What are we going to do with Gilbert?

We chatted with author and photographer Gilbert McCarragher, who walked us through his career path. We then heard about his new book Prospect Cottage Derek Jarman’s House when he was in conversation with Martin from Sailors at The Winery at the end of May.

What were your childhood interests, and how did you find your way?
Gilbert.  I hated primary school. I was petrified of the head teacher there. My three brothers and two sisters had preceded me and warned me about her.

I was held back in the same school year for two years longer than my classmates; I didn’t know why. It felt almost as though I had been forgotten. My contemporaries would move to another class, and I would stay behind. Eventually, the teachers realised I had outgrown the table I was sat at, and they moved me up. Those years haunted me the whole way through my education.

My relationship with school changed at the age of 12 when my mother died. I suddenly realised that if anything was going to change, it was down to me to change it. I wanted to prove to everybody that not having my mother didn’t matter and that everything was OK. It did matter, of course, but I pushed forward and eventually moved on to a further education college to get my GCSEs. I’m not sure anyone noticed my efforts.

School did not work for me. My real education started when Channel 4 began broadcasting, not long after my mother died, and I was exposed to a whole new world. The Tube on a Friday night was a standout. Then there were the late-night shows, like The Eleventh Hour, which exposed me to weird debates and subjects I had no previous idea of.

One Friday night, aged 15, I was introduced to Derek Jarman when Channel 4 broadcast his 1976 film Sebastiane. There was such a public uproar about that film. I didn’t know who Derek Jarman was at the time. I just knew the film featured naked men frolicking around, which I liked the sound of.

The film blew me away; it’s so poetic and beautiful. It was the first time I’d seen a same-sex relationship shown positively. This was Northern Ireland in the 1980s. In the newspapers, everybody was talking about this evil man who would be broadcasting this terrible film on Channel 4, and they wanted it banned. People enjoyed getting themselves in a twist over it; it gave them something to talk about.

I muddled on at the further education college a few more years. Two years in, one of the tutors asked me if I had thought about going to art school. I hadn’t. I didn’t think that kids like me got to do that. At that time, we were doing life drawing with fully clothed models. The tutor said I was talented and should give it some thought. It was fantastic; I had some direction. He took me under his wing and nurtured me forward.

I spent time developing my portfolio. There was only one Foundation course in Belfast at that time. It was heavily subscribed because all the ‘home birds’ who wanted to stay in Northern Ireland applied there. It mattered not, because I didn’t want to stay. Instead I went on a mad tour around the UK via a National Express bus pass visiting universities in England. Blackpool… Manchester… Canterbury. I was lucky to be offered many places on courses, and ultimately decided to go to Middlesex in 1990.

I enjoyed my Foundation course, trying out many things. I went on to pick graphics as a specialism, which led me to Central Saint Martins. It was a great course, and what it lacked in facilities and funding, it made up for in preparing you for life. It made you think creatively about how to respond to a creative brief without having to pay a fortune.

While at Central Saint Martins, I embarked on a project about identity and growing up Protestant in Northern Ireland. It was only supposed to make up 10% of the course. But by the end of my three-year degree, I had spent most of my time working on this one project. I went on to graduate with a First but with limited commercial skills, which was difficult in the mid-90s when the economy could have been better.

How did you find your way into the career that worked for you?
Gilbert.  After graduation, my tutor gave me work with her family temporarily. I became her children’s live-in “Manny” for what became two years while trying to get on my feet. The idea of a male nanny in those days was seen as odd. But it was also seen as something exotic in Notting Hill, and my tutor and her family seemed proud to tell people they had a male nanny.

When the family no longer needed my Manny services, they would talk about What are we going to do with Gilbert? Soon enough though, the family across the road offered me work looking after their child. As each family’s child or children grew up, I found myself passed to another house in the street or in the neighbourhood. Eventually I came to look after the children of John and Catherine Pawson.

When their children reached the age that they no longer needed a Manny, John asked me if I’d like to come to work at his architect’s office, and that’s what I did, working on graphics and photography for him. With that, my career in architectural photography began. I honed my skills, figuring out what was needed for each shoot, and planning how I was going to develop a visual narrative by way of the photographs I would obtain. I’ve now worked with John for more than 20 years, so he must have been pleased with my work.

“When I started working for John, I would always overshoot to ensure I supplied all the options plus more just in case. But I don’t shoot like that anymore; your confidence grows with experience.”

What brought you to Dungeness?
Gilbert.  My husband and I looked after a friend’s house in Rye when she was in Australia for Christmas. We had such a great time, it inspired us to start looking for a home there. Over three years, we searched and found nothing we wanted, until we passed an estate agent’s window that we had not noticed before.

We saw in the agent’s window a write-up for a derelict property in Dungeness. It looked a lot like a building from The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. We hadn’t thought about looking in Dungeness until then. Over the years, we had taken many pilgrimages to the place, to stick our noses against the windows of Prospect Cottage, but we didn’t think anybody actually lived there. The estate agent said the ad went in the window just a couple of day’s prior, and five people were already interested. After some back and forth, we got in to view around three days later. Filled, as it was, with boxes of fire-scorched curtains, rusty saw blades and bottle upon bottle of sulphuric acid, we walked in that day and knew we were home! The bizarre refuse the property’s previous owners had stored there didn’t put us off, and we purchased that treehouse-cum-bungalow, built round the remains of an old Victorian railway carriage, in 2008.

My husband is a fantastic cook and we hosted dinner parties for some 30 friends and Dungeness residents in the old house, seated around trestle tables that butted end-to-end and ran the length of the railway carriage. At the end of the evening, the tables came down and our tent went up, as we camped at the property while waiting for planning permission to rebuild. Eventually we got the go-ahead, and rebuilt the place.

