Photography, Film, Dali, Zappa - an interview with Lukas Strebel

Photography, Film, Dali, Zappa - an interview with Lukas Strebel

16 November, 2011
by: Tom Jeffreys

Award-winning cinematographer Lukas Strebel tells Tom Jeffreys about his life as a photographer ahead of his retrospective exhibition this winter.

The Nightjar – an impossibly classy underground bar located just a few hundred yards from Spoonfed Towers on City Road – seems like the perfect place in which to meet Emmy-winning cinematographer Lukas Strebel. It's dark and strange and packed with the oddball glamour of ages past – a little, it seems to me, like Strebel's photographs from the 1970s, a selection of which is going on show this winter, round the corner at Printspace on Kingsland Road.

But there's a problem. Listening back to the interview transcript is a rather painful task, on account of our conversation being frequently drowned out by the dulcet tones of background jazz and soul. Ray Charles' 'Hit the Road Jack' obliterates a large section of the recording, but, funnily enough, it sort of seems right, particularly when discussing someone who has always spent so much of his life on the road, as it were.

Silver-haired but looking youthful in a rather cool leather jacket, Strebel may be best known for his cinematography work on shows like Garrow's Law and Little Dorrit, but it's his days as a still photographer that take up much of our conversation. Growing up in Switzerland, a country with no film school in the 1960s and '70s, Strebel forged a successful career as an artist working in photography, that took him across the world: from an apprenticeship in Zurich to teaching at Bath Academy of Art, an artist residency in Canada to visiting Dali's house in Spain (another story altogether).

“It was an exciting time, a very special time,” he tells me over one of the Nightjar's elaborate cocktails. “I used to travel around in a Volkswagen Beetle. You could drive anywhere then – I have this photograph of Florence, right outside the Duomo!” It's typical of the sense of freedom and adventure in Strebel's anecdotes of his past. “We were real hippy kids,” he continues, creating a sence of a kind of Europe-wide idyll. “We had these mescaline full-moon parties in the Alps, amazing gigs like Moldova jazz festival, Frank Zappa – when the casino burnt down, you know? I had a huge freedom but lived very frugally.”

And all the while he was lugging round all manner of strange props – “horns and masks and lights and chairs” – in order to construct his painstakingly staged images, all shot in black and white, and rich with strange, indecipherable symbolism. The title of the exhibition, for example, comes from a table that Strebel travelled everywhere with for three years. For some reason he named it Antoglyph (“don't ask me why”) and it forms the basis of an incredible shot [above] of him seemingly flying, witch-like, as waves lap at the table-legs.

Despite his success as a photographer, Strebel always had his sights set on working in film, and the constructed nature of his still photography was clearly ideal preparation for the transition. “Telling stories – that was always my interest,” he says, “ and I always wanted to work in film. With photography, sometimes I felt very lonely, whereas in film you share a vision, you have a whole team working on it, and ideas come together.”

And yet, as the industry (and his role within it) has continued to grow and change, Strebel warms to the intimacy of his early still images. “The teams are so big sometimes – my crew might be 27 people and I can't even remember their names!”  By contrast, he speaks warmly of the days of one-dollar plastic Diana cameras and lightbulbs fixed to the back of chairs, and when I ask if anything has been lost in the industry's transition to digital, his answer is immediate: “the magic”.

But then maybe it's just nostalgia. The whole process of revisiting these early photographs was prompted by Strebel's soon-to-be daughter in-law, Natasha Hoare, who is curating the exhibition, and it's clearly been a pretty major undertaking. “For me it's quite a journey to go there again,” he explains, “ trawling through negative books and contact sheets – I was quite nervous to actually sit down and look at these images, but then I got really excited. And then depressed because there was so much material to go through!”

“I'm just grateful to Natasha,” he continues, “to her curiosity and her interest, which is genuine, in my work. She lifted me and brought me towards something that I wouldn't have done alone.” Or at least that's what I think he says – with Ella Fitzgerald in full flow, it's kind of hard to tell.

Lukas Strebel – Antoglyph is at Printspace from 25th November 2011 to 3rd January 2012.

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Tom Jeffreys