Santini’s Summer In Scarborough

Andrew Liddle visits the Scarborough Art Gallery to see the work of an internationally acclaimed photographer and filmmaker

Throughout the summer, Scarborough Art Gallery is the place to come up close and personal with some of the fashionable people from the worlds of fashion, art, music and theatre, the luminaries, the superstars, the major leaguers! It’s fascinating to find them virtually in the flesh, note how in different ways they convey they are in fashion, set the fashion, are the fashion.

Self Made is an exhibition of portraits of cultural icons from different generations and backgrounds taken over a 30-year period, that seem to be here to the very life in the room with us, their eyes holding ours, following us about. Captured by the internationally-famous photographer Derrick Santini, who was born in Scarborough, in 1965, they are the sharply crystallised essence of the individual subjects, documents of the contemporary world, aesthetic representations of it. Importantly, they are all different, highlighting individual originality as much as creative connections.

We are greeted by X Factor-famous Kyle De’Volle, who seems to embody in his image, indeed emblazoned in his tattoos and pursue in his variety of callings as ‘fashion designer, creative director, celebrity stylist, fashion consultant and style commentator’ the very model of the modern fashionista!

For someone as apparently multi-faceted as this, Santini has created a glowing, multi-dimensional lenticular image, which magically morphs from Freddie Mercury ringer to feminine alter ego. There is a hint of the surreal here. It’s some way to whet the visitor’s appetite and establish the Self-Made premise of the show, that people of talent confidently project their identity in their self-representation. Don’t they just!

These people are simultaneously the ones who set the fashion in their creative lives, are the fashion, make the fashion out of themselves. It is surely Santini’s great skill that he allows them to do this, ‘cajoles’ them, as he says.

“As a photographer I have spent my life searching out something to photograph, hunting elusive moments, and channelling desired ones. These decisive moments, split seconds in time, create a photograph, which in itself is the very essence of the art of photography. Amazing, incredible timeless moments, seen, cajoled, spirited, ultimately captured in that moment and thus born to the world.”

Cigarettes seem back in fashion. Kyle is revealed as a smoker and Jay Kay, lead singer and co-founder of the acid jazz and funk band Jamiroquai is caught in a reflective pose with one in hand. The late Lee Alexander McQueen in his tragically short lifetime scooped most of the major fashion designer awards, although he himself clearly preferred to dress down at work. We see him perched restlessly on his desk, having a quick nicotine fix, his mind whirring with ideas. Jarvis Cocker, the Sheffield-born satirist and former lead singer of Pulp, manages to convey in three-quarter pose a querulous disposition who is holding off putting cigarette to lips in order to rip into us.

For Shane MacGowan there is no suggestion that a cigarette might be a mere prop. His index finger is as stained as any old Woodbine addicts. There can be no finer, more detailed study of the lead vocalist of the Celtic Punk band, the Pogues, almost as famous for his wilfully self-destructive personality as for his iconoclastic lyrics which vividly portrayed the rank underbelly of Irish immigrant life. For this critic, this is perhaps the most moving image of the collection.

Santini’s women - or most of them - tend to have an effortless sensuousness. Adele has a calmly confident allure. Gwendoline Christie, otherwise known as Game of Thrones’ Brienne of Tarth, is the archetypal lady in red, reclining seductively on a fur stole, elegant from her coiffure down to her jewelled slippers. The actor Thandine Newton is all tastefully sensuous curves in a long, high-waisted, primrose-shaded dress against a pastel green background, lounging against a chair.

Mel B, the lass from the Leeds’ district of Harehills, is a vision floating towards us on invisible wings, her magnificent hair billowing out adding to her buoyancy. Perhaps no finer or more sincere tribute to Santini’ s vision can be found than in her words displayed proudly next to her image. They deserve to be quoted in full.

"I am wiser,” she writes, “life has given me many, many more knocks but I still recognise my soul in this image. I am still the woman who confronts the world head on. Fearless. Back then I was a Spice Girl, a young mother to my eldest child Phoenix (she’s now 25 ) today I am a Spice Girl, a mother of three, a Patron of Women’s Aid and I have an MBE for my work with domestic abuse. I remain exactly who I will always be - Melanie Brown, a working-class mixed-race kid from a council estate in Leeds who just wants to be seen, heard and make a difference. It’s an emotional image for me. It was the first time I ever did a shoot on my own and Derrick just wanted to see me, who I was, what I stood for. I see my pride, I see my spirit, I see my strength and vulnerability. Derrick perfectly captured not just what was on the outside but the soul inside.”

It is fitting that Derrick’s work as a portrait photographer is being celebrated in his hometown. This exhibition brings together some of the best of the scores of iconic figures he has captured definitively, who echo Mel B’s words. “A lot of it is to do with people skills. I’m not a provocative photographer like some,” he explained in a recent interview. “I don’t ‘play’ the subject, I don’t offer adulation no matter how big they are in the industry. I just use a gentle tone and relax them, try to feed off their natural energy.”

“I want to capture a truth – not the truth. A portrait above all has to reveal the sitter, personal light resonating outwardly from the eyes revealing the depths, capturing the whole rounded person.” Clearly he does just that and his guiding presence is palpable in all his work. He doesn’t just point his camera. He finds permanent characteristics against arbitrary time and place because he is looking for them, and uses all his artistry to bring them out.

His portraits have been acquired by the National Portrait Gallery and he has exhibited widely in the UK and internationally. He continues to work commercially and editorially, as well as publishing numerous articles on photography. He is very much a self-made man and you can see what he has made of others at the Scarborough Art Gallery.

Derrick Santini

Self Made is not to be missed and runs until Sunday 1st September, 2024

For more information see Andrew Liddle’s exclusive Yorkshire Times’ interview with him: Scarborough-Calling-Part-Four-Derrick-Santini-Comes-Home