Dick Jewell: Britain’s nightlife archivist

CHERRRYBOy Magazine — Optigram

An avid collector and hoarder of images, Dick Jewell is like a magpie. Whether he is out collecting lenticular greeting cards or deciding which JPEG of a mug from one day’s eBay adverts to add to his collage 750 Mug Shots, Dick is constantly adding to his array of images, footage and objects.

“Ever the shepherd of our digital age.”
Julian Firth

Found Photos, Limited Edition Books, 1978 & 1981

200 Tongues, photomontage, lightjet print, 2003

Dick has been working from his studio in Pimlico for the past 30 years: it’s an old drying room on the top floor of an estate looking out on to Battersea Power Station. We meet outside where Dick takes me in to the garden nearby for a cigarette. “This is my favourite spot in London,” - a sunny little plot tucked away by the Victoria railway sidings, a memorial garden formed from the demolition of part of the avenue during the Blitz, cherished by Peabody residents with red and yellow tulips planted by Dick’s wife.

As we head up to the studio, Dick whispers to me to be quiet and points at one of the other resident’s door. “I’ve told you to stop making art! That’s what she came out her door and screamed at me the other day!” Dick marches defiantly up the stairs in his Doc Martens, it becomes pretty clear that nobody could ever tell Dick Jewell to stop making art. When you enter Dick’s studio, it’s like walking in to a maverick’s wonderfully curated archive of life - a life well lived and fastidiously documented. A stuffed golden crested crane in a glass case looks out in to the room - “Yeah, I’ve had him since 1st year BA, he’s been with me everywhere.” There are stacks of framed prints, drawers full of postcard collections, photographs and club flyers to name a few, hundreds of his own video recordings with names like Spend Spend Spend, Louise’s Belly Button and The Queen’s Speech with H’s dropped.” Piles of tapes including Eric.B Rakim and Toyan, Lee Van Cliff, Sammy Dread live on Gemini Hi Fi next to a boombox on top of every type of equipment for analogue playing and recording – from U-matic, Betacam SP, Hi8 and VHS to DVCam. A photograph of William S Burroughs and Francis Bacon blutacked next to a film photo of his daughter, bookshelves with spines ranging from the Argos catalogue to Artist’s Model by John Everard. And then the huge iMac with a vast web of JPEG names scattered on the desktop, when asked how he navigates his computer’s database of downloads and screenshots, he chuckles, “I really haven’t a clue.”

Flag of the Absurd, digital print on double georgette, stainless steel pole, bullet finials, 2008

750 Mug shots (A Portrait of the Nation), inkjet print, 2006

We sit down in front of the computer where Dick can spend hours in to the night searching and amassing images off the internet. Dick lights up another rollie and taps the ash in to a 1970s Fray Bentos tin before showing me his most recent film Faces. It is a video montage of thousands of different faces flashing from one to the other animated to Faces (album version) by RUN D.M.C. Almost morphing in to one continuous face with it’s speed and considered choice of order, you are bombarded with Kate Moss, men with “monkey tail” beards, bruised up eyes, ageing celebrities, Donald Trump, A.I generated faces, Instagram models (pause for breath) and that’s just scratching the surface.

While we watch, Dick is giggling and sometimes pointing astonished at a certain face - “Did you see that!?” Dick is not only obsessed with the state of the image, but also with the human condition or humanity portrayed within it. Dick says that “Faces merges our relationship with celebrity, face swapping, tribal and online culture, ageing and self image with politics and advertising.” The internet’s myriad of characters has become a gateway for him to explore different sectors of people, along with certain bizarre trends that have emerged from the internet airing the global multitude of subcultures and tendencies. In seeing so many faces whilst listening to the energising RUN D.M.C, you are struck with an almost euphoric sense of celebration for the diversity of the human race. Dick explains that “the pace of Faces interrupts the processing of our prejudices of every face we see, ultimately promoting a harmony and unity amongst people.”

We discuss where Dick will publicise Faces, “maybe YouTube, I think of YouTube as video’s equivalent to street art - I’m not too focussed on making money off it, it’s about people seeing your art, getting it out there for people to think about it.”

