I can’t exactly recall when I first encountered Elaine Constantine’s photographs. I don’t even remember what initially drew me to her work. She really drew me in, though. The young women in her photographs really drew me in. It was their jubilant smiles, combed hair and exaggerated expressions. The way they arranged themselves in a jagged line, so one would always appear slightly taller than the other. It was how they pouted or purred at the camera, showing their real expressions, real selves.

Although Constantine has become well known for these aspirational photographs of energised young women, her major interest lies in this energy of real life. From the moment she first picked up a camera at her college in Bury, Lancashire, she has been fascinated by the ‘real’. What is real fun? What is a real moment? What is a real expression? All questions that I imagine reverberate in her mind, over and over again.

When Constantine began taking photography seriously in the 1990s, 'real’ was classified as waif models staring vacantly into cameras owned by photographers with the last names Meisel, Bailey and Lindbergh. Exploding into this vacuity, Constantine immersed herself in a documentary tradition inspired by the work of Martin Parr, Chris Killip and Nick Knight, the latter whom she assisted for in 1993. Her photography series for iD, The Face, as well as French, Italian and American Vogue focused on moments of pure, unfiltered joy, while her later personal series, such as Tea Dance and her BAFTA-nominated film Northern Soul, captured the spirit of the UK dance scene. Throughout all her work, Constantine allowed her subjects to show the most true versions of themselves.

RACHEL WEINBERG Hi, Elaine. How are you?

ELAINE CONSTANTINE Good. Thank you for doing this. It’s late there, though.

It’s nine in the evening.

EC Wow.

I feel quite honoured to speak with you and learn about your life as a photographer and filmmaker.

EC I keep quite a low profile. I don’t really socialise much these days. I just seem to work all the time.

Do you enjoy working all the time?

EC Well, I guess it’s geography, really. A lot of friends have moved out of London in the last few years. I have a child who has been at school, so we haven’t been as free to move around. There was a time when we all wanted to move to Italy, so a lot of our friends are there. As you get older, your social life shrinks and things change quicker than you think they might.

Do you feel the need to lighten your workload?

EC It depends on what it is. When I was young, I was a bit of a workaholic. I’ve worked out how to balance life a bit better now. I’m not unhappy with where I am and what’s going on. I mean, ideally, I’d have some more film projects going, but there seems to be a kind of randomness to that side of things that I have been unlucky with.

Who instigates the film work? Do external production companies or agencies approach you?

EC Well, the Northern Soul film was unique in that it was completely driven by me. I didn’t have to wait for producers to get involved. I tried that route, but it was impossible. And I think that maybe, back then, the world of photography and film was so separate that you couldn’t piggyback off a career. You couldn’t go straight from being a good photographer into a filmmaker, especially a photographer like me who focused on ordinary people, ordinary activities, ordinary things. A lot of big artists can make that leap. I’m not Steve McQueen. I’m not Anton Corbijn. I never made an impact like those guys did.

I can’t really compare careers. Some people can come from one discipline and go to the top of another and flourish, and I think that’s brilliant. But someone like me was never in that league. I was never someone who was ‘on the horizon’. I think I’m a bit niche. When it came to trying to get a producer for Northern Soul, it was absolutely impossible.

What was the feedback you were receiving?

EC None! People just completely ignored me, and I couldn’t get an agent. You have to be a big name if you’re coming from somewhere else. And I was just not a big name, despite having some really great moments in my career.

Can we go back to that point in your life. What made you move from photography to film?

EC I think boredom. I don’t know if I managed my career well early on, but I was pretty quickly pushed into a commercial cul-de-sac of smiles.

What do you mean?

EC The more subtle images that I produced when I was working for The Face were being ignored for the more obvious commercial images. I know a lot of people were genuinely excited by a new photographer on the block who could authentically record something about young women, which showed a degree of freedom and felt joyful. I think that people who saw that work, who were advertisers or magazine editors, wanted a part of it. And, at the time, there’d been a kind of austerity in photography. I’m not saying I was the first to go against that because I wasn’t. There were many people photographing in new or different ways, but there was something about taking images on location and out of the studio that appealed to people.

I think I had a brilliant kind of two years where everybody wanted a piece of me. There were lots of big photographers even copying me. But at a certain point it just kind of fell away and it became about clients wanting smiley pictures.