During that time, we got to know Keith Collins, Derek’s companion. Keith became a regular fixture at our house, and us at his, where he would give us impromptu tours around Prospect Cottage.

Derek Jarman died in 1994 from an AIDS-related illness, at which point he (and Keith) had spent around eight years at Prospect Cottage, during which time Derek created all that is wonderful about that amazing place. Keith was then there for a further 24 years after Derek died, protecting it and maintaining Derek’s legacy for all that time. There was no funding at that stage; Keith was the glue that held the place together. One afternoon when tending the garden in 2018, Keith complained of a terrible back ache. He decided to return to London to have his back looked at the next day, and 24 hours later we received the terrible news that the cause of Keith’s pain was a previously undiagnosed brain tumour.

The prognosis did not look good, raising the question of what would happen to Prospect Cottage. I was asked to photograph the house as a result, because it was felt that it was important to capture the cottage at that very moment in time, before anything might change. I started the process of documenting Prospect Cottage soon after Keith’s diagnosis, so was one of the first people to go through the door after Keith had unknowingly locked the house up for what would be his last time a few days earlier. Sadly, Keith passed away just three months after the diagnosis.

How did you approach documenting the cottage?
Gilbert.  When I first went into Prospect Cottage to photograph it, I had this nagging feeling that I wasn’t supposed to be there. It was quite unlike any of my previous visits at the house with Keith. At that stage, I had no idea how long the process would take: whether a few days, weeks, or months. I decided to photograph every room, every elevation, and every corner to get complete coverage. I went through the house quite systematically, room to room. Immediately, I realised I was capturing everything in the house but was not capturing its beating heart. I could sense that the house wanted to tell a story greater than what was being captured in those early photographs.

Over the next three years, I continued photographing Prospect Cottage, coming and going and playing around with different ideas at the house. That was how I built up this body of work.

On one of my earliest visits, I took down the net curtains that Keith had hung in the house after Derek died, and the light quality changed immediately and immeasurably. Until that moment, the light had been pretty soft and even throughout the house. Suddenly though, the light blasted in, creating hard shadows and pools of bright light. Objects easily hid in the dark gaps between the glaring highlights, and over the course of a day, things would emerge from out of the shadows, at times surprising me. It was a couple of years into the project before I realised there was a grandfather clock in the corner of the writing room. It was only when the light fell across it one day that I noticed it.

After those curtains came down, it proved tricky to capture an image without people at the windows; their presence reminded me how I did the same on my early visits to Prospect as a student.

I avoided photographing the garden for a long time, because it has been documented so extensively. Many people who have never visited Prospect Cottage know what its garden looks like, it’s so famous. For a long time, I therefore concentrated on interiors of the cottage and of the views from it looking out through the windows into the garden and the surrounding nature reserve. After some time though I became concerned that I might only be telling half the story by doing so.

Eventually venturing outside Prospect Cottage with my camera, the question became one of how to bring something new to this. One night, I wandered around the cottage’s garden having left all the lights on inside the house. The building appeared like a magical lantern, and you could see inside too. The light quite powerfully spilled out of the cottage into the garden and fell onto some of the objects, illuminating them like characters on a stage. That was what the photography needed: something theatrical.

How did the idea of the book Prospect Cottage Derek Jarman’s House, come about?
Gilbert.  At some point in time, I began printing some of my photographs and keeping them in a box. In the back of my mind, I thought that this would make a good book project. However, I had no connections to the publishing world, and was simply enjoying the experience of spending time at the house, capturing memories of it and of Keith.

One night, I went to a dinner party at one of the houses in Notting Hill where I had worked as a Manny. I was introduced to a chap who used to have a publishing company, and we started chatting. I didn’t want to be that guest who pushed their photos onto a stranger. So, I asked the host to put us in contact afterwards. He then introduced me to the lovely folks at Thames& Hudson, but he told me not to prepare or show them a written proposal. He said instead just to go in and meet them with my box of photographs, and to talk them through my experience of photographing at the house. I did so in November 2022. Thames & Hudson latched on to the concept that first time that I met with them, asking if they could publish the photographs in a book alongside an essay that they wanted me to write. I told them I was a photographer, not a writer, and they confusingly responded that that was perfect.

I agreed, thinking to myself they would want 2,000 words, or maybe 3,000. Of course, it turned out they were looking for 15,000 words. I then spent a troubling few weeks back home in Northern Ireland that Christmas, looking endlessly at an empty document, wondering how I would write 15,000 words?

New Year’s… January… February… All came and went. In May, having managed only a few hundred words, I organised a holiday with a friend to Gran Canaria. Rather than explore the island though, I sat beside the pool with my laptop and punched out some 25,000 words.

“Once I got the first few words down, the writing process took on a life of its own, in the much same way the photographs do when I’m on a shoot. I always aim to build a narrative when working; whether writing or photographing, it’s all storytelling.”

I don’t want this book to be just for Derek Jarman fans. I want people who have never heard of Jarman to pick up a copy, to be interested in Derek as the charming character he was, to be inspired by him and to learn more about his work and his impact. I want people to discover everything that Keith gave to maintaining Prospect Cottage too, and to see and feel something of the love story that is written across every surface of the house, as I did.

Gilbert McCarragher - Photographer
www.gilbertmccarragher.com
@gilbertmccarragher

Prospect Cottage Dungeness Road, Dungeness, Romney Marsh, TN29 9NE

Prospect Cottage Derek Jarman’s House
Gilbert McCarragher
Frances Borzello
Thames & Hudson

Thirty years after Derek Jarman’s death, we are finally allowed inside a house that encapsulates the filmmaker’s vision of the world.