Olafaq Magazine August 2024

Into the hideouts of Georgia's far-right ultras with the lens of John Bolloten.

British photographer John Bolloten talks exclusively to OLAFAQ about his days with "Elita", the far-right Georgian ultras group.

The "ultras" are fanatical hooligans, known for their violent action. The term originates (probably) from Italy, but is used worldwide to mainly describe organized (and extremely fanatical) team fans. In Greece, most professional football teams also have an ultras team. Most of them are named after the number of the gate that hosts them in every match of their team at home. Other teams have different names or no distinct names at all and are simply named after the team they support. The behavioral tendency of these groups is more or less known, it includes of course the singing of football anthems and slogans, marching to the beat of military drums, the use of flares and smoke generators, the vocal support of the bigger teams and the hanging of flags and banners in the football stadiums, which are intended to create an atmosphere that will encourage their own team and intimidate opposing players and their fans. These teams also organize organized trips to attend away matches.

Violent action by ultras has emerged as one of the most worrying phenomena in the world of football, with tension and violence now spreading to most European stadiums. These organized fan groups, known for their loyalty to the teams they support, often go beyond the limits of support and resort to extreme acts of violence, primarily causing serious social and sporting consequences. From Italy to Greece, and from Russia to England, pitch violence has become an almost inevitable part of football matches. Clashes between rival teams' ultras, as well as attacks on police and fans, have become a daily occurrence. And if one wants to search for the root of this violence then one will find that it is all related to political, social, and nationalistic motivations, thus adding an extra layer of danger to the already combustible atmosphere of a critical struggle.

The spread of violence in stadiums is not limited to physical conflicts. Hate speech, drug use, and the display of symbols that refer to extreme ideologies have become hallmarks of many ultras. This form of violence not only affects the participants, but also erodes any sense of sportsmanship that has survived today, undermining the fun and unity that football is supposed to promote. The response from the authorities and football clubs has been consistently mixed. Despite tighter security measures and penalties for offenders, violence continues to be a serious problem. Efforts to deal with violence cannot be limited to police measures alone, but also require social interventions that will deconstruct the mentality of violence and strengthen the values of sport.

The phenomenon of ultras is complex and deeply rooted in the history and social structure of many countries. Although the culture of ultras is widespread throughout Europe, the history of Elita is deeply rooted in the very history of Georgia and Tbilisi. In the mid-20th century and until 1991, Dynamo Tbilisi competed at the top of the Soviet Union's football hierarchy, in the legendary Soviet Premier League, alongside historic teams such as Dynamo Kyiv and Spartak Moscow . But with the fall of the Soviet Union, Dinamo Tilfidas found themselves along with other Georgian teams on the new path of the Erovnuli Liga, the country's top league. It was then that ultras groups began to emerge, linking their presence with the renaissance of Georgian football.

About a year ago, British photographer John Bolloten stepped through the revolving gates of the magnificent Boris Paichadze Dinamo Arena in Tbilisi, Georgia, a stadium that can hold up to 54,000 souls, and found his place in the heart of Sector 17. With the stands rising sharply like undulating ridges around him, he turned to the crowd and began to capture with his lens the men standing behind him – most of them bare-chested, with shaved heads, roaring en masse as the match began. These were the men of Elita , the central ultras group that follows Dinamo Tbilisi , who had invited Bolloten to live this unique experience alongside them, after a communication they had developed earlier on social media.

John Bolloten's photographs from the troubled days in Tbilisi have found their way into the excellent photobook “Tbilisi Raw”, a unique black-and-white documentary that offers a raw (and often disturbing) look into the dark world of Georgia's far-right ultras. Through stark, black-and-white images, Bolloten captures the violence, ferocity and extreme ideology that characterizes these groups, which are often associated with nationalism and racism. At the same time, in a perverse way, it glorifies unity, brotherhood and camaraderie, regardless of whether all this comes from a "hostile" environment. His work highlights the atmosphere of intimidation and the harsh reality behind the stadiums of Tbilisi, showing a part of Georgian society that rarely comes to light, and causing reflection on the rise of extremism in the region.

John Bolloten's current works in progress also include the series 'Blood Brothers' (bare knuckle fighting), 'Levelling Up' (a disturbing record of Britain's urban decline), 'Generation Grime' (an in-depth study of northern scene grime and drill) and 'The Life and Times of Shuttle Athletic' which sees him return to the Bradford Sunday Football Championship. On the occasion of his book "Tbilisi Raw", which received excellent reviews from the international press, OLAFAQ spoke with him, entering with his words deep into the Georgian underground among hooligans and skinheads.

Where did you grow up? When you were a kid, did you have the sense of what sort of creative path your life might take?

I was born in 1965 in Brighton, England and lived there until I was 9. Then we moved to Edinburgh, Scotland in 1974 where I lived till I was 18. From there, in 1983, I arrived in Bradford, England and I am still here. I didn't have any idea of any creative path until punk came along in 1976 and the concept of learning 3 chords and forming a band. That led to me having a long music career.

How did you get in touch with photography? What drew you in it? What was your first camera?

I always liked photography, especially music photography and the images from punk and reggae. I also really liked the album covers from Blue Note Records. However, I never thought about taking photography up until I was 43 and I bought an entry-level Canon DSLR. I got really into it, obsessive even but it took a few years before I started taking any photos that were any good.

How important is the role of people in your photography and why?

Very important. I am more interested in people and what they do more than anything else really. I do shoot quite a few photos though that I call urban landscapes which largely don't have people in the frame. I use photography as a way to connect with people and I most interested in those worlds which are often hidden from mainstream society.

What drew you to the Ultras culture, and specifically to the Elita group of Dinamo Tbilisi?

I always thought that doing some photography around football hooligans would be a really interesting thing to do. Growing up in the 1970s, you could not escape this phenomenon. It wasn't just about Saturdays, it was literally every day. Growing up in Edinburgh, wearing a football scarf could mean getting your head kicked in at any time. With regard to Elita, after some research I found them and got in contact. I didn't know about them before I came to Tbilisi in Georgia.

How did you approach Elita on social media, and what was their initial reaction to your request to photograph them?

I messaged them on Instagram and I was very surprised that they actually replied. They told me later that they had looked through my Instagram page and could see that I wasn't a cop and also that I was used to working in underground scenes. After some conversation I got invited to meet them at the stadium the following day.

What was it like stepping into the Dinamo Arena for the first time, surrounded by such an intense atmosphere?

The whole evening was very surreal to be honest. Georgian football is in a slump and even though the Dinamo Arena is steeped in history and glory, games are only sparsely attended. The busiest area was Sector 17 which is the completely closed sector inhabited by Elita. Outsiders are forbidden entry into it. There was about 100 Elita there and at the beginning I was just keeping myself calm and waiting to see how it was all going to develop.

Can you describe the dynamic between the Elita members and the general crowd during the match? How did it influence your photography?

Well, it didn't take long for things to kick off. There was some argument with a couple of Russian guys and within seconds three or four Elita were out of the sector chasing them down and then punched their heads in. I knew then that I was in the presence of very serious and violent young men. When the guys came back they were all smiling and happy and that kind of broke the ice a bit. After that I was just trying to do my job well and take powerful images. A few guys took their t-shirts off and I could see that they had neo-nazi tattoos so I made sure I took as many pictures as I could of whatever I found really interesting. I will say that everyone in the sector was friendly and I had no problems at all in there.

Your photography often captures raw and candid moments. How do you achieve that level of authenticity in a charged environment like a football match?

I am totally focused on trying to take really strong photographs whatever is the environment. I shoot with a wide angle lens so I have to get up close so I have to balance that with my own personal safety and the reaction of whoever I am photographing. I am used to being in underground scenes and usually it is a closed environment, away from the public. So once you are accepted it is not like being on the street where anything can happen. I use a small camera and lens and try and be discreet and non-threatening. I think once people are comfortable with your presence and they can see that you know what you are doing then it's easier to be in the right zone.

Were there any particular challenges you faced while photographing the ultras? How did you navigate them?

Yes, there were a few. The main one that stands out is what happened after that first match I attended with Elita. Everything had gone well, they were all in good spirits and I was happy because I knew I had made some really strong images. We gathered outside the stadium and I was asked what I was doing now. I said that I had no plan so they invited me to join them. I accepted and jumped into a car with three others. We were speeding through the streets of Tbilisi and I asked where we were going. They said that they were going to attack some rival ultras who were at a stadium on the outskirts of the city. To cut a long story short, I found myself in a big street fight, I got two usable frames and was able to get myself out safely. This massively earned their respect and set the foundation for me to continue working with them and make the first ever photobook deep inside an ultras group. Despite the dangers, it was one of the greatest experiences of my life.

What emotions or stories were you trying to convey through your photographs of the Elita group?

I always try and work honestly and document with integrity, regardless of who the people are. Intimacy is at the heart of everything I do and I want the viewer to feel that they are right there. I am aware that my images can be uncomfortable viewing but they are all authentic, nothing is being staged for the camera.

How do you think your presence as a photographer impacted the behavior of the Elita members during these sessions, if at all?

I don't think it had much impact, if any to be honest. They are doing what they are going to do. The only difference is that they set some things up to happen while I was there like a midnight graffiti action which they would have done anyway.