What I should have done at that point was try to focus more on editorial. But I was too busy. I was too backed up, I had job after job after job. And I didn’t get time to think about what was happening. I was extremely exhausted and bored of trying to get people to laugh and smile. And so, I gravitated naturally towards film. It meant that you didn’t just have ten minutes of someone roaring with laughter. You had to have the other emotions as well.

[Beeping sound]

Sorry, can you hear my washing machine? My son’s going to college in about half an hour. I’ve just got to put his sweatshirt in the dryer. Hang on a second. We had a bargain last night that if he did the washing up, I would do his sweatshirt this morning. I’ve done it on a really wet setting, so it’s never going to dry.

What is he studying?

EC Oh, he’s doing art. Let’s see where he goes with that.

Were you exposed to a lot of creative disciplines when you were growing up?

EC My mum worked for a tailor for most of her life before she had me and she would make our clothes. I always saw my mum making patterns. My dad was a carpenter, so he was busy with his hands. My two older sisters also made their clothes. In the town we lived in, there was a big market where we could get cheap fabrics. It was a creative house in that way. It was a very working-class house, though. It wasn’t a middle-class house where we were all talking about art and craft movements. We were poor and we had to make ends meet.

And what about film and photography? Did you grow up around that?

EC We would beg my dad to project his cine-projector on a Sunday night so we could watch old films. It was a big thing to get the screen out and whip up the reels and the spools. My parents came from an older generation than [that of] most of my friends’. They would obsessively try and film everything. We had all these lovely family films that had been made before I came along. We had all these holidays filmed in Wales and it was magical to see my siblings as young children.

And then when did you start taking your creative inclinations seriously?

EC I was a good drawer and I could paint adequately. I never looked at the creative world with daunting eyes. Well, I didn’t let my fears bother me. When I eventually picked up my auntie’s camera, I didn’t really fully understand what an aperture or shutter speed or an ASA or ISO was.

I certainly had the fear that I would become unemployed. We were heading towards this ‘three million unemployed’ figure when I left school. There were so many youths that there were no jobs. In some respects, that motivated me. I probably would have ended up in a supermarket because I couldn’t add, I couldn’t spell, could hardly read and write. The teachers at my school didn’t give a fuck about us. They just saw us as scum to be managed and spewed out. There were only two teachers that actually wanted to teach us and make us learn. The rest of them were just horrendous.

I ended up leaving school with no CSEs, which is what you did if you were too thick to do O-Levels. I only had a CSE in art. I got a place at a very basic sixth-form type of art college in Rochdale, which was pretty shit. It didn’t really matter, though. I just wanted to paint scooters.

Like motorbikes?

EC Like Vespas and Lambrettas. You know the Italian old scooters that the Mods used to ride? I was sort of a Mod scooter girl at this point. When I saw Quadrophenia in the cinema at, like, fourteen, that was it for me. Then, when I was around fifteen, I would go into this bookshop in Bury (my hometown) every Saturday and look at this mod book by Richard Barnes. It was rammed with amazing photographs of young mods from the 1960s. It was my bible.

And this interest continued throughout art college?

EC Yes, during art college I got a part-time job and managed to get a scooter. That’s when I decided that my interest in art and mods equated to spraying scooters. All I cared about was cellulose, paint thinners, spray guns, airbrushes and masking tape. I would use the facilities at college to design graphics for scooters. My boyfriend at the time was also into it. We would get a scooter and he would give it a basic spray job, and then I would do sign writing, pinstriping and customising. They weren’t great at that point, but I worked myself up to doing a really amazing spray job on my own Lambretta two years later. That’s where it started, the art in me.

Okay, then when did you start really taking pictures?

EC If you go right back to the impetus to take pictures, it was to take pictures of my friends wearing mod clothes from Oxfam. I’d be there with the shittiest Kodak point-and-shoot with this funny little cassette in it. Probably eight-millimetre size negatives. We would do poses that we thought were cool, leaning against the Lambretta, looking moody. Then we started going to scooter rallies and suddenly our little gang of people with scooters that originally was made up of around ten people multiplied, maybe even quadrupled when I started going to Manchester, which was five stops away on the train. There were thousands of mods!

Was education a priority for you?

