Marlborough Mop Fairground Workers

Last Saturday was the weekend of the Marlborough Mop, where the high street turns into a giant fairground for the night and all the local teens get drunk and dizzy, silly and sick. Oh, and a few families have a nice time too.

The history of the Mop Fair is succinctly described in the Wikipedia thus :

"Farm workers, labourers, servants and some craftsmen would work for their employer from October to October. At the end of the employment they would attend the Mop Fair dressed in their Sunday best clothes and carrying an item signifying their trade. A servant with no particular skills would carry a mop head — hence the phrase Mop Fair.

Employers would move amongst them discussing experience and terms, once agreement was reached the employer would give the employee a small token of money and the employee would remove the item signifying their trade and wear bright ribbons to indicate they had been hired. They would then spend the token amongst the stalls set up at the fair which would be selling food and drink and offering games to play."

Anyway, this use of the Mop Fair is long gone but the stallholders and ride attendants still come. And they're a pretty fascinating looking bunch. They lead pretty tough lives I'm sure, living on the road, keeping odd hours, grafting hard to get the stalls and rides erected and dismantled to a tight schedule. There's a certain toughness in the faces and it contrasts in interesting ways with the candy colours, fluffy stuffed toys and glitzy lights. All the effort goes into creating this wonderful, glittering, magical other world for a night, and if it was run in a corporate fashion these people would be wearing Hi-De-Hi blazers and cartoon animal suits. But they're not. They're real. Straightforward. Honest representations of themselves.

The Slidegun

The following is lifted directly from my flickr page (http://www.flickr.com/photos/uncertainworld/2183447974/) where I described it at the beginning of 2008. 

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ok, so I finally got around to describing this thing a little better....

a. sb800, liberally wound with velcro of course

b. nikon diffuser cap with the front cut out of it, velcro on the sides to hold slide.

c. slide, printed on acetate on a desktop inkjet, with tabs of velcro on the edges.

d. funnyfoam snoot to hold the lens, with a strip of velcro along each edge

e. 50mm 1.8 lens (lightweight and wide aperture) with a strip of velcro wound around it which goes in the nose of the snoot, something like 50mm off the front of the slide. 

see it assembled at www.flickr.com/photos/uncertainworld/455957985/in/set-721...

check out photos tagged with slidegun in my stream to see what it does, then go make one. tag the results with slidegun, just so i get a thrill out of it!

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I'd actually been using a variation of the slidegun for nearly a year before that, but ideas gestate slowly in my mind sometimes. As far as I know nobody was doing this when I started. It's an idea that has huge possibilities for mixing scenes with branding, text, subversion, comedy, or simply creating an image in camera that's greater than the sum of it's parts. 

I've only had a few opportunities to use the slidegun commercially since then, the majority for jeanswear company Real Real Genuine. Richard at RRG was really supportive and enthusiastic, for which I'm very grateful. 

Quite a few people seem to have taken up the challenge and produced variations on the slidegun of their own. It's hugely gratifying to find someone in Japan or Australia or wherever has spent a day off building one of these and testing it, and posting the results on photosharing sites and blogs. If you're interested in trying it out, tag or name the results with "slidegun" just so everyone who has an interest can find them. 

Here are some of my results :

Steam Barge

This is Tony Bryant. He lives on a narrow boat which runs on a unique steam engine he built himself. It's fuelled with dead wood which he picks up from the sides of canals and surrounding fields. Seems like the ultimate in green transport!

I met him in August 2009 while I was working for the local paper (a rare event lately) and I gave him my number. A few days later he called me to ask if I wanted to come and ride with him through the Bruce tunnel on the Kennet and Avon canal near Marlborough. It's about a quarter mile long, and enables the canal to pass beneath the main London to Penzance railway line. And it's 200 years old this year.

He was on his way to Bristol, from where he was planning to turn north up the Severn. His ambition is to see Loch Lomond from his boat.