Have you had any follow-up interactions with Elita or other ultra groups since your time in Tbilisi?

Yes I have a strong relationship with a number of members of Elita and I keep in touch with them. I know I am welcome back there at any time and one day I do hope to return. I can't say that I am interested to work with any other ultras group as it would be hard to top the work I was able to achieve with Elita.

What do you hope viewers take away from your photographs of this experience?

With all of my work, I want to give an intimate insight into worlds that your average person doesn't get to see. So this includes projects I have done around football hooliganism, injecting drug users, bare knuckle and no rules fighting, drugs, gangs, cockfighting and so on. In some projects I am recording interviews so there can be a deeper understanding.

In your opinion, what role does football play in the identity and culture of groups like Elita?

Football is obviously very important but to me I think it is more about a group of young men can come together and be part of some kind of family. In some ways it isn't different from being in the military where it a place where men can love each other unconditionally. Having said that, when I was there, all the members were between 16 and 23 I think, so they want to have a lot of fun also.

Can you talk about the importance of trust and rapport when photographing subcultures or groups that are often misunderstood or misrepresented?

Deep trust is everything when making work like this. The camera is really only a tool for making photographs. Having access, being accepted and respected is all down to who you are as a person. I try to be a good human being with compassion regardless of who I am working with and usually I prefer working with people who are different to me. There is a phrase “real recognise real” and I think this sums up well how these relationships are. I don't pretend to be anyone different from myself and people can see that, or smell it as we like to say!

If you were given the power to get rid of something off this planet, what or who would you choose it to be and why?

I don't want to get into politics here so I will just say the demonising of other people who are different to us.

To what extent can music or art or photography be subversive today, up to the point of changing our understanding of today’s f****d-up world altogether?

Who knows to be honest. People often say that photographs can change the world but overall the same bad things are still happening. I do believe that every single person can affect change, however small, so I try to do my bit, at least in the things I have some control over.


Amateur Photographer Magazine July 2024

Raw Talent

John Bolloten photographs groups on the margins of society including inside the brutal world of far-right football hooligan ultras.

On Thursday 11th April 2024, documentary photographer John Bolloten drove the short distance from his home in Bradford, West Yorkshire to The Carriageworks Theatre Leeds to install his exhibition at Photo North Festival 5. He found his allocated space, unpacked 18 large black and white prints and with swift precision, white tacked them to the wall. The work was shocking and violent. John is respectful and calm.

For the duration of the three day festival, John held vigil beside his exhibition, talking to visitors, explaining his method. When he delivered a presentation to around 60 people, some visibly winced and tightened their posture, others sat wide eyed. ‘I do recognise that most of my work is on the margins of society and I’m also a figure on the margins. I’m seen as possibly a divisive figure or some people see me as that. I don’t, obviously. I’ve always felt like an outsider my whole life, maybe that’s why I’m attracted to stuff that’s on the outside. I know that I make work that’s outside of the mainstream and many things are easily misunderstood in society.’

The exhibition and book, Tbilisi Raw goes deep into the underground of the Georgian capital with a rare and intimate insight into the world of football ultras and right-wing skinheads. Elita, formed in 2018, became the main ultras group following Dinamo Tbilisi after the demise of previous gangs and have advanced in reputation from clashes with rival local and international hooligans from Dutch giants Feyenoord, NK Maribor from Slovenia and Israeli fans from Beitar Jerusalem.

It’s John’s fifteenth publication, most are self-funded. Not bad for a photographer who first picked up a DSLR with intent in 2008 aged 43 and while employed full-time, currently as a specialist harm reduction worker in a needle exchange service. There’s the obscene graffiti trilogy - This is Shit, Shit and Fuck You. Other work includes Blood Brothers, a long-term documentary project on bare knuckle pit fighting. North Guerillas documents one year at an outdoor cannabis farm at a secret location in Yorkshire. Generation Grime is a social documentary project around grime music in northern England and Gladiators provides an intimate look inside the sabong (cockfighting) scene in Manila, Philippines.

For his reportage, Nothing To See Here John photographed homelessness, destitution, drug and alcohol misuse in Bradford. Shot over a period of eight months in 2018, Love Story was an important and unflinching reportage of the often volatile and drug infused relationship between Gary and Maree. At times bleak and brutal, there are tender moments of a couple living and loving on the edge of madness. John’s next book, This Is Not a Life, It’s Just an Existence, a high quality 500 edition paperback including 18 life stories is scheduled for publication this year with a boxed special edition of 60.

Born in Brighton, John moved to Scotland at the age of nine before settling in Bradford at the age of 18 in 1983. He admits to having had a difficult upbringing and having had problems with drugs. Photography has provided an alternative, a positive impact on his mental health and he tries to photograph daily. It’s these personal experiences and working in closed worlds that prepared him for his hooligan encounter.

Following up on his schoolboy interest in the Russian Revolution and politics of the cold war, John used his camera as an excuse to visually explore former eastern European Soviet bloc countries - Albania, Serbia, Bulgaria and Slovakia. After a week in the Armenian capital Yerevan, where he met some football ultras who followed Pyunik Yerevan, he took the bus to Tbilisi, Georgia. ‘When I was in Tbilisi I saw that there was a football game on and that there was also an ultras firm there. I never expected them to answer or even acknowledge my message that I sent them on Instagram @elitadinamotbilisi. They told me they went and looked at all of my Instagram and they just had a feeling about me. Obviously they could tell I wasn’t a cop and I was used to being in underground scenes so they invited me to meet them. I was really shocked to be honest.’

John arrived at the Boris Paitchadze Dinamo Arena, home of Dinamo Tbilisi to discover that the Elita faction controlled the gated Sector 17 and was invited inside. ‘I got my camera out and all I’ve got on my camera is an 18mm lens, 27 full frame equivalent on the Fuji XT1, so it's a crop sensor. Literally a minute after I got my camera out, before I took any pictures, three or four Elita were over the fence punching in a couple of Russian guys which I didn’t photograph because I’ve a wide angle lens - it was 50, 60 metres away by the time it happened - I missed it. They came back smiling because they were happy they’d had this fight. The first thing they said was did you get any pictures of that? And I said, no!’ John stuck with his go-to lens and proceeded to photograph up close the ultras of Sector 17 for the remainder of the match.

Witnessing how confidently he photographed, Elita invited John to join them on an ambush of their rivals, Torpedo Kutaisi, at a small stadium on the outskirts of Tbilisi. ‘I was in the first car with the leader of the group. I didn’t know where we were going, they just said what are you doing now? I said I don’t have a plan, they said do you want to come with us? I said well ok, because they hadn’t killed me or beaten me up, I didn't feel like I was in any danger.’ John continues, ‘There were about three or four skirmishes in which I only took three or four frames at most. Everything was happening slowly in my mind but was actually very quickly in reality. The next thing, all the guys I was with, which was probably at that point 18 or 20, they all ran off. I was left there but got myself out alive and safely.’ Having proved himself and earned their respect, John received a message from a hooligan group of teenage neo-nazi skinheads who invited him to hang out the following afternoon.

After that first brief encounter in October 2022, John returned to Bradford burning with desire to publish a book. ‘I was talking to the leader of Elita every day for at least an hour after I came back. After about a month of forming this relationship and getting to know a lot about him and the group and vice versa, I thought I’ll ask him, can I come back and make a book and he said sure, come.’ John returned for 10 days in March 2023. From the beginning it was made clear no faces were to be visible, John negotiated a solution, they would be censored with a black line.

The faces may be covered but the stark and often disturbing black and white photographs in the book documenting tattoos, clothes, banners, racist and xenophobic graffiti is revealing. Flares are held and middle fingers flicked out in front of mural proclaiming FUCK RUSSIA. The 14/88 combination of two popular white supremacist numeric symbols is permanently inked across torsos. Turkish-made pistols are postured with. A line of skinheads perform a Nazi salute. Heavy laced-up boots scuffle in the dirt. Often John was technically challenged holding his mobile phone torch in one hand to illuminate black hooded faces in dark corners, firing his camera set to a high ISO and a low f-stop in the other.

‘I can’t put any of those pictures of tattoos on social media because either Instagram will remove them immediately and then give me a shadow ban [when the platform's algorithms restrict the visibility of your account] or people will complain. You can put a picture up of someone with a line over their eyes. Social media often makes no sense. If you live in the USA you can post loads of pictures of people with guns. In the UK it’s a different matter. I might post a picture of someone in Bradford with some kind of firearm and I’ll get a warning but in the States that’s kind of normal.’

The pages in Tbilisi Raw rage with tension from the terraces to parks, subways and abandoned buildings. The ideology may be distasteful but the photographs are shot with a degree of empathy, portraying young men coming together. A safe place of unconditional love and shared identity. A tribe to swig beer with, have a smoke. It would be easy to level an accusatory finger that the book is endorsing hooligans. The introduction to the book is an interview with Elita laying down in their own words their ideology - where they come from and the context of growing up in Georgia with the uncertainty and instability of the region since gaining independence in 1991 after the collapse of the Soviet Union and subsequent conflicts. South Ossetia seceded from Georgia in 1992 and proclaimed itself an independent republic. Abkhazia broke away from Georgian control declaring independence in 1999, though it remained unrecognised. The account reveals their hooligan mindset allows room for the reader to form their own point of view.

