Responsive / ID Magazine / Research

Ewen Spencer

http://www.ewenspencer.com/#/home

OPEN MIC

Capturing the UK Grime Scene.

http://www.dazeddigital.com/artsandculture/article/22525/1/watch-our-full-length-documentary-open-mic > A short documentary by Ewen Spencer on the growing british Grime scene.

Open Mic: A documentary of UK Grime

'In his raw and candid film Open Mic, trace back to the community centres, bedrooms and makeshift club nights where Britain’s last seismic youthquake began.'

Images are captured naturally, no gaze or posing. 

Minute details such as the man to the left of the image with two phones have connotations that would only be understood by people directly involved in the scene.
Capturing details like these communicate the essence of a subculture stronger than any proposed, directed shoot.

Documenting the activities of the scene.

BRANDY & COKE

Reliving the UK Garage scene

http://www.dazeddigital.com/artsandculture/article/19531/1/watch-music-nation-brandy-coke-full-length-channel-4-uk-garage-documentary

'...he starts to explain the fascination with subcultures that has driven his photography for almost two decades.

By “subcultures” he means the pockets of the world where young people have developed their own look, their own rules, or their own music. Finding one of these is always an exciting moment, he says, because it means he can get in there with his camera and communicate that scene to the rest of the world. That’s what happened in London, where he famously documented two of the city’s most significant music scenes of the last 20 years: grime (Open Mic) and U.K. garage (UKG and Brandy & Coke)'

"clean living under difficult circumstances. It’s when kids aspire to be something else, and that manifests itself in something truly creative — say they appropriate a look and define it in their own way. When that look starts to happen en masse, or in a couple of different cities, and it’s gone from 15 kids to 150 — that’s the genesis of a subculture.” 

'He has the knack of quickly befriending the kids at the heart of a scene and getting the kind of spontaneous, atmospheric pictures that suggest he’s been there all along.'

'Spencer comes from Newcastle, the same English city where I grew up, and I can see its influence on his attraction to “clean living under difficult circumstances.” It’s a place where most people aren’t affluent — and yet it’s a big party town.'