FACES, final 100 stills from 4 minute film, 2021

It’s clear that Dick is in an artist driven by compulsion rather than monetary success. “Well you know Rothko killed himself on his canvas stretcher because his gallery always insisting on similar work for the money: that’s just not me, no way.”

We move on to talking about Four Thousand Threads, published in 2015, it is a book of 4000 images gleaned from the internet laid out in a way that is akin to a comic strip. There is a linear visual narrative running through all these images: we start at a statue of Étienne-Jules Marey (pioneer of chronophotography) and 3999 pictures later, we end up at a woman and two men dressed up as Google (her breasts are the double O). Within this epic ocular journey, we are met with planking, exploding porter-loos, streaking, kids crying on Santa’s lap, photobombing, dogs playing poker and much much more. The link between adjacent photos is sometimes humorous and always compelling: it is a wonder that Dick has seen such a vast quantity of the internet’s ever expanding database of images. When at a book fair selling 4000 Threads, a man enthralled by the book asked Dick incredulously how on earth he made it.

My Friends of My Kinky Gerlinky MySpace Nov 2007-April 2008, Inkjet prints, tamperproof notice board, 2008

The Fight Between Carnival and Lent after Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Inkjet and varnish, 2010

Dick didn’t knwo at the time, but the man asking was Mustafa Suleyman, co-founder of DeepMind - a company developing AI that mimics the short term memory of a human brain resulting in computers that can play and win against grand masters of Chess and Go, and who had gone on to develop the algorithm for finding similar images on Google.

I make the mistake of calling the internet based images “found”, to which Dick says “Well, they were never lost were they - I’m very particular about how images are contextualized.” Sticking to the guidelines that Dick has intrinsically stipulated for imagery within his work, I ask about his 1978 book Found Photos. It’s a 154 page book of photo booth portraits, all of which had been discarded by their sitters: thrown on to the ground or left on top of the booth. As we discuss the difference of photography then and now, Dick says that “the rise of the digital camera has liberated photography, and now with phones - everyone’s a photographer!” He isn’t precious about the notion of how an image is taken or who took it. “There is a similarity between Found Photos, where our evaluation of the image is led by our familiarity of the situation in which the photograph was taken, to Faces and 4000 Threads and our relationships and understanding of how images are shared on social media and online platforms”.

“Well I’d looked at over three quarters of a million images
within a year and kind of developed my own sense of algorithm.”

Dick is now on the hunt for some the unclaimed photobooth portraits, he’s rummaging through reams of boxes and photographs, mischievously smiling and saying, “Don’t get me started on this hunt!” Dick has two kinds of archive in his studio - the digital on his computer and then the analogue all around him, making his studio almost like a physical embodiment of his work and style. “Nope! I really can’t find them - it’s impossible this place - I’ve got a whole other room on top of the block next door, that’s literally just full to the rafters!” You really could spend, days, weeks, years even poring over what Dick has compiled in his studio.

People to the Power, photomontage polaroids, 2012

Girl Power, photomontage polaroids, 2012

With no luck finding the chemist photos, Dick decides to put a film on his VHS player. It’s an old Super8 film of a Balinese dancer he took at the first Womad Festival in 1985 on Mersea Island, Dick has dubbed Pauline by Leroy Smart over it as a soundtrack. He is mesmerised by the way the dancer moves and how the reggae song seems to be completely fit for it, and it really does seem to enhance the motion displayed. The way Dick stitches seemingly disparate things together is a common thread through out his work: a blending of cultures, music, movement, composition and time to create cohesive astute pieces on society without too much of an agenda.

We say goodbye when Dick gets a call from another artist friend inviting him for a barbecue. “Will you go?” I ask. “Nah,” he says, “Think I’d rather crack on and do some more work.”.

Idol Worship, inkjet print, 2012

Looking Over the White Cliffs of Dover, inkjet print, 2020

Head2Head episode 1, stills from 144 minute film, 2019

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