Sam Batley is a photographer from Barnsley living in Liverpool. His latest book, ‘God Loves a Fretter’, is a collection of photographs taken over the past two years in these two hometowns. It also features an essay, poem, and contributions from his family, centred on the theme of fretting. The following piece draws from a conversation with Batley and my impressions of the book.
A white horse; a gun in the kitchen and a fluttering dove stark against the lake. Pines in Formby? Daffodils on Hale Bank? Sea foam and a drifting shark. 5:47. Sandstone roots. Late night dune, etchings of marram grass and sprinting fur. Caravan couple hold each other; footprints crack in chained mud. BUDGET FOODS! Dog’s eye pierces the page. Much like images glimpsed on a bus, while running, half-remembered or maybe in a dream, the subjects in Sam Batley’s photographs are often elusive, and escape understanding. But these images feel indelible.
This is a book of photographs gathered together by the theme of fretting. To fret, in Sam Batley’s words, is ‘to worry, whittle away, devour or corrode’. Batley grew up in Barnsley, in a self-professed family of fretters, and the ‘heart’ of the book holds a small red zine, with his mother Jenny, and sisters Hannah and Grace’s creative responses to this definition. ‘Faith found me in the pits’, writes Grace Batley, ‘she invited me to step out of the shell and back into flesh’.
It was a serendipitous encounter: on desk and about to go on my lunch break, having just started thinking of questions to ask Batley in a future interview – and in he walks. I usually go to sit by the river to eat, and he offers to join me. But the sea air is cold and biting, so we reroute for some cosy caffeination instead. We speak about this book, about his life, practise and what drives his photographic urge.
‘My mum got me a camera, a Canon EOS 300’, he tells me, ‘And I just felt compelled. I didn’t really know why at times; I only really started reflecting on it when I came to Liverpool. I think it’s about making sense of the fact of why every time I leave, I end up back in the same place. It kind of came crashing down when I saw a lad that I’d went to school with. I’d not seen him for years; I’d been in Berlin. I told him I’d just moved back, and he looked at me and just said, why? I didn’t have a good answer for him’.
‘That’s when I started taking loads of photos’, he continues, ‘but that’s when my addiction was at its peak. And even though my money was going on X, Y and Z, I always left enough money to get my film processed. I used to go to a place in Leeds called Dragon Photos – it’s not there anymore, used to be cooperative owned and you could get one-hour photos. I used to be a labourer in Leeds, so I’d get dropped off at the end of my shift, drop the film off in Dragon Photos, get about three pints, I didn’t have a laptop, so I’d get physical photos – and they used to be warm, and I’d be f* buzzing’.
Batley talks with conviction and clarity, often in short, punchy sentences, and listening to him I get the feeling that these words are hard earned.
On his Instagram, Batley writes that ‘fretting provides a constant opportunity to take a leap of faith’. I ask him if taking photos comes out of the sensation of fretting. ‘Sometimes, yeah. There’s no excuse why you can’t take photos. You’ve come to Open Eye today, on a journey from A to B. Photography is the C. You’re always looking anyway, why not have your camera, you’re already in a call and response relationship with your environment’.
A white plastic horse is caught on the merry go round, in a moment, its head tilted with what looks curiosity. Opposite, a blurred close-up of a skull in the grass mimics this tilt. The connection is striking, as though life fills the plastic horse through the skull, this fairground dummy animated by its recognition in death. A dog escapes the frame through a style: its black tail flicking upwards, hind paws still rooted to the dry ground, ready to leap or pounce through the wooden gap. Feet pivot. Body swivels. Hand moves and in an instant, the shutter closes as the dog shoots away.
‘The body of text is the theme of the whole book really. Fretting translates perfectly into photography, for me. It provides… This bigger narrative that I have which is a recovery one. That I can learn things about myself in a creative setting and then I can reapply into my life’.
But Batley tells me that addiction was not mentioned in the book; that words like addiction and alcoholism create distance.
‘But it is about processes. And everybody goes through processes. Everybody’s got it – got bits of themselves that they’re like, “I want to lose that. That’s not serving me properly”’. Fretting is something that anyone might connect with. ‘Photography provides an opportunity to fail, to get something wrong, to have an expectation… all stuff that happens in life. You can learn how to process that in a different way’.
To local eyes, places reveal themselves as glimmers. New Brighton lighthouse hovers at dusk in a tidal pool; a heron on Princes Park Lake; a copula of the Greek Orthodox Church on Princes Avenue rises behind abject shrubs; the bridge between Terminals at Manchester Airport; a field near his childhood home. Pity Me, a town in County Durham. What comes to the fore in these photos though, is not so much a thing or a place, but more the relationship between Batley, his camera, and the world around him: feelings, captured in each moment of looking and pressing the shutter.
‘I shoot from the belly’, he says, reclined in an armchair on Mann Island, ‘using it as my eyes’. ‘The way I like to describe is that the act of taking photos is the constant’ – not the photograph. It’s a constant process of taking photos, making photographs: an extension of perception, a response to the calls around him. A dove flutters across his peripheral vision and into the page.
