14 f2 FREELANCE PHOTOGRAPHER April/May 2010

THE F2 PROFILE

Observer Music Monthly, GuardianWeekend, FHM, Grazia, Glamour, VivienneWestwood, Reebok, BT, Cutler and Gross,Canon and Heineken. He has directed videosfor Marilyn Manson, KT Tunstall, and theEighties Matchbox B-Line Disaster.Perou learnt how to make stills running

Click hire studio, where he met a lot of greatphotographers, their clients and thoseresponsible for Dazed and Confused maga-zine. After a couple of years working forDazed on the picture desk, he found that hewas shooting more than editing, and left tobegin his career shooting stills. “People often ask me what was my big

break in this business”, he says. “There hasnever been one: it’s always been a long hard slogto the middle. It was very gradual. After a while,I came off the dole. Then I came off housingsupport. Then I had enough money to startthinking about paying tax. Then I was earningenough that I had to be VAT registered.”Perou is clearly in a process of transition.

“I grew up in stills”, he says, “but like manyother photographers at the moment, I’m try-ing very hard to rebrand myself as a director. “I wouldn’t get into a debate about

whether moving pictures are better than stills.They both have their place, but it is imperativeto understand how to make money in newmedia and through the internet. If you cancrack that, you’ll survive ... or just shoot forpleasure and don’t worry about it.”

Between the internet and the rise of thedigital camera, the way the industry operateshas changed dramatically. Photographerswho trained and began their careers shootingon film have lived through one technologicalrevolution, as the industry made the transi-tion from film to digital, and now, with theconvergence of still and moving imagery,they are living through a second. Perou has weathered the storm well. His

slick website, coupled with a move into real-ity TV presenting and directing short filmsand pop videos, betray both his ambitionand his business acumen. The future of theindustry still concerns him however, and helambastes the rise of the amateur which hasaccompanied the digital revolution. “The quality has absolutely slumped”, he

says. “I used to work for a music magazine.Then they worked out that, if they paid aphotographer £1000 to do a shoot, heretained the copyright, and ended up earn-ing £1000 again. So the magazine paid off itslong established music photographers, andreplaced them with kids shooting on digital,who were quite happy to give away theircopyright, because they didn’t have anyexperience and they didn’t know any better. “It meant there were no fantastic music

photos any more - just some band standingagainst a wall. Nobody cared, the magazinesales actually went up, and they made moremoney. It’s really hard to find a client who

cares about the quality of your work. Theyjust want it quickly and cheaply.“When everyone has digital cameras,

they basically mess up the industry, becausekids out of college without any jobs thinkthey don’t need to learn the skills that welearned over years. They don’t have a lot ofwork, and clients exploit that by only payingthem 1/10 of what they would pay me.”Perou’s attitude to the ‘kids with digital

cameras’ is more nuanced than this tiradewould suggest, however. “A student wholives near me in Kent told me that his collegetutor said to him that, within a year of grad-uating, he was going to be earning up to£200,000 a year in photography, and that80% of his class would be doing the same. Ifind that beyond offensive. It’s immoral.” Since his move into directing, Perou has

naturally pondered the impact that digital cam-eras equipped to take both HD video and highquality stills will have on photography. His toneoscillates between gloomy and sanguine.Photography is not dead - but it’s changing. “Just within the last six months”, he says,

“people are talking about how stills photogra-phy is going to be over in the way that silverhalide was over five years ago, that everythingwill be shot on moving cameras and the stillswill be taken from movie footage.“But it’s not that simple. It’s like when pho-

tography came along, everyone said that itwould be the death of painting, but it wasn’t:

Samantha Morton

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