EC There was no emphasis on education where I came from. The idea was to get a job. The better paid the job, the better you were off. Obviously, education meant getting a better job. For me, as someone who was almost illiterate, there was no way education was on the horizon. I was just hell-bent on being the coolest mod on the planet.

What happened after college?

EC I left college around 1983 or 84 and was on the dole. The police were becoming a bigger presence in my life. Even if there was no violence or fighting or drunkenness, the police seemed to be always on our backs. They were getting more and more aggressive and antagonistic. We all had these songs we used to sing when they turned up. There was this real kind of charge in the air.

We would go to these Northern Soul all-nighters. That was my life, really. And then this unemployment phase hit and my parents were completely perturbed. My mum said to me, ‘Oh, you like taking pictures? I’m going to do flower arranging at the old folk’s class in the centre of Bury where they have an arts and crafts place. There’s a dark room in there and all these old men keep coming in and out of it.’

And you decide to go inside? [Laughs]

EC Well, if she could go there then I could too. I thought if it got her off my back, it was worth it. I asked a friend if she would come with me so we could figure out how to use cameras properly. It turned out to be this kind of camera club with 20 retired guys who were all keen amateur photographers. We would all go into the dark room and use the studio. They would pull money together and save up for a lingerie model once a month. She would come in with her camisole and panties and they’d take pictures of her. I would just sit at the back roaring with laughter!

A few months in, a guy called Brian visited. He had a job at Manchester Polytechnic. He was amazing and asked me to bring in all my snaps. He said, ‘Oh, you’ve got a good eye. Let’s see what it’s like when you try something like this.’ He lent me a camera, I went out shooting for the day, returned and he took me through the stages of processing black-and-white prints. He asked if I had seen the work of Chris Killip, and I obviously hadn’t at the time. He showed me the skinheads and punks and said, ‘Look, it’s the same stuff as what you’re doing. You just need to know how to master the camera.’

I would pore over Killip’s picture[s]. They felt magical to me. The subject matter was exactly like me and my mates. I had never seen pictures that were taking people like me seriously. It was a big revelation. Brian also showed me pictures by Shirley Baker in the streets of Manchester. Suddenly I could see a future as a photographer, and I got really fired up.

One day Brian said to me, ‘Listen, I’ve been doing some research. I think you should try for a City & Guilds,’ which was a technician level course. He put me through the test, and I got a certificate. Then I did a higher level of City & Guilds in South Manchester for a year, passed and became really engaged in photography. I discovered Martin Parr and Daniel Meadows and the new colour British photographers.

Is that when you met Nick Knight?

EC I got a job on a government scheme to help a technician in a lab. It was a low-paying job, only for one year, but it worked out because I got to follow a photographer very closely and see what they did day to day. I learnt how to colour print and how to develop colour.

As my year came to an end, I got promoted to the next scheme as a supervisor, which meant that I actually had a real job and a real wage. Then I applied as a demonstrator in a college. When I got there, I found out I was actually doing the job of a lecturer but paid as a technician. Despite that, it was a great leap for me. I was suddenly running a department.

At the college, there was a fashion lecturer who came to me one evening when I was clearing out the dark room and said, ‘Hey, I think me and you could work together. I’ve seen your pictures. I want to be a stylist.’ We used the student collections to try do some fashion shoots. At that point, I’d only seen David Bailey’s fashion images. I wasn’t really interested in fashion photography. We would photograph the fashion students’ designs two or three nights a week for the next two years.

Wow.

EC The woman who ran the fashion department had seen some of our pictures and suggested that we create a magazine for the end of the year. That magazine got my appetite wet for fashion. I found out that Nick Knight needed a first assistant from another lecturer whose husband was his tutor. I went to London for an interview and I got a call the next day saying I got the job.

Honest to God, Nick’s practice, the level of practice, compared to what I’d learnt, was on another scale. We were shooting on 10x8 cameras and I was cross processing 10x8 dark slides of colour. Within a week, I was throwing up a column tripod, building a 10x8 in a location, assisting Nick with another assistant, and then collapsing down this giant system to drive to another location and set it all up again. It was unbelievably hard, but I learnt so fast. It was a baptism of fire. I had a boyfriend that I was in love with at the time. I could never see him. I used to go and ring him from the phone box at twelve at night after I’d finish. I didn’t see him for four months.