‘The same feeling is involved with taking that one of my mate walking down the street in Barnsley and taking the one of that dove. The action is still the same. Responding. Like that one – my landlord said, there’s rat in your neighbour’s bat, would you go and take it out for me? I was like yeah sound… I went up and was like ‘that is fucking stunning’. I went and got my camera, got the flash on and like, let’s have a little photoshoot.’
In the 1979 Italian horror Suspiria, a blind pianist is pulled, late at night, by his guide dog – a German Shepherd – into the centre of a grand and ominous square. The camera spins around. Dark archways loom with a grim and supernatural threat. The dog barks at the archways. The camera spins. The pianist turns ever rapidly on the spot. Intensity grows; unbearable. And then, in a sudden twist, the dog leaps upon its blind companion and tears in for his throat.
‘Photos stand on the intersection between the internal and the external’, Batley writes in his short essay. ‘The grey part in between the black and white grows’. His photos have something of the supernatural feeling, which Daniel Argento creates in Suspira. There is a gothic eeriness in the dusky scenes: dogs, bushes, churches, fields, guns, fag ends and grains of grey which fill my vision as I flick, haunted, through the pages. Like the guide dog which turns on the blind pianist, many of Batley’s photos threaten grim potentialities. ‘The eye of the dog tears through me’, writes Batley’s sister Hannah, in response to a blurred close up. In Suspiria’s bright, 70s technicolour, Argento drags the viewer ever deeper into a psychedelic nightmare. In God Loves a Fretter, however, we are invited to step out of the fearfulness, out of distorted anxiety and into something grey, hopeful and real.
In their book On Connection, Kae Tempest describes how the writer and the reader of the text may have a very different relationship to it, even if it is the same person. When committing their poems to memory and then reciting them, Tempest observes how ‘the reader undergoes a process of discovery that the writer side of myself is not involved in’.
‘When I came to Liverpool my whole approach to photography was in a constant state of making’, Batley explains, ‘but not really reviewing, not really editing. Especially this year it’s been about sitting with them. What am I saying to myself with these photos, why am I taking them? What’s drawing me? Because one photo doesn’t say that, but a body of photos does. The same feeling is involved with taking that one of my mate walking down the street in Barnsley and taking the one of that dove. The action is still the same. Responding.’ The same approach led the design of this book, he tells me, as he delved through his archive of the past two years, making ‘off the cuff’ pairings of diverse images, responding as viewer and editor to resonances, narratives, echoes in his work as photographer.
Batley tells me it is in the grey zone between outer meaning and inner feeling that his work lies. And it’s at the limits of meaning and content that I find myself gripped. I feel moved by the photos, their elusive quality. I feel it in my throat. Words go halfway to convey their appeal. Fretting’s second meaning as physical gnawing away, corrosion, devouring – not just as worrying – speaks to the power of this book to affect us in ways that are beyond sight. Batley’s photography is more about feeling than about form. These photos that come from the belly are felt in the body, and to look through this book invites less a critical eye than a physical, emotional connection.
‘The grey part in between the black and white grows’, he writes. Interspersed between images, empty pages are grey and granular, like the skies and fields of Barnsley and Liverpool as rendered in Batley’s 35mm snapshots. Sometimes the substance in a gesture lies more in what is left obscured. ‘What I’m leaning towards at the moment’, he tells me, ‘Is the bit that we can’t actually see. We can’t see the bit that’s in between that wing flap and the water. The bit that we can’t grasp allows us to fill in the blanks.’
The motif of the hare which appears at various stages in the book evokes the fleeting meaning of the photographs, somehow out of reach in their blur, graininess, the subjects turned away – eyes half closed, stories untold. But the bounding hare also embodies the ‘leap of faith’ offered by every moment of worry. At the end of the book this mysterious hare arrives, centre stage, in a poem.
I got to top of field and when I turned around there it was.
Looking back at me through the morning,
I choked on it.
…
Purpose filled me to the brim,
I’m not alone in this place,
And never have been.
The path didn’t walk itself into a contour.
Well caffeinated, we head back to Open Eye. I’ve overrun my 40-minute lunch break by 5 minutes. On one double page spread, the white dove has flown beyond the gun’s line of fire.
‘Eventlessness has no posts to drape duration over’, wrote John Steinbeck in East of Eden. ‘From nothing to nothing is no time at all.’ I wonder whether photographs, especially film photos, are posts to drape duration over, each photograph an arrival, creating both a site and an event, a marker which gives shape to experience.
Fretting is being overwhelmed by unwanted thoughts, feelings, stimuli. For Batley, photography is about a response – not just clogging the RAM with sights, but doing something with it, making something out of what you are presented with. In this way, photography is inherently creative. Pressing the shutter, taking the photo, a leap of faith: believing that the brief relationship between your eye, camera and the world around you will produce something of value.
GOD LOVES A FRETTER is available in the Open Eye bookshop and online at https://sambatley.bigcartel.com/.