‘When I’m doing talks and talking about all my work, it’s really to give people an insight into people's lives and humanise those people, say a bit about where they come from and what their backgrounds are. I never want to say that I represent them but in the book they represent themselves and that’s really important. I’m a firm believer that if I can do it anybody can. You have to start from a place of self-belief and that your work has value. You have to be connected to your work and have an emotional response to it otherwise how can you expect anybody else to?’

There are groups of ultras all over the world, some political, some not. Some are far-right wing, some left. Like all of John’s work, it’s a chapter in his burgeoning archive documenting marginal groups and people. ‘I prefer working as a photographer with people different to me. My philosophy is talk less, listen more. Try to understand where people are coming from. If you have the opportunity to get inside a closed group of people it’s an enormous privilege to be there and have that space to make work and to try and make that work as honestly as possible and as intimate as possible.’


Huck Magazine July 2023

Inside the violent world of Georgia's far-right football ultras.

Photographer John Bolloten was granted rare access to Elita, pro-nationalist ultras supporting Dinamo Tbilisi, to document a group typically closed off to outsiders.

Last October, John Bolloten went through the turnstiles at the grand, 54,000-capacity Boris Paichadze Dinamo Arena in Tbilisi, Georgia, and took his seat at the front of Sector 17. With the steep stands rising above and around him, he turned to face the crowd and began taking photographs of the men standing behind – mostly bare-chested with shaved heads – roaring in unison as the match got underway. These men were members of Elita, the main ultras group following Dinamo Tbilisi, who had invited Bolloten into the match with them after he reached out on social media.

“They control the sector of the stadium, so if you go to the ticket office you cannot buy a ticket for Sector 17. It’s completely locked off for Elita, and they control all the access,” Bolloten explains of the group’s grip on their club’s home turf. Founded in 2018 as a conglomerate of historic ultras groups and rising to the top of Dinamo Tbilisi’s ultras pyramid, Elita are a right-wing (often far-right), Georgian nationalist association – and for many who don’t fall into line with their views, politics, or even from the wrong nationality, they can be uncompromising.

“Sometimes people may say they want to come in that sector and they will decide whether that’s acceptable, but for people who are outsiders it’s very dangerous to come close to that sector,” says Bolloten. “If you’re Russian, it’s fatal.”

As he began flicking the shutter on his camera, he noticed a commotion in the corner of his eye, as indiscernible shouting in Russian and Georgian came from above. “I wasn’t paying any attention, and then the next minute I looked up and saw two guys come over the fence chasing two Russian guys for about 50 metres through the stands and caught them and beat them up,” he continues. “That was within about two minutes of me being there – that was a very sobering moment.”

The picture he took inside the stadium with the ultras, who requested Bolloten to mask their faces with a black line across their eyes, raising their arms in the air just before the violent episode, is now featured in his new photobook Tbilisi Raw. Spending more time embedded within Elita on that trip, and returning on occasion in the following months, the book is a tense, disquieting look at ultras culture – the fights, their fraternal bond, and their varying extremities of right-wing, nationalist and often white supremacist beliefs laid out in black-and-white spreads.

Ultras are associations of hardcore fanatics of football teams across Europe, emerging in 1960s and 1970s Italy. It’s a diverse subculture, with rituals, practices and beliefs differing across fanbases and even within ultras groups, but in the past decades they have become synonymous with far-right politics – and often violence. After seeing the attack in the stands, Bolloten would quickly find out that violence is part and parcel of being an ultra, especially in Elita. After the match, one of the group’s leaders approached him and asked: “What are you doing now? Do you want to come with us?”

“I have no plans,” Bolloten replied, and proceeded to enter a car with the group. Driving towards the city’s outskirts under the cover of darkness, he asked: “Where are we going?”

“We’re going to attack the ultras from Torpedo,” was the reply.

Pulling up in Varketili, a neighbourhood located at the end of the Tbilisi Metro line, Bolloten was dropped off on the side of the road, where roughly 30 fans of FC Torpedo Kutaisi – Dinamo’s “detested rivals” – were waiting at a bus stop. They were standing unassumingly next to a patch of Astro turf training pitches, with their figures illuminated by the floodlights. “They were very relaxed, they’d won their match,” he recalls. “Then a couple of minutes [later] I saw the guys from Elita marching down the road, and then they just came through the trees and just charged at these guys and attacked.

“It was like being in a movie,” he continues. “I just pulled my camera out and took some pictures over the 90 seconds that these skirmishes took place. It was to be honest the only time ever as a photographer I believe I’ve been invisible, because the whole time I was there I don’t recall one person even looking at me.”

The Elita members quickly bolted and dispersed out into the surrounding urban jungle, leaving John on his own with the bruised Torpedo fans. Without hesitating he pulled up Google Maps on his phone, typed in the address of his apartment and saw the 309 bus that he was instructed to take pull into the stop across the road. Keeping his head down he crossed the road, boarded and made the long journey home, with his pulse still racing when his phone started buzzing.

“I got a WhatsApp about two minutes later from one of the leaders of Elita asking me where I was,” he says. “I said: ‘It’s okay I’m out of there, I’m on my way back to the apartment.’ So actually what happened that evening sealed the trust because I had gone with them without hesitation and handled myself.

“From what I’ve seen, the mentality of Elita – they are a lot more ready for violence at any moment than any of the other supporters of any other club in Georgia,” he adds. “For many ultras groups, these are guys who like fighting. We see violence as a negative thing in society and I am one of those people too, but I do understand that for many men violence is a way of life – it is a part of life.”

While the ultras culture is spread across Europe, the history of Elita specifically is intertwined with the history of Georgia and its capital city. Throughout the middle of the 20th century all the way until 1991, Dinamo Tbilisi played its football at the top of the Soviet Union’s football pyramid – the Soviet Top League – alongside other storied teams including FC Dynamo Kyiv and Spartak Moscow. But following the collapse of the Soviet Union, Dinamo would join other Georgian teams in the country’s top league – the Erovnuli Liga – and it was around then that the ultras groups began to gain prominence.

As Russian and Georgian relations diminished, including a 2008 Russian invasion as they sought control of the disputed South Ossetia and Abkhazia regions, right-wing nationalism and far-right movements in the country gained traction and prominence. It’s partly why the group targets Russians, and why those two football fans were attacked in the stands.

“People aren’t happy about [the invasion] and The Caucasus is a very unstable region, so everything in relation to the ultras has to be seen in the context of a very unstable region. Family [members] of the ultras have been there in the war, in the army,” Bolloten explains. “Elita is a right-wing, nationalist ultras group – but they’re also made up of people with varying views, so they do contain elements of neo-Nazis, white supremacists.”

He clarifies: “But there are neo-Nazis who are not ultras. They’re not establishing themselves as a Nazi ultras group.”

The vice versa is also true: not all ultras are neo-Nazis. There are a hatful of clubs whose ultras associations sit left-of-centre, including AS Livorno Calcio, Red Star Paris, Marseille and Celtic’s Green Brigade. However, ultras groups across Europe overwhelmingly skew right, and even fascist. While much of their cultures are wrapped up in the history and politics of the local areas, similarities between strong national pride and club fanaticism, as well as the collective spirit of brotherhood, can create fertile ground for far-right beliefs.

In Georgia, this comes along as a tide of such politically-minded groups have been growing increasingly influential in the country, with anti-Russian sentiments, anti-immigration rhetoric and increasingly powerful religious fundamentalism growing louder. While they remain fringe in nature and yet to make a serious dent in electoral politics, the far-right have made their presence felt in the public space – 2,000-plus protesters attacked Tbilisi’s Pride rally recently on July 9, causing clashes with police and forcing the cancellation of the LGBTQ+ celebration.

“Georgian Pride was smashed up,” says Bolloten. “I don’t know if any of the ultras were involved, but there’s large sections of Georgian society who are opposed to that scene.” Regarding Dinamo Tbilisi specifically, alleged racism from their fanbase – including the unfurling of a Nazi banner – have seen them face sanctions from European football’s governing body UEFA on several occasions.

For Bolloten, their views came second to the opportunity to photograph a group who are famously closed off to outsiders. “My job wasn’t to go there to have political discussions – I’m not a racist so I don’t share their politics,” he says. “If anybody levelled a question at me like: ‘Why didn’t you challenge them?’ Well, I would probably be hospitalised, and I’m not going there to put my life in danger.

“I realised I was in a position to have really unparalleled access to a group you can’t get access to. Nobody had ever made a photobook inside an ultras group,” he continues. “My job is to honestly document and take authentic photos in a situation that on paper is extremely dangerous.”


Daily Mail July 2023

Inside the brutal world of far-right football 'ultras': Shocking photos lift the lid on the extreme Dinamo Tbilisi 'Elita' whose code of violence is second to none.

The world of football hooligans is a secretive one - often away from the public eye and mainstream media.

Access inside the groups of so-called 'ultras' is near impossible. Members never reveal their identity and faces are never shown. It is a code that stretches across the whole world of ultras.

Letting a stranger inside to photograph their world is an extremely rare occurrence.

But, Bradford-based documentary photographer John Bolloten was able to gain the trust of one of the most notorious groups in the Caucasus region - Elita - and has published his photographs in a new book: Tbilisi Raw.

