Stuart Paton Photographer
Visit Dunfermline were delighted to chat with much-respected international photographer Stuart Paton about his work and his formative years growing up in Brucefield, Dunfermline.
I really want to know about your journey since you left Dunfermline, your successes, accolades, etc.
After a fair amount of soul-searching, I left Dunfermline for Paris in 1989, having met the future mother of my daughter there the previous summer. I was simultaneously homesick but bowled over by Paris. In fact, if I could pierce the space-time continuum, I'd opt to be a 1950s Parisian photographer-flâneur. What a time and place to be alive. While I was there, I kept plugging away with my photography until eventually landing a professional photographer's contract.
Then, in 2005, we upped sticks and headed out to the jaw-droppingly beautiful Finistère ('end of the Earth') in Brittany, where I hardly picked up a camera for eleven years. Until, on my 50th birthday, a demonstration in town turned into a full-scale riot, and my photography pulse began beating once more.
By Xmas 2016, I was starting a new life in Milan and went back at it with a vengeance. I was making up for lost time, taking pictures almost every day and producing my best work. I've never been motivated by accolades or faff. And much to the frustration of some friends and peers, I've retained the simplicity of the early years when happiness was a dole day bus trip with my camera and a packed lunch. I've had my work exhibited or published worldwide, success in competitions and recently was commissioned for a book about the traces of the pandemic.
Nonetheless, nothing can match my proudest moment when, in 2019, Paolo Pellegrin put me forward as a candidate for Magnum. It felt as if the planet had stopped revolving, and suddenly, everything leading up to that point made sense. It's not something I've ever shared in public before.
What special memories does Dunfermline hold for you?
Mischief. Laughter as an antidote to boredom. Larger-than-life characters. Incessant rain. Chip shops. Sunday telly Westerns. Pubs. Punk. Daydreaming. Signing on. Trying to work out who I was and how to escape 9 to 5 drudgery...etc. That sort of stuff. I was always a bit of a loner but luckily, I had a few great pals who probably saved me from myself.
The local library was a lifesaver, too. I spent countless hours in there whilst unemployed. Sheltering from the weather and the world. I'd plough through books with a hunger to self-educate. Novels, politics, philosophy, history, sociology, psychology and any other '-ology' I could lay my hands on. They had a great wee photography section, too, so I would photocopy my favourite pictures to blu-tac onto the walls of my flat for inspiration. I loved that place and was never made to feel unwelcome. When I pop my clogs, my photography books will be donated to it, and hopefully, some other scruffy ne'er-do-well will pick up where I left off.
Who are your biggest influences concerning your photography?
In truth, the most significant influence has always been anger. A typically Scottish distaste for injustice meant that when I first began taking pictures - during a six-month American road trip back in 1984 - my class politics translated into nervous mooches around Harlem and the Bronx. Once back home, the miners' strike only added fuel to the fire and by then, it felt as if I'd found 'my thing': my get-out-of-jail card.
As far as photographers are concerned, the ones who guided me early on were Don McCullin, Chris Killip and my dad—having grown up between the polarities of punk and Thatcherite neo-liberalism, that whole social documentary tradition chimed with me. Fast forward a few decades into a darker, more complex world and in turn, my pictures attempt to reflect that - transcribing our feelings of disorientation, emptiness and erosion of singularity. Without getting too heavy, photography is just the tip of the iceberg, and it's the underlying ideas and emotions which give it foundation and direction.
For better or worse, Dunfermline played a central part in that.
You can find out more about Stuart and purchase his prints on his website, patonphoto.wixsite.com or on Instagram
https://instagram.com/_stuart_paton_?igshid=OXB5anY1czU0d2U4