Wednesday, March 09, 2016

Trev Eales - photography and friendship

Saturday, I went to Lancaster to meet up with my friend Trev Eales, whom I’ve known for 42 years. (He has a couple of walk-on parts in my autrebiography, Words Out of Time.) We walked (and saw the snow-peaked caps of the Lake District from the Castle Mound), talked, ate and drank. Amid the vital and essential catching up, we returned to a casual remark I made on our last meeting in Lancaster – no time at my birthday party in November to pursue this – the idea of combining my words and his photographic images in some form. Trev’s work has two main strands, the landscape photography taken on those very hills we’d seen (‘Today would have been perfect up there,’ he sighed in the sunshine), and his paid work as a music festival photographer.

Trev also reviews festivals, including one here, where he takes in a show by the poet Luke Wright, a curious meeting of our worlds. (He was still raving about it over coffee on Saturday.)

On the festival side, the side I’m interested in most, are images of artists ranging from Ella Eyre (a particular favourite of Trev), Booker T, Baba Maal, Robert Plant, The Prodigy, Marina and the Diamonds, St Vincent, Arctic Monkeys to The Stones (in all their wrinkled glory). I hope you’ll think his eye quite exceptional. I do. There is an interview with him here, which shows how the photography grew of out his interest in music. (Indeed, we first met at a Thin Lizzy concert in October 1974 at UEA.) 

We don’t have very detailed plans of how we would work, but the intention is activated. And emails shall follow!

 Images are displayed on his website here, and on his supplementary flickr site here. Dwell on them!

Here is an account of some of our later plans.