The unique black-and-white photographs are shocking and disturbing - showing fights between ultras groups as well as their hidden lives.

John said: 'I was in Tbilisi for a few days and I found out that the top club there, Dinamo Tbilisi, had a fanatical ultras group called Elita. I made contact with them and after some conversation, they invited me to join them inside their sector at a home match the following day.'

When John arrived at the stadium, he discovered that Elita control an entire gated-off sector, Sector 17, of the ground and no outsiders, even regular Dinamo supporters, are allowed inside.

What was to follow was a disturbing and shocking experience and John soon learned the power that the far-right group harness in the region.

John explained: 'After only a couple of minutes inside I noticed that Elita were having an argument with two Russian far-right ultras. Seconds later, the Russians were beaten inside the stands. I understood why Elita had such a feared reputation in the region and that a situation could explode at any moment.'

Elita were formed in 2018 and became the main ultras group following Dinamo Tbilisi after the demise of a few ultra groups before them.

They quickly established themselves as a force to be reckoned with and had taken part in organised fights against rival hooligans, clashing with groups from Dutch giants Feyernoord, NK Maribor from Slovenia and Israeli fans from Beitar Jerusalem.

Their main rivalries are with Russian clubs, although to date they have not had the opportunity to meet.

Hatred of Russia is notable on the streets of Tbilisi, particularly since the war in Ukraine began. Offensive graffiti can be seen across the city centre and out in the surrounding areas.

Georgia became independent in 1991 after the collapse of the Soviet Union. It had its own internal civil war and a was against Russia itself a few years ago. Two Georgian regions, South Ossetia and Abkhazia, are now outside Georgian control and unrecognised by most of the international community. Elita's own banners at matches state that these regions are part of Georgia.

John continued: 'The rest of the match passed off without incident. I was able to take many photographs and I had agreed beforehand that I would put a black line over members' faces to protect their identity.'

Trust and communication is a massive part of John's work. He said: 'All of my work is based on trust and I never betray it. I have worked on many underground projects and trust is always at the central to being able to take and publish such photographs.

'When Elita met me, I think they just had that feeling that I was someone they could trust. They told me after that I was the first person ever to be invited inside their sector.'

This trust was cemented after the game when Elita invited John to join them. When driving out of the capital, Elita then revealed that they were going to ambush their most detested rival ultras from Torpedo Kutaisi at a small stadium in the city's suburbs.

Around 30 Torpedo ultras were ambushed by 20 from Elita in a few street skirmishes. John photographed the fighting between the two groups. When Elita left the scene, John was able to slip away unnoticed.

John recalls: 'I got on a local bus to take me to the metro station and then received a call from one of the Elita leaders asking where I was. I said I was on my way back to my apartment and that I was fine.'

It was this that fully gained the trust the of the ultras. He was invited the following day to take some more photos and then decided to return a few months later to work on the Tbilisi Raw book, with the full co-operation of Elita.

'Despite their notorious reputation, Elita gave me incredible access', John said. 'I travelled with them to games, went to their gatherings and also when they were making graffiti in Tbilisi'.

The photographs that make up the book Tbilisi Raw are often shocking and disturbing. But they show a hidden world that is rarely, if ever, seen by ordinary people.

John explains: 'My documentary work is about making honest and authentic photographs that accurately depict the lifestyles of those on the margins of society. I don't seek to glamourise or condone any of this, just to show the reality that exists. The viewer can then make up their own mind in an informed and balanced way.'

Since John returned to the UK, Elita have continued to wreak havoc at football matches in Georgia. Violent incidents have taken place at matches with one even being covered on Georgian television. When Elita were contacted by local media for comment they deliberately stayed silent. However, in the book they gave a three page interview to John about the origins, their philosophy and what the hooligan lifestyle means to them.

Elita state that their political philosophy is right-wing and Georgian nationalist. They claim to represent the common views of many Georgian people on political matters, in particular in relation to their Russian neighbour.

Elita say they are not only seek to be the most notorious hooligans in Georgia - but in the whole of the Caucasus region.


Daily Mail April 2023

Inside the bloodthirsty world of cockfighting: Roosters fitted with 3ins blades hack at each other in brutal fight to the death in front of baying crowd at arena in the Philippines.

An English photographer has captured the bloodthirsty world of cockfighting in the Philippines in a series of black and white photographs.

John Bolloten, of Bradford, England, photographed the cockfights in Pasay City Cockpit, Manila, between 2019 and 2020.

The photographs show birds fitted with 3-inch blade leg-spurs involved in 'hack fighting' as they're forced to fight each other to the death.

Spectators can also be seen betting on the brutal fights which see 30 million birds killed every year and up to £9.6million raised in Government revenue every month.

Mr Bolloten said although cockfighting was a 'difficult thing to watch' and a 'very intense environment' it was important to document the 6000-year tradition 'honestly'.

The owner and trainer bring their bird into the arena and prepare them for combat. The signal is then given to start the fight and the roosters will usually fly at each other and attempt to land significant blows.

Because these attacks are fast and the birds are covered in feathers it is actually difficult to make out what is happening until they come apart. Fights can last from around 30 seconds to over five minutes.

Victory is declared with the death of one bird and then the victor will be rushed to the makeshift medical centre at the back of the arena to receive urgent medical attention.

Antibiotics will be given, wounds stitched up and broken limbs taken care of. Occasionally the winning cock will succumb to his wounds while being treated.

However, most will make a full recovery and will be ready to fight again in a few months' time. The dead losing bird will be prepared by the on-site butcher and the winning owner will take him home for dinner.

The events, which are held daily across the country's 2500 stadiums, have numerous ring-side bookmakers who converse in a bewildering mix of jargon and hand signals before each fight takes place.

Former Philippino president Rodrigo Duterte helped revive the billion dollar industry - known as 'Sabong' - after it collapsed during the Covid pandemic.

Mr Duterte issued permits to seven betting companies to operate online 'e-Sabong' which saw the cockfights streamed 24 hours a day and allowed spectators to place minimum bets of £2.75 with their mobile phones.

The controversial sport's popularity ballooned along side Government revenue which saw £9.6million raised every month.

The sport's spike in popularity is linked to betting brand Pitmasters, which has a near-monopoly on the online business model.

The group's owner Charlie Ang told the Japan Times it generates more than 700 billion pesos (£10.7 billion) annually in wagers - more than double the gross gaming revenue of the country's casinos in 2019.

But the bloodsport has also attracted opposition from animal rights activists like senior vice president of PETA Jason Baker.

Mr Baker told the Japan Times the expansion of 'e-sabong' was a 'cruel and unethical' practice by a 'desperate' and 'dying' industry.

He said: 'Moving this cruel and unethical practice online is a desperate move by a dying industry. Birds are mutilated, injected with steroids, and forced to fight until their unnecessary death.'


Huck Magazine February 2023

Gloves off

Bradford-based photographer John Bolloten captures the brutal world of bare knuckle pit fighting in the north of England.

In February 2020, before the UK began its cycle of pandemic lockdowns, photographer John Bolloten travelled to a hotel in his hometown of Bradford. He wasn’t going to spend a night there, but to attend a meeting of the Spartan Bare Knuckle Fight Club – the only licensed hay bale fight club in the UK.

As the crowd began to file in, eventually growing to over 700 people, Bolloten jostled to find a spot to line his camera up and take pictures. An MC’s voice blared over the tannoy speakers, signalling the start of one of the most dangerous combat sports in the world: “Bradford, are you ready for some extreme violence?!”

“Even before the fighting started I was really intrigued, and almost hooked,” recalls Bolloten. “What the first two or three people I spoke to, who were all fighters, told me about themselves made me realise very quickly that it’s not just about the sport and the combat. It was like, who are these guys and why are they doing this?”

The fighting commenced when two men – shirtless and gloveless – entered a tiny, eight-by-eight-foot area boxed off with hay bales and began throwing everything that they had at each other. The tiny space means fighters are squeezed close together, and there is nowhere to retreat or hide.

“When they made the pit, I could see it was a small space,” says Bolloten. “I decided to jump over and stand inside – it felt like half the size it looked from the outside. I thought: ‘Wow, there’s obviously no time or space for thinking or running or dancing – it’s going to be straight combat.’”

Bolloten has been following the Spartan Fight Club around the north of England ever since, documenting the fights, fighters, and fans. His pictures are collated in his new series Blood Brothers, which capture in visceral detail the energy of the fights – the punches, the knockdowns, the roaring crowds, and the bloodied victors.

Most fights last less than a minute, and injuries are common – broken noses, cracked jaws and cut eye sockets are habitual, and medics are always on hand to immediately respond if anyone is seriously hurt. So why do people want to take part in such a violent sport?

“Many guys in pit are coming from backgrounds around drug and alcohol addiction, mental health issues,” Bolloten explains. “Many people will say it’s therapeutic for them to face their demons and set a challenge that they’re going to reach and conquer. For me, as a person in recovery, watching it is almost like having a fix.” One guy, who used to be a drug dealer, told him that fighting was “better than smoking crack”.

With its claustrophobic crowds and no-holds barred punching, the Spartan events take boxing back to its raw, old school form. For Bolloten, the event that encapsulated that energy the most came in December 2020. When the country was in the midst of tight lockdown restrictions, around 100 people gathered around a makeshift hay bale pit near Manchester in freezing, two-degree weather, ready to fight.

