Widely regarded as one of the most influential UK photographers of the 21st Century. Simon emerged as an authoritative chronicler of London’s youth culture with the publication of his book, DON’T CALL ME URBAN! The Time of Grime in 2010. In 2018 Simon became photographer-in-residence here at Abbey Road where he brought his documentary expertise and cultural relevance. Simon continues to work with us as guest Underground Scenes category judge at the Abbey Road Music Photography Awards.
It’s been a long road to get Don’t Call Me Urban out there again but the response to its re-release has been resounding, I never realised there was quite so much love for this work I’ve done in London. People were queuing up around the block at the launch event and we took over a corner of Brick Lane as the cypher spilled out onto the street on one of those early May evenings when everything seems possible. Even if back at the beginning of this journey - that morning in May 1998 when I stepped onto a decaying South London council estate which would soon be demolished - the situation in which I now find myself would have been impossible to envisage. It took a while to gain any recognition, but I’ve become grateful for the struggle I endured, I feel it forced me to dig deep.
Last year at the MPA party Rankin was casually introducing me to some people as a ‘great photographer’… and on the tube back home that night, I reflected on these words of someone just a couple of years older than me and thought back to the 90s when he was so famous and commercially successful… while at that same time I was barely able to pay rent, scraping the odd low-paid assignment to somehow keep me in the game. No magazines were very interested in what I
was doing, it was hard to even get appointments with picture editors and I was very close to giving it all up. My situation now - with so many people telling me these past couple of months how influential I am in UK youth culture and how much my work has inspired them - would have been some kind of intrepid fantasy.
Whatever I write here might not do justice to the gratitude I feel, though I can reflect further and draw lessons from my experience to share them with you as the underground scenes mentor who has worked Abbey Road since the beginning of the MPAs. And I should say above all else that however unlikely the future seemed back then I still always somehow believed in myself and what I was doing. I was very committed and that commitment must have come from a place of belief. A few weeks ago I woke up to a deep and reflective moment, learning that the great Sebastiao Salgado had passed away. He was the first photographer I came across, a man whose work gave me a sense of purpose in life when I was graduating from university in search of one. And in retrospect that was the most important thing in my career - purpose. For with that, belief naturally follows and however difficult my situation I could continue to work on the various long term stories I had going on, believing in what I was doing - however isolated I may have sometimes felt.
My book, which spans 12 years, is a long story of purpose - a gradual and subconscious attempt to uncover the social realities and conditions from which the genre of grime emerged.
What I would like to see from entrants in the underground scenes category is commitment to a subject and purpose. Of course, I also place high value on the artistic - the perfection of composition, the primacy of mood and sensitivity, the capturing of distinctive and touching moments - but why have you chosen the story and what is it you reveal, and how deep have you gone into the psyche of a subculture?
The re-release of DON’T CALL ME URBAN! THE TIME OF GRIME is available now at www.backdooreditions.com.