. Rich’s bellybutton was an integral part of the Bob Fossil character. The stretching of his blue outfit was very important. His shirt had to be just the right size not to burst. If his bellybutton wasn’t out, the comedy wasn’t as good. Noel didn’t know I was taking his picture. If he had, he would have been Blue Steel-ing it down the barrel. He usually has the ability to spot a camera from 500 yards in thick fog. But here he’s contemplating. It’s unusual to capture him so unposed and natural. I’ve known Noel for over 30 years. He’s in his absolute element in front of a live audience. I think a lot of people who only know him from Bake Off don’t realise his background is in standup.

This shot would have been taken on 35mm film as it was pre-digital. I love the symmetry of it: the black line down the middle, the black and yellow pop of Noel’s glove, and the contrast between the black, red and white. It’s got a White Stripes feel to it. I also like the reflection: I use mirrors a lot. It must have been pre-show because they don’t look sweaty enough for it to have been in the middle or after. Plus Rich is drinking an orange juice.

My forthcoming exhibition, Behind the Boosh 20, has been hard to curate because I pick shots from a photographic point of view, whereas fans want to see photos of their favourite characters and episodes. What’s funny is that most of the shots were taken while I was in a gorilla suit. In the first series, Bollo the gorilla was an expensive animatronic suit with a very expensive actor inside. He dies in the scene where they go to monkey hell, but Noel and Julian decided they wanted him back on the live tour, so they said: “Dave, do you fancy being Bollo?” I said: “Sure.”

They got loads of prosthetics made. Then the makeup woman said “Monkeys don’t have eyebrows” and shaved mine off. Then Julian, Noel and the director, Paul King, said: “It’s not right. We’re going to use a mask instead.” So I asked the makeup woman: “Was that strictly necessary for a two-second test?” I had no eyebrows and my girlfriend wouldn’t even look at me.

Dave Brown’s CV

Born: Essex, 1973
Trained: Photography and graphic design, Buckinghamshire College of Higher Education
Influences: “William Eggleston, Wim Wenders.”
High point: “Playing 11 sold-out gigs at Brixton Academy, London.”
Low point: “Passing out in the Bollo suit.”
Top tip: “Don’t ever not do something because it’s scary.”

Behind the Boosh is at Behind the Gallery, London, 10 to 13 October

Beirut, Lebanon

People gather at the site of the assassination of Hezbollah leader, Hassan Nasrallah, in the city’s southern suburbs

Photograph: Hassan Ammar/AP

Look at Magnum photographer Gregory Halpern’s images of Buffalo, New York and you’ll see stark contrasts and contradictions. It is a place full of obstacles and hardship: relentless snowfall that lasts for months on end; a decline of industry and population in the city’s postwar era; a lack of both infrastructure and opportunity.

In one image, vibrant wildflowers grow in thick, yellow-tipped swathes across the foreground of weathered industrial structures. A windswept wooden house leans sleepily, its vacant innards exposed to a flurry of snowfall. A single white deer gazes ahead, ears poised, focused as if bracing for danger.

It’s taken from King, Queen, Knave, a new book in which Halpern examines his native city – located within America’s rust belt – over the course of 20 years. Halpern, whose exhibitions and publications have long explored the intricacies of Americana, is a master observer.

“My grandmother lived in Manhattan,” says Halpern on our Zoom call, sporting his trademark blue chore jacket and horn-rimmed spectacles, “which is a five-hour drive for us. As a young child, visiting her felt pretty exciting. I remember riding the bus with her, facing the adjacent row full of strangers, and her telling me: don’t stare, but I couldn’t help myself.”

Halpern found himself thinking about this fascination with faces while making King, Queen, Knave: “To look at how the light moves when they move. I still find that a very remarkable thing about photography.”

Halpern spent his many planned visits to his Buffalo-based father armed with the revered hulk of a Pentax 67 camera, restricted to 12 exposures with each precious roll of film. In retracing half-familiar paths, searching for the crucial, elusive essence of home, Halpern was tasked with the job of immortalising a place layered with the familiar and the alien.

“I feel like this was the hardest project that I’ve ever done,” he says, candidly. “You would think it would be the easiest somehow, but emotionally, just going home, it’s always complicated. I think, there’s the sense that growing up if you’re going to succeed you’re supposed to leave, and not come back. So in a way, there’s a sense of pleasure in leaving, but nowhere else has felt more like home since I left.”

The concept of home is a central theme in American photography and there are fleeting glimpses here of traits from the lineage of artists before him. A glance at Halpern’s nighttime photograph of a nondescript suburban house, exhaling smooth, inverted pyramidic chimney smoke, evokes the otherworldliness of Todd Hido’s oeuvre. Seeing a young woman at the water’s edge, deep in thought, conjures the cinematic, enigmatic energy of a Philip-Lorca diCorcia image, framed with the intimacy reserved for a story’s central characters. There is, however, another influence – that of a mentor of Halpern’s, whose simultaneously gritty and gentle works helped change the perception of working-class life on both sides of the Atlantic.

“I think the main influence for King, Queen, Knave, was Chris Killip,” Halpern says, in acknowledgment of the acclaimed British black-and-white photographer who documented the harshness and the hidden beauty in northern England’s de-industrialisation and surrounding hardships. “He’d always advised me to go back home and slowly chip away at a project, much like his own methodology. In King, Queen, Knave, there’s an image of a friend of mine, walking through a snowstorm, wearing a balaclava and trench coat. That was a direct nod to Chris and his work.”

The role of the elementsin King, Queen, Knave is dramatic: dozens of sallow apples are left to rot beneath a tree; a visor-clad woman picks flowers in a meadow eclipsed by a power station; a warehouse appears in the midst of a fire, its foreground alight with subsiding embers. Across the 112 pages, we see seasons change and life begin anew. The dichotomies of nature and industrialisation appear as clear and curious as ever.

The book stands apart from its peers thanks to a recurring motif: a leucistic (white), female deer named April. She appears haphazardly across the publication, like a portent or spectre.

“April felt like a perfect, surreal, ghost-like recurring character, to open and close the book with,” he says. “She’s a celebrity in the neighbourhood, so it would be like a thing if you spotted April, and posted on social media. I don’t know if I can articulate exactly what she means to me, but she’s pretty special.”

King, Queen, Knave feels as though it captures a moment in Buffalo. When I ask Halpern about the publication and its links both to the American dream and the turbulent politics of the past two decades, he pauses. “It’s not a political, or activistic body of work, but of course, there is a connection. People on the coasts and in academia in the US are often isolated and protected from what working-class America looks like. For example, 28.3% of Buffalo is living beneath the poverty line, and like many other places in America, people feel ignored. Without wanting to evoke pity, there is a complex, beautiful life being lived in Buffalo that many people don’t know or think about. For the first time in half a century, the city’s population grew in the last few years, mainly because it became a real hub for refugees. That’s been a positive change in the city’s life.”

Much like Halpern’s image of a frost-covered chequerboard, the game of life in New York’s once flourishing and industrious city, although fraught with hardships, is still there for the taking by the brave and the bold.

Liverpool, UK

The chancellor, Rachel Reeves, speaks on the second day of the annual Labour party conference

Photograph: Paul Ellis/AFP/Getty Images