“It was wild, there was no place for warming up – guys just stripping off their tops and then jumping in because it was completely illegal,” Bolloten says. “It was totally underground, stripped back to its core.”

“There’s this thing in society that fighting is bad, but fighting is a way of life for many men. It’s a part of them,” he continues. “A lot of them, young or old, love fighting, but they don’t want to have that on a Friday or Saturday night and go to prison. They want it in a controlled environment.

“And they don’t want to mess around with gloves – they want a proper fight with fists.”


Daily Mail January 2023

This guerrilla cannabis plantation is not in the Amazon rainforest... it's in YORKSHIRE: Inside the illegal weed farm with 8ft Marijuana plants that's 'hidden in plain sight' in countryside.

Nestled in the dense vegetation between a motorway and railway line in West Yorkshire is a lucrative marijuana farm, where plants grow up to eight feet high.

Two cannabis enthusiasts in their mid-20s tend to the crop from seedlings to sale point.

Over the course of a year, the men allowed Bradford based photographer John Bolloten to monitor and picture their illegal trade. The photos form part of a book, titled North Guerillas, documenting the year on the farm.

They refer to themselves as the North Guerillas, and take great pride in their crop of about 50 plants.

They operate on public property, effectively hidden in plain sight near a thoroughfare where passersby go on daily walks, catch the train to work or even sit in traffic.

Allowing Bradford based photographer John Bolloten into their private quarters, the two men - who cannot be named but refer to themselves as the North Guerillas - have offered an insight into the world of weed growing.

The North Guerillas scale an 26ft wall to access their crop, often protecting their faces in dark coloured masks and wearing long sleeved clothes.

Everything they need for growing must be carried into the area by hand, and they generally harvest under the cover of darkness.

Wearing face masks to protect their identity as they work, the men move the crop into a gazebo they erected themselves to be dried out, weighed and eventually bagged up for distribution.

Pictures of the process show the men separating the types of marijuana they're about to grow into plastic cups. The different strains range from 'Dutch Dragon' to 'Cream Caramel' and 'Special Queen'.

After the germinating stage, they move through the thick vegetation until they reach the area where they plant them.

The duo use a drone to monitor their crop from afar.

Over the course of a year, the duo plant up to nine types of marijuana seeds, transferring them from small pots as they grow until they're eventually ready to be moved into the ground.

The plants are transferred from small terracotta pots, first into larger pots and eventually directly into the ground.

Water is usually the heaviest item they have to lug between areas. Despite Yorkshire getting ample rain, growing marijuana is a tedious task and the plants require a certain amount to properly develop.

When it is ready to be harvested, pictures show the crop drying on a string inside the shed.

Eventually, it is weighed on a set of scales and bagged up, ready for distribution.

Police raided the public land at the tail end of the growing season, seizing what was left of the plants.

But the North Guerillas were not at the farm when the raid took place and they've since reestablished their crop, continuing their underground operation to this day.

West Yorkshire Police left a calling card which read: 'Dear drug dealers, we have your drugs! Call 101 to get them back.'

It's hard to determine exactly how much the crop would be worth, as it is largely dependent on the size and success of each plant.

In recent police busts, 1200 cannabis plants in one illegal farm had an estimated street value of £960,000, while 110 cannabis plants with an estimated street value of £110,000 were seized at another location in Telford.

According to the Institute of Economic Affairs, the black market for cannabis in the UK is estimated to by worth up to £2.6 billion annually - approximately 255 tonnes sold to three million users


Daily Mail November 2022

Inside the brutal world of bare knuckle pit fighting - where gloves are banned and competitors can settle feuds without the risk of going to prison.

Striking pictures have laid bare what it's really like inside the brutal world of bare-knuckle pit fighting – from gory injuries to victorious celebrations.

The incredible black and white portraits show bare knuckle fighters in the ring, training and posing before and after matches.

Taken by brave Bradford-based photographer John Bolloten, the images document the fighters' wins and heavy losses.

They were taken in various locations across the north of England, from Bradford to Manchester and Oldham, between 2020 and this year.

Savage fights allow boxers to settle feuds without the risk of going to prison – with it described as 'doing boxing the old school way'.

Spartan Bare Knuckle Fight Club is the only active club in the UK and holds events quarterly across the region.

They are governed by the World Pit Fighting Association, which dictates that all boxers should wrap their hands and land punches with closed fists, as in gloved boxing.

Tough-looking boxers, most of whom are heavily tattooed, go head-to-head in violent battles staged in 'pits'.

Unlike bare knuckle boxing, which is fought in a ring, pit fighting takes place is a tiny 8x8 foot arena, constructed by a small space which is lined with hay bales.

Pit fighting is widely regarded as the most dangerous combat sport out there.

Although events are usually licensed and a medical team is present, injuries are very common – from broken noses, jaws, fingers and hands to fractured eye sockets and deep cuts.

In spite of that, fighters will often state that they believe bare knuckle fighting is actually safer than gloved boxing.

Some argue that injuries can heal up without causing lasting damage.

Meanwhile, in gloved boxing, fighters are repeatedly hit with a blunt instrument for a considerably longer time period.

The average bare knuckle pit fight lasts less than a minute.

Used to being ringside, Mr Bolloten has been involved in the savage world of bare knuckle pit fighting for almost three years.

The photographer has gained recognition as a photographer specialising in documenting life on the fringes of society.

He is most known for his ground-breaking work with heroin and crack users in Bradford and has documented and published a wide variety of work including the grime and drill music scenes, an outdoor cannabis farm and non-league football.

This set of images, entitled Blood Brothers in reference to the camaraderie but also violent exchanges these men share, depict the fighters training and battling it out at events.


Then There Was Us March 2021

A human approach to documenting society with John Bolloten

Being firmly interested in photography for around ten years now and viewing it on a daily basis ever since then, I can only recall one photographer who has documented Bradford in a way that has really caught my attention. Last year I managed to get to the Don McCullin exhibition at Tate Liverpool, where I saw the huge collection of McCullin's work from the 60’s and 70’s that documented industrial scenes from towns in the north-west. Earlier this year I was introduced to a photographer based in Bradford who continues to make gripping work no matter what he’s documenting and shares similarities in his work to the great Don McCullin. John Bolloten has documented everything from local cricket teams, to homelessness and drug users. Building a remarkable amount of trust with these people and documenting them in a way that is honest in his approach, I got the opportunity to catch up with John and speak about his career in photography.

JT: Can you give us some background about yourself and how you got into photography?

JB: I was born in Brighton and moved with my parents to Edinburgh when I was 9, then moved to Bradford when I was 18 in 1983 and I never left. I always liked photography but I can’t say I was really into it. I was more interested in music, reggae in particular, and had a long career involved in that. During a decade-long retirement from that world, I was hungry to do something creative and decided to buy myself a DSLR at the back end of 2008 when I was almost 44. I taught myself and after some years, started to find my way in it. The last few years I have been able to carve something of a niche out for myself with the type of work and images that I shoot.

JT: You started photographing at the age of 44. How do you feel all the years of building up inspiration from various avenues has affected what you wanted to photograph when you picked up a camera for the first time?

JB: I think that by coming into photography later in life has been an advantage. I have been through a lot of challenges in my life and I am able to approach what I do with the viewpoint of someone older. I am 56 now but in my head I still feel that my mind is really fresh, like someone in their 20s maybe. I am very passionate about photography and the work that I am doing. I have always been somewhat manic so I shoot a lot and cram loads of things in whilst at the same time holding down a job.

JT: Your work has been described as “documenting people and subcultures that exist on the margins of society”. Can you tell me what interested you about documenting these themes?

JB: Pretty much all of my photography is around people and scenes that are not part of the mainstream. I did a few projects at the grass roots of society in Bradford and much more in-depth work around injecting drug users, grime music and currently bare knuckle pit fighting. I also have other ongoing work that I cannot talk about at this time. For me personally, ever since I was taken to Scotland as a kid and having a very difficult childhood which led me to having problems with drugs, I have always had a feeling of being some kind of outsider in society. I am somewhat socially awkward and feel much more comfortable connecting with people with my camera. I must be reasonably good at it because I have got into some really deep scenes and people seem to be comfortable and accepting of me being there.

JT: In your series titled ‘Nothing To See Here’ you have described the close relationship that you built with Gary and Maree over documenting their lives consecutively for 8 months. How as a photographer have you built this trust with the people you photograph?

JB: Working with vulnerable people with drug dependence, homelessness and mental health issues is a very controversial subject in the photography world because many people think that it is always a case of the photographer somehow exploiting people for their own gain. Much of the time those critics have no real idea as to the realities of life at the very bottom of society and wouldn’t ever get their hands dirty by spending a long period of time deep inside it. I spent five years of my life documenting this world and a group of around two dozen people within it. It was all done in my spare time and without any backer or even anyone to support me. At the heart of all this work is trust. One just cannot turn up with a camera and start taking these images. I had a very close relationship with the people I photographed that often took a long time to develop. I collected 18 life stories and these are all told in people’s own words and will fill a substantial portion of my forthcoming book This is Not a Life, It’s Just an Existence. With Gary and Maree, I had met them in the early period where I was shooting a lot on the street and after the first volume of this work, Nothing to See Here, had been published, I wanted to my photography to become more personal and intimate. They both kindly let me into their lives over an 8-month period where I made this book Love Story. Tragically, Gary died in January and I attended his funeral with Maree so we could say goodbye to him.