Did working with Nick assist you in defining your direction as a photographer?

EC I remember Nick saying that I could work for The Face or iD with my portfolio. He would ask why I wanted to work for him. I remember saying that I didn’t have the confidence to do that.

After leaving Nick, I knew I could do anything, though. I could fly. I knew how to light, I knew how to throw up equipment, and I felt the confidence to go into magazines and ask for work.

And did you?

EC Yes, I went to The Face and they offered me small jobs. At first, it wasn’t that easy to get in and do fashion for those magazines. You really had to prove your worth. I was still very humble. I didn’t go in there saying, ‘Take me on, I’m fucking great.’ I was still a Northern girl who was desperate for approval. But I knew I had an inner confidence.

Were there any rituals or practices you found essential?

EC I had two lives as a photographer, one as a photographer with little or no control, and one as a fashion photographer, where one hopes for a lot of control.

Do you feel like you have control now?

EC Having full control can sometimes be a problem. You can end up doing stuff that would be your default setting. As a fashion photographer, working for a small magazine or a magazine that doesn’t have a lot of advertisers to appease, you’re probably going to have much more control. You might get to pick your own stylists, you might get to pick your own models, you might even get to come up with the idea in its entirety.

When I was trying to make it as a fashion photographer, there were very few platforms to observe photography from. There were only the giant Italian and French brands that were doing stuff with Meisel and his contemporaries. Things changed when Melanie Ward turned up on the scene. Together with David Sims and Corinne Day, they spearheaded a movement away from commercial fashion. Her styling influences were from kids on the streets. They were all in tune with capturing authentic youth culture.

They were also all working across iD and The Face. Those two magazines were way ahead of anything that was happening in America. America didn’t know what was going on. Between the two British magazines, you had this host of talent, and it was an amazing time for photography and fashion photography. It wasn’t dictated by super-thin snooty models.

Do you like working with those kinds of models now?

EC If I can, I’ll construct a different kind of image. I learnt long ago that I have to keep myself fresh and interested on the job. But I find that I can’t always keep finding brand-new models who can do what’s required of them in my shoot. I find that very frustrating. Clients will say, ‘We love what you do. It’s amazing! We love how you change the models into something human and people we can identify with.’ But then they send a really shy girl who is terrified!

I got bored of being delivered models that don’t have balls to be themselves and get down with it. A lot of good-looking girls get into modelling because they’re highly aware of themselves, but they have this fear of being ugly. They associate ugliness with letting themselves go. And that’s what kills it for me. I have to photograph someone who doesn’t want to be ugly or silly. I get incredibly frustrated, and I don’t get the results that everybody wants because they are working against me to stay composed. It’s amazing how many clients will completely ignore my recommendations for casting. I always try and hire confident people who don’t care what they look like when their mouths are open or when their necks are crooked or when they’re pulling stupid faces.

That’s what makes a picture special, when fearless people are in them and they don’t give a crap about being beautiful.

Well, at least you know what you want.

EC Yeah, I love that.

And even though you ask, and it’s not received, you still ask.

EC Yeah, I guess there is something liberating about knowing what you want, isn’t there? Because a lot of people don’t.

What do you look for in photography now?

EC There is something interesting about the particular versus the ubiquitous. I’ve seen a lack of the particular in modern fashion photography. I don’t know what the key players are doing because I’m not really involved in that world anymore. But the thing that slightly disappoints me is people’s fear of the particular. There might be a spirit in the photographs, but there doesn’t seem to be anything unique.

It’s interesting you say that because a lot of the photographers in Australia produce the same style of work. Not a lot of people seem to have a ‘particular’. Perhaps a lot of photographers aren’t actively trying to develop their voice or their identity. Or maybe they are yearning for their voice, but they feel this pressure to perform in a certain way.

EC I can see why agents are probably pushing for that. They probably want to give those photographers an international appeal. I would almost advise people to get a job in the industry that isn’t as a photographer so they can practise their photography and hone their spirit and their voice. They don’t have to be involved in the commercial pull. That’s what kills it. That’s what kills the spirit and their desire. They are two separate jobs completely. Two lives, two different photographers.

Do you think magazines still play a part in photography standards?

EC I don’t really have much experience in editorial anymore. I turn down a lot of editorial commissions that come to me. I don’t want to repeat something I’ve already done.

Are you often asked to repeat previous work?

EC Well, no, but there’s an expectation, isn’t there? ‘Let’s get some smiles in here and let’s change this up! Let’s make it a bit more real!’ I’m not against fashion or editorial commissions if they’re coming from the right spirit. But at the same time, I have no desire to photograph the latest silhouette and try and get some awkward, shy girl to jump around. It has no appeal to me, whatsoever! I think I killed my editorial career a long time ago when I decided I wanted to become a director and a writer.

Are you writing anything at the moment?

EC Yeah, writing several things. I pick some things up, I put them down, I try to pitch them. I’ve been involved in three or four development processes that have fallen flat. I’m not a big player, so the opportunities are slim.

But you’ve got your fight. You’ve got that drive.

EC I managed to nearly bankrupt us when I made Northern Soul. The fight that I had went into making that film. And now I can’t self-finance anything. I have to find the right person to raise the money, and that’s a problem within itself. I’m niche! Not a lot of people like my take on things, and I don’t blame them because I’m a bit of an oddity.

What’s your take? Why do you think it’s so different?

EC It’s complicated. Maybe my ideas are not that good or they’re not that relevant. It’s a different world now. It’s about money and figures and seats in cinemas and streaming. That may be what my problem is. When I write an idea, I don’t think commercially. I don’t think about audience.

When the ideas come, I just have to write them. I keep trying because I would go mad otherwise. My creativity would collapse. When I’m writing, I try to stay humble. And whether or not that actually manifests as something real, it doesn’t really matter. Once you get in that flow, it’s the best, isn’t it?

There’s something about writing that is so hard and taxing. You feel like you’re never going to get through it. And when you do, you’re not only proud of the work you’ve produced, but also the process that you endured. I’m sure you feel that with your visual work? I think it’s the challenge of it. You don’t care if people read or see it. It’s just that you made it. It’s such an achievement.

EC Yes, there is a kind of naivety to writing. I think I would rather be in my own space than be crippled by what other people think. I think if you can apply yourself to a lot of research and brainstorming, then it can be enjoyable. It doesn’t have to be painful.

Yes, if you lean into the learning part of it, it’s so much more rewarding. There is a real fight for knowledge. You have to scour the internet. You have to go and search for what you want, find the information, find the angle, find the history. Do you read a lot?

EC Yeah, I try to. I try to read a couple of books a month, but it’s not always that easy when you’re doing lots of other things. I tried to read as many classics as possible just to figure out what makes them classics.

And what’s coming up for you this year?

EC I’ve got a show at the Martin Parr Foundation in July. There will be a book published by RRB.

What’s the exhibition about?

EC It’s a kind of bonus show that I never envisaged or planned. Have you met Martin Parr or interviewed him?

No, I wish.

EC Martin Parr is one of those people who is always sniffing around for what hasn’t been published or isn’t in the public domain. There was a moment when I was considering doing a documentary about Northern Soul in the early 90s. I took loads of pictures of the atmosphere, partly research and partly so I could use the material in the documentary, which I never made because I realised that everybody who was on the scene was getting a bit older and the spirit wasn’t quite the same. Anyways, I did a talk at the Martin Parr Foundation a couple of years ago and I showed some of these pictures. Straight after, Martin and Craig from the Cafe Royale ran up to me and said, ‘What are these! We need to see!’ I sent Craig a PDF and he created a little book. Then Martin decided he wanted to do a show.

Fantastic. And the photos are of people dancing?

EC Yeah, it’s just the scene as it was in that period. They’re quite rough pictures. They’re sometimes ill composed and they’re not romantic. It’s not Cartier-Bresson. Definitely more Martin Parr.

Where do you keep all your pictures?

EC Well, those were shot on film. So, they’re in an archive box. Around 2010, I moved to digital, so a lot of stuff is on lazy hard drives needing a good organisation.

Anyway, I must go because I am expected at the office. It’s been really lovely and I’ve really enjoyed this intimate chat we’ve had. I feel like I went through my whole life! Come to London! We could go for a cup of coffee.

Oh, I’d love that. Thank you, Elaine. I’ll speak to you soon. [EXEUNT]