A Burning Desire People want him to shoot their weddings, their kids, themselves prancing on the beach. Giselle, 19 and beautiful, set him a note saying. “Hi, I’m Giselle; I’m 19 years old and I want you to capture my youth - how much will that cost?” His pictures are so good they are used in photography textbooks now. 39-year-old Roddie was born to a medical family and raised near Belfast. He picked up a camera at age 11: “some people can dance, I discovered I can take pictures.” He went to university in Wales and England, moving from physics to journalism. He came to San Francisco after winning a Green Card lottery in 1994. After some dull computer jobs he came to see his photography as his calling and gradually found an appreciative audience. Though words cannot describe pictures well, the word story behind his pictures is extremely interesting in its own right; and having him explain his pictures reveals a singular way of seeing and method of capturing truth, beauty, and soul. Human anatomy, physics, and newspaper journalism are foundations of his approach. More than an artist Roddie is a journeyman reporter relentlessly, compulsively, athletically pursuing his craft. So this lad from the soggy grey north of Ireland treks up to the Nevada high desert every year dressed in bare threads and decorated with grime and body paint to take photos from dawn to dusk of the scene at the world-famous Burning Man festival. The festival is “pure id,” beyond drugs, beyond lascivious, a wild colorful neo-primitive bacchanal of dancing and personal display, with art objects fashioned from industrial artifacts scattered around the white dusty desert floor. His preparation is thorough and methodical but, once the festival gets started he enters into his own manic “Tasmanian Devil” dream state, he loses track of time, immerses in his field of vision, setting up shots by jumping around. “To frame (the picture) you have to use your feet.” He is proudly ADD and credits his condition with giving him “hyper-focus,” the ability to handle many projects at a high functional level simultaneously, and also to shift focus and grab a great shot almost before his conscious mind has had time to settle on it and compose the picture. The visceral thrill comes at the end of the festival as he develops his rolls of film and the great ones appear on the light box. Roddie uses many gifts to seize great pictures; serendipity, strong physical constitution, mental drive, and hyper-focus, but also an engaging personality he uses to gain the complete trust of his subjects. For his pictures to work in completely natural light, un-retouched, full frame un-cropped, requires that the beautiful young people he photographs are completely at ease, free of worry, rested and well-hydrated. He says his pictures are like Sun Spots, small blurbs in the famous UK tabloid daily The Sun: “They pack in who, what, where, why and how - and make it funny - in one column inch, readable for a 12 year old. That’s a real high point. And I’d like to think that’s that I do in photography.” Blue-collar journalism without pretense or fancy language, the rough chemistry of the streets coming through on the page, spare, clean and genuine. Roddie admires mid twentieth century news photographers Weegee (Arthur Fellig) and Henri Cartier-Bresson, both renowned for their ability to capture raw and spontaneous images of ordinary people in disaster, distress, or simply bizarre situations. Like them, he sees himself as an “artisan, perhaps” someone with ink under his fingernails, rather than an artist. “I have little or no imagination . . . all I’m doing is recording what I see.” Commercial photography today is overly composed, and with rampant, insidious retouching we are at risk of losing our historical record. Photographers should capture the world they find. “You should find what’s cool and get it, you can improve your chances by getting better light, by ensuring your models get enough sleep . . . there are inflections in the movement that you can capture . . . your job is observation . . . pattern recognition.” His aim is to capture images of people, “not just what they look like, but also who they are,” to allow the soul of an individual to be revealed in the print. His unique approach can be seen in the new book “Hips,” a remarkable collection of shots of the right hip, hand and arm photographed in the high desert of Burning Man. These 250 photos are paired thematically, and express the beautiful variety if skin tone, shapes and forms of the body, tattoos, jewelry, scraps of decorative and whimsical clothing worn at the festival.
Tony Bucher Talks With ‘Hip’ Irish Photographer Patrick Roddie
(Irish Herald, May 2005)
Belfast born photographer Patrick Roddie is making his mark in the art world from his base in San Francisco. People visit his website in droves, after Burning Man some 18,000 unique visitors a day, and he gets calls from Belgium, Japan, UK, and all over the states.