JT: I’m curious to whether photography has been used as a form of not only documenting but as a replacement for problems which you had earlier in life, almost as if photography has been a form of meditation. Would you say this is true and if so have you introduced photography to the people you work with on a daily basis and have any of them taken an interest in it?

JB: I can’t say that photography for me is a form of meditation, but it definitely has a positive impact on my mental health and I try to shoot daily if I can. Because I have an addictive personality then it could be fair to say that I am addicted to photography. I need to channel my energy into things that are creative, productive and constructive and I immerse myself deeply into all the projects I am involved in. Intimacy is at the heart of all the different projects I am doing and I need to be close to people, so most of my work is shot with a wide-angle lens.

When I was out working a lot with injecting drug users as a photographer, I did get some old digital cameras donated which I gave to people for them to document their lives and do something creative. However, it turned out to be unsustainable mainly through the cameras getting lost.

JT: You have photographed non-league football teams and cricket teams and then as you mentioned above, bare knuckle pit fighting and drug users. How has your relationship as a photographer differed between these groups and do you approach each subject and theme that you work with differently?

JB: I usually approach all my work in the same way. The hardest part is actually starting something new as in all these pieces of work, I didn’t know anyone at all when I began. The most complicated and complex aspect was working people who had drug dependence and homeless issues – not surprisingly. However, I always take the approach of being honest and genuine about what I am doing and being a human being. It is common being with people or in places and not actually taking any photographs. As I have progressed and developed over these last years, I now find it much easier to scope out a whole piece of work in my head now and envisage it as a completed project.

When I started working with drug users I was coming at it from a more street photography angle and as that work progressed I became much more focused on doing a body of work, personal and intimate, and also collecting people’s own life stories. Now I approach everything as a documentary photographer but with the smarts of someone who is used to being on the street and can work there without fear. When I went to my first bare knuckle event I literally didn’t know anyone there but after speaking to a few fighters I quickly worked out in my head what this work is all about. It is about the people who do it and why.

JT: In your work surrounding drug users and the people who sit on the margins of society, I’m curious to know whether you’re making this work for a reason that has an endpoint?

JB: First and foremost, I make the work for myself. I don’t have any commissions or backers or anyone funding me. At the same time it is also because I believe that this work has a value especially in relation to having a record of how we are living in these times. When I was doing the first part of my work with drug users I literally didn’t know anyone in the photography world, but I knew that what I was shooting was important. With austerity, Brexit, and Covid-19 lockdowns we are living in a truly extraordinary period of time and there is a wealth of things to document. These latest lockdowns I have probably been doing more work than I usually do but that is through the many connections I have built up over the years. All of my work I will approach with an honest, compassionate, empathetic and non-judgemental attitude. If people who see my work end up having a more empathetic feeling towards less fortunate in society then I will be satisfied with that outcome. You will probably never see my stuff in major galleries or collections, either because people like me cannot get access into that world, or simply because my work is often too uncomfortable. However, for all of the criticism, bitching and sniping that I have faced, the people I work with never seem to have any problem with what I am doing. So go figure!

JT: If you could document anything in the future, what would it be?

JB: Right now I am not thinking of any other possible projects to do as I have ongoing work in the bare knuckle pit fighting scene that will take a few years and I am still shooting amongst young people up here in West Yorkshire who are doing grime and associates rap music. I also have another ongoing piece of work that will last throughout this year which I cannot talk about right now plus I am putting together my big book This is Not a Life, It’s Just an Existence which will take a few months. I will also release a new zine soon of various photos I have taken abroad over the last decade. That’s enough for me to deal with for a while.


Creative Light magazine February 2020

What motivates you to capture and create your powerful documentary images?

I take photographs of things I am personally interested in or curious about. I started photographing amongst people who use drugs as I did that myself when I was younger and I understood about the psyche and mentality of those people. I like to photograph things that I can connect with in some way.

Your favourite lens for your photography?

Fuji 18mm on my Fuji XT1.

What advice can you share for people interested in documentary street photography?

Shoot what you are interested in or passionate about. Aim to do work that reaches a high standard photographically that has power, emotion and intimacy. Stay around for the long haul with patience, determination and persistence.

What have you found most challenging in your area of photography?

Spending five years photographing at the roughest end of injecting drug use was very challenging mentally, physically and emotionally. Now that work is completed I have no desire to go back into that environment again. Working in low light environments and trying to take strong, well-composed photos was always a difficult technical challenge.

Have you found yourself in situations photographing your subjects where you have felt afraid or scared for your safety?

I never felt uncomfortable around people who were using drugs and I think the people I worked with by and large didn't feel uncomfortable with my presence. However, it was a challenging and sometimes very dangerous environment with some characters who were particularly unpleasant. I was in a few situations where I was fortunate to emerge unscathed. Having said that, most of the drug users I worked with were pleasant and I formed some really strong relationships with around two dozen of them.

Post-processing are you a Lightroom or Photoshop user?

Lightroom only. I aim to get my photos correct in camera and I usually only spend a couple of minutes per photo in post production, if that. Some small tweaking, usually correcting any exposure issues, and using the contrast, blacks and highlight sliders. I am not a fan of heavy post-processing like excessive use of the clarity slider or HD.

Lighting of your images, what is your preferred light source choice for your photos?

Always natural light unless it is simply too dark and I have to use flash. In my work with drug users, it was common to be shooting at 3200ISO, f2.8 and at 1/30 or 1/60 maximum handheld.

Where do you find your inspiration from?

I am inspired by people and subcultures at the margins of society so all my social documentary work has this at its heart. I am also inspired by the work of some other photographers but I always aim to shoot for myself and not copy what has gone before. I am a naturally curious person and there is nothing more interesting than people!

Can you recommend any photography books?

My shelves are straining with books. Most important to me are books by Eugene Richards, Josef Koudelka, Miron Zownir, Boogie, Tom Stoddart, Jim Mortram and Brenda Ann Kenneally to name just a few.

The photographer Don McCullin has inspired you, can you explain why?

McCullin, apart from being a brilliant photographer, understood that one didn’t need to go abroad to photograph war. He knew that there was a war in our own inner cities and this needed to be documented. McCullin also shot some incredible images in Bradford in the late 1970s that had a big impact on me.

Love Story of Gary and Maree is powerful. How difficult was it to build the trust to document the emotion and depth of the story?

Although working with drug users has trust at the heart of it and this could be very difficult to get, I got on well with Gary and Maree from when we first met about a year and half before I starting working on Love Story. Because of this relationship it became obvious that I would approach them when I started to think about doing a very personal and intimate story. It sounds obvious, but one just cannot turn up with a camera and start shooting this stuff.

How many books have you written on documentary photography?

I have published six photography books to date and written none although the big book that encompasses all of my work with drug users is due to be published by Bluecoat Press in 2021 and will feature a number of stories in peoples’ own words about their lives. I knew instinctively that these incredible stories couldn’t be told any better than in their own words.

Do you exhibit your work in galleries?

Although the gallery/curators world is largely made up people who make very safe decisions, I was fortunate enough to be asked to exhibit my work with drug users at Photo North Festival in 2018. This led to me exhibiting at Hull International Photo Festival in 2019 and a return to Photo North for their second edition. I also exhibited in Belfast for homelessness awareness week. I am hoping that more people will approach me so that I can show these images and talk about this work. We need more contemporary documentary photography in the galleries and media and not wait until thirty years later when we can see it with some kind of misty-eyed nostalgia.

Favourite place in the world, and why?

No one favourite but I would be happy to return to all of these - Damascus, Istanbul, Mexico City, Belgrade, Belfast and Manila. They are all places I have felt connected to in some way and really enjoyed photographing there.

Three words that describe you?

Thoughtful. Emotional. Determined.

Your favourite food?

No absolute favourite but living in Bradford, I am always happy to eat decent Indian food.

Where next?

I am publishing a book on the cockfighting scene in Manila called Gladiators on Fistful of Books and am continuing to work in the grime and battle rap scenes.


Tales From The Brazier's Grotto October 2019

John Bolloten’s Human Approach To The Marginal World

John Bolloten is a Bradford based documentary photographer whose most noticed work is about the homeless people and drug addicts in his hometown. His newest release, Love Story, is his sixth book. At the moment Love Story together with Nothing To See Here is seen as an exhibition at Hull International Photography Festival.

I met John Bolloten by accident four years ago at Brudenell Social Club in Leeds where we both were photographing Walter Lure’s gig. John photographed Walter also for his project Punk Survivors on that night. Anyway, we started talking and John gave me his business card. I studied his website and noticed at once that this guy is worth following; visually great, influential, touching and intense photographs; social documentary photography that is nowadays far away being a trend.

I couldn’t believe when I found out that John had started photographing very, very late; at an age of nearly 44. John says that he feels that he is still learning. “The things I’ve involved myself in I really do kind of addictively, I’ve merged myself in the work I am doing, I’ve become very…sometimes quite obsessed by it.”

John works really hard on his subjects, and that can be seen in the results, in his photographs. I do also think that as he was not a fledgling when started photographing – I mean dealing with different kinds of live situations because of his age – he has had sort of courage to step into the world of photography and he has definitely not chosen the easiest themes. His creative mind, age and experience in general and hard work has started bearing fruit and he has started to get recognition in the photography world.

His latest book, Love Story, published by Fistful of Books was released in May this year and as I was in the UK in April, it was a time to have a good talk about his work. The interview took place in a Pakistani café in Bradford with Pakistani breakfast and after that we went to meet Peter, one of those people whom he has photographed and who is also involved in Nothing To See Here book.

John tells that he has always been very creative. He had had a long career in music, and when he retired from that he felt that he needed to do something creative to fill that hole. He thought, why not buy a camera and learn to use it.

“I always liked photography, but didn’t really know anything about it. I didn’t know anything really about documentary photography or anything. That came much later. It was mainly about how to use the camera. I was photographing stuff I was interested in. It was about six, seven years ago when I really found myself; the kind of stuff I wanted to photograph that is largely people, subcultures on the margin of society. That’s what really interests me.”

Don McCullin and Bradford

John appreciates Don McCullin a lot who also photographed homeless people in the east end of London decades ago. McCullin also photographed in Bradford. He has said (quoted from the McCullin exhibition sheet): “I wish I’d been born in Bradford, and had its beautiful dialect and its warm, relaxed attitude… Bradford’s full of energy and enthusiasm – and exciting, giant, visual city.”

This is what McCullin has written in one of his books about Bradford:

…Bradford, where I found a microcosm of the dark satanic legacy that we had inherited from Britain’s industrial heyday. On the other hand, I was met everywhere by warm and courteous people who were surprisingly tolerant towards the growing influx of immigrants from Asia and the Caribbean. In Bradford I experienced a new freedom, wandering through the quiet dilapidated streets where, for the first time for years, I encountered a great deal of hospitality and the welcome absence of violence. I discovered here a city, a living city, and in so doing I rediscovered myself – not always a comfortable process. (Don McCullin, Sleeping with Ghosts, Vintage 1995)

John about Don:

“The work he did with homeless in London, the pictures he shot in Bradford in the late 70s, it is unbelievable. They are a big source of inspiration to me. The thing about Don McCullin is that he is able to connect with people. He is able to approach people, he is able to talk to them and he is able to take incredible photographs. You can’t go to university to learn that. You either have it, or you don’t have it – the ability to connect people, the ability to see something or ability to just get things happen. For me being British, I think Don McCullin’s best work is here. He has always understood that there is a war on our own doorstep. There are people suffering in this country and he has always recognized that you don’t have to go abroad if you want to photograph war […] And I think that’s the most important thing about Don McCullin. You don’t have to go abroad to be inspired. You can photograph where you live and document life in an interesting and powerful way.”

It’s easy to see why he appreciates Don McCullin’s work so much. He continues that when Don McCullin came to Bradford he saw it with the observer’s eye as he was not from Bradford. John is neither from Bradford. “Even though I have lived here 36 years, I still see it with that observer’s eye”, he says. But then he continues that young photographers should feel that they can photograph where they live for a long period of time. Knowing the place add the depth to the material. On the other hand – this is anyway a matter that divides the documentary photographers in two camps – if you are an outsider, observer, you see all the peculiarities etc. of the area which can be ignored totally by a local.

Nothing To See Here

John’s fourth book Nothing To See Here is about homeless people and people with drug problems. John had worked in public health for many years and has lots of knowledge of the subject matter when it comes to people using drugs. But the photography is on the personal level.

“The main thing is that you obviously just cannot turn up and take these pictures. Originally I was interested in people who were homeless.” That was my starting point, tells John. He started by taking portraits on the streets of homeless people. Doing this kind of work is based on trust, making connections and not judging the people.

“I was forming some relationships then. And that led on to some situations where I was able to photograph other things in their lives like use of drugs and so on of those people who were having drug problems. And I think the way to gain trust… people can smell bullshit straight away. First of all I always approach my work as a human being first and being as genuine as possible and I don’t work with anybody else, so I am going to the situations being vulnerable.”

“Once you meet enough people who really trust you and respect you, they just introduce you to another person. The number of people I work with is relatively small, a couple of dozen and there are about 2000 people in Bradford who are using heroin for example. […] Once that trust is there, people understand what I am doing. But it takes time. Some people I’ve photographed for my new book, I’ve known for six or eight months, they kept me arms length and that’s fine, and then suddenly they completely changed and became really close.”

John was interested in starting a project where these people could document their own life, partly as therapy and partly giving them a chance to do something creative, something that would lead to something good. But cameras went missing and finally John had to give up. But he still thinks there should be more opportunities to give people chance to do something creative… something they get interested in as a therapy or recovery.

How have those homeless people whom John has photographed reacted being a subject of a photographer?

“Pretty much all the homeless people I have photographed, if not all of them, have never had a problem of me photographing them. Because I am engaged on it, I just don’t turn up, taking a picture and then running away. I am interested in them, their stories and I am aware where that sits in a wider context as well. I think lots of depends on your approach as a photographer”. John continues that pictures of homeless people at doorways are not interesting at all unless they are part of a wider context, of a deeper story.

“A lot of the time people have strong opinions against photographing homeless people or people who use drugs. They don’t have any understanding of that world. They wouldn’t go into it.” John continues that because he himself was somebody who used drugs when he was younger, he understands that world. “I understand the mentality of people and so on. I don’t feel uncomfortable there. People can sense that, I think. I am not interested in taking drugs, but people are not uncomfortable me being there and I am not uncomfortable being there. So there is lots of trust.”

I must ask if John has ever been afraid when photographing these projects.

“At the beginning I was lot more apprehensive, because I knew very few people. When I started doing this work I was meeting people on the street. So I didn’t really know who people were, because I was not very well connected. The connections, they were built up naturally over a certain period of time. So sometimes I did feel quite vulnerable.”

He continues that when completing Nothing to See Here (published in April 2017) and started doing much more personal work, he stopped hanging out in public spaces with people.

Love Story

Nothing to See Here was kind of like an overview of the world where people use drugs. After that he wanted to do a much more intimate, personal piece and he asked a couple that he knew from Nothing to See Here if he could visit their flat and photograph and they agreed. Those people were Gary and Maree.

That project took eight months of 2018. At the time Gary was 44 years old and has used heroin for 30 years. He had his leg amputated on the previous year. Maree is twenty years younger and she smokes crack. During the time John was photographing Gary and Maree, Gary was in a therapy for getting a prosthetic leg.

“People are doing lots of homeless portrait projects, I found that uninteresting; it’s just people’s faces. I am interested in the deeper stories. And I think that the people I photograph, they know that. When I go to see somebody I am in their place three, four hours, sitting there, talking to them, just chatting about life or we are talking about something deeper. Sometimes I am interviewing people for my new book. Sometimes the stories are absolutely heartbreaking. They trust me enough to tell me about those things. It takes lots of time to get into that point where the really great stuff happens.” When he was working on the Love Story book, he visited Maree and Gary every week, usually from three to five hours during those eight months he was following their life.

The result is a collection of photos of a troubled couple, but you can sense the love between them. Some of the pictures are really tough, some are absolutely beautiful. You couldn’t be able to take those pictures without a deep trust between this couple and a photographer.

Has there ever been a situation that has been too hard to photograph?

“Yes, there have been. Not so much in private spaces. Because when you are in a private space the people know that you are there.” John tells that when he was taking photos for Love Story, Gary and Maree said, ‘you can photograph anything’. So John had a kind of permission to photograph everything unless something quite awkward happens. “On the street that’s a different matter because there might be a situation of people overdosed”. John has witnessed these situations and then it’s time to help, not taking photos. “And there have been quite a lot of times that I haven’t wanted to photograph.” The first thing is to help, he says.

John tells that he always feel like an outsider, he lives totally different kind of life than the people he is photographing. He can be in the same room where people are using drugs, and thus he feels very privileged to be inside of those moments that can be very intense. But he is anyway an outsider: “I always hesitate to use the words like ‘friends’, because primarily I am working as a photographer. So I wouldn’t say that people I am photographing are my friends, but some people are very close to me and some people I really care about a lot and I have a very close relationship with them. So I think I can be seen as a friend, a close friend, more than just a photographer – definitely.”

John is not photographing anybody using drugs anymore. All that part of the project is finished, he says. He has concentrated working on the new book. “It’s about the lives of people who use drugs, mainly heroin, but also crack. People are telling their life stories in their own words as well as lots of very intimate pictures inside that world.” It will be published by Bluecoat Press that is specialized in British social documentary photography, both old ones from archives as well as contemporary. If a book is coming out on Bluecoat Press, it means that it’s something to wait for. I mean I have several photo books published by this company and they are all great. The book is scheduled to be out in late 2020.

Other marginal subculture projects

One of the projects John has been working recently is a Generation Grime -project. John explains that grime is music that emerged in the UK around 2003. “What is interesting is that it’s peculiarly British phenomena, people are rapping in their own accents, recording videos in their own neighbourhoods and the music is peculiarly British with elements from garage, hip hop, reggae even”, explains John. “It is something that’s gone pretty much into every working class community in the UK. White kids, black kids, mixed race kids, Asian kids, refugee kids, all are rapping grime.” Grime came from east London, but John wanted to document it in a northern city that is very multi racial. In West Yorkshire where he did most of the work, people are different, architecture is different, and so on, John tells. He started photographing grime culture in February 2017 and the work is largely finished now. The plan is to publish that in the future on Fistful of Books.

“I don’t see any contradiction between me working within grime music and drug addiction. I have the same principles and approach with everything I do. John tells that also in the grime scene there were situations where people were not sure about him photographing them. But he was carrying Nothing To See Here with him and when showing it, people realised that this photographer had already been inside in some heavy scenes, he was trusted, he was ok.

John has also published books on cricket and football.

“I spent a couple of years photographing cricket in Bradford. I just fell into it, it was really, really enjoyable, because the people were so lovely, so welcoming. So I made this little project, which is called Shabash, which is a Hindi word for ‘bravo’. I really enjoyed that and self-published it as small edition. I finished that and I thought maybe I would do a football one. And I have always focused on the lowest possible level. So the cricket was the lowest league and the football was on the lowest leagues.”

Cricket was photographed in the summer, in a nice weather, whereas football was a winter thing, photographed in an absolutely freezing cold weather, John tells. And it was not just the weather that was tough: there were hostilities sometimes John being there with camera. “I guess people were just getting paranoid when seeing camera. There were some guys smoking cannabis and I wanted to take pictures and they were quite paranoid about that.” But again, John showed pictures from his Nothing To See Here project and again that worked. “That was really enjoyable project to do. Just one season and published on Fistful of Books. The book, Field Of Broken Dreams, got a good reception.

John has also photographed abroad. But photographing abroad is much, much more difficult because of the language barrier, he explains. In Bradford he is able to talk to people and is well connected. Abroad he is doing more street photography, even though he is nowadays more interested in stories than the average street photography kind of stuff, funny scenes and so on.

But when being in another country it’s not possible to dig deep during a short period of time. He tells that he had some contacts in Delhi and that made it possible for him to photograph drug users there and visiting rehabilitation centres. People also speak English in India. In India in general people are fairly warm to photographer, says John. Last year John visited Mexico a couple of times photographing homeless people. He notes that Mexico City is quite a dangerous city, but most people are really warm, too. “I think people can sense who you are, so I never had any problems there”, he says but adds that concerning the work, he was just scratching the surface. He might anyway make a publication that gathers together pieces of work from different countries.

Punk Survivors

In the beginning of the story I mentioned John’s Punk Survivors project. The project is pretty much finished now, but he does not yet know what to do with the material. It was his first long term project. He started it in May 2011 and worked on it about six years. With this project he became serious about photography. John says that it was not easy, he was just learning to be a photographer, and he had no magazine or anything behind him. Some of the pictures he would have shot in a different way now.

For the project he took portraits of around 220 people, people who were connected in punk and new wave, from the early seventies to the early eighties. So the collection includes also some people from the pub rock era, before the punk phenomena.

What might be a bit surprising about that project, it’s not about portraits of punk or new wave artists, but the whole project is about ageing. John says that in those days, in the heyday of punk 1976–83 (when hc punk sort of replaced the first two – or three if we go to America, this is how I count it) the whole scene was documented very heavily by the contemporary music press and other photographers. It was an incredible snapshot of youth and youth culture, says John. People in that scene were young.

“But I realised when I started working on Punk Survivors – when people were generally fifty, over fifty, maybe early sixties – that they hadn’t been documented as older people and who they were as older people in a very intimate way. I didn’t necessarily like people being a character. I’d like to photograph just as very ordinary peoples, not any stage clothes or anything, just very ordinary… to just show them as they were, but also in some ways to have a final stage of documentation of who they become later in their live.”

John has a couple of exhibitions to come; Love Story and Nothing To See Here are part of the Hull International Photography Festival that is open from 4 October to 27 October.

Love Story will be included in the short Photo North Festival that takes place 30 November–2 December.


Big Issue in the North Magazine September 2019

John Bolloten’s new book is a hard-hitting but intimate portrait of a couple with longstanding addictions. The Bradford-based photographer tells Steve Lee how he won Gary and Maree’s trust and became good friends with them.

John Bolloten describes himself as having “always been a creative person”. But although he began experimenting with photography around a decade ago, it wasn’t immediately that he found his true artistic calling. “After buying my first camera in 2008 I spent a lot of time on a long-term project called Punk Survivors, which looked at artists from the original punk scene and what they’re like now,” Bolloten, now 54 and a long-term resident of Bradford, explains. “I enjoyed doing that but knew that while it helped me work out what made for a great picture, it wasn’t anything really unique, special or deep.”

Projects examining Bradford’s gritty amateur football scene and the bottom tier of his city’s cricket leagues followed. As he steadily honed his craft, the work of unflinching documentary photographers such as Eugene Richards, Boogie and the great Don McCullin began to catch Bolloten’s creative eye. “Although people romanticise war photographers who work across the world, these people show that you only need go on your own doorstep to find another kind of war. I think that’s really, really empowering and an important thing to document.” Always fascinated by those on the margins of society, Bolloten began to focus on Bradford’s darker recesses – those inhabited by the homeless and habitual drug users. Nothing to See Here, “an exploration into homelessness, destitution and drug and alcohol misuse in Bradford”, was the first of his projects examining the disenfranchised.

Following directly from that has recently come a collection titled Love Story, probably Bolloten’s hardest hitting, most intimate work yet. Self-published in softback earlier this year, Love Story examines the world inhabited by a couple, Gary and Maree. Gary has been injecting heroin for almost 30 of his 44 years and is also a heavy drinker. Maree, 20 years younger, is a crack addict who also drinks daily. “I met Gary and Maree while working on Nothing to See Here,” Bolloten says. “Their story is really interesting on many levels so I just asked them if I could come and photograph them where they lived. It’s something that’s evolved organically over a number of years.”

The resulting collection of images is hard-hitting and often disturbing. We see the couple laughing, fighting, relaxing, clowning for the lens, injecting and smoking, almost exclusively within the confines of a claustrophobic, squalid flat. “We get to witness the kind of stuff your average person wouldn’t be comfortable letting you see, but they understood my work and understood the need for honesty,” the photographer explains, adding he now regards the couple as very close friends. “They were convinced I was honest and genuine as both a photographer and as a human being. Gary said a couple of times that if they didn’t like me, I wouldn’t be there. But there were some not so good times: it was often very challenging and very, very awkward.”

The fact that around two years ago Gary had his leg amputated adds further poignancy to the images. As the book progresses we see him receiving a prosthetic leg and, in the only shots taken outside the couple’s flat, learning to walk again, first in a local medical facility and later outside his and Maree’s home. Where Bolloten’s images could so easily have felt voyeuristic and intrusive, the obvious affection he holds for his subjects and dedication to depicting their situation warts and all make them disquieting, disturbing and occasionally extremely touching. What do Gary and Maree make of the finished work?

“Gary spent quite a lot of time looking at the copy I handed him and I could tell it was difficult for him to take. But after I’d been there about an hour and I was about to leave he just said: ‘Come and give me a hug – the book’s absolutely amazing.’ Then he texted me three days later when Maree had reappeared and told me she loved it too. I think they felt validated as human beings – that there was somebody who cared for them who was willing to show their lives in an honest way with no agenda.”


Amateur Photographer Magazine June 2019

Love Story may have a romantic title but the images contained within are from the traditional notions of romanticism. This 72-page zine from Bradford-based documentary photographer John Bolloten documents the relationship between Gary and Maree. John spent eight months withe the couple, getting a close and personal insight into their daily lives - one which, as Bolloten points out, is generally hidden from public view.

While this kind of work is uncomfortable to look at - indeed, you may very well be tempted to turn some of the pages as quickly as is possible - its importance can not be understated. Projects like this teach us valuable lessons in understanding and empathising with those left languishing on the fringes of society.

The print run for Love Story is limited to just 200, so you might need to act quickly to grab the last remaining few copies, but you'll be handsomely rewarded if you do.


Amateur Photographer Magazine May 2019

Home Truths

It wasn’t until John Bolloten turned 43 that he first picked up a DSLR. In 2008, looking for a new way to be creative, he bought an entry-level Canon camera and taught himself how to use it.

More than a decade on and he’s created some incredibly hard-hitting documentary work, mostly focused around the city in which he lives – Bradford, West Yorkshire. I met John at 2018’s Photo North festival. Giving a presentation in conjunction with the homeless charity Simon on the Streets, you could see he felt nervous.

Considering he spends his photographic life with characters and in situations that could be described mildly as ‘uncomfortable’, it’s ironic that a small room full of polite listeners should bring on such uneasiness.

Never judgmental in his approach, he photographs with a kind of empathy that shows the lives of those on the fringes of our societies, let down by the systems which are supposed to protect them.

Often, documentary and news photography highlights problems on foreign shores – it can be easy to forget that right here at home we have more than our fair share of potential conflict waiting to be documented.

John has been photographing in and around the streets of Bradford for several years. His superb book Nothing to See Here was published in 2017 by Fistful of Books, and has since gone onto a second edition when the first quickly sold out. Wanting to go even deeper, he chose to enter the private spaces of the couple seen across these two pages for his new book, Love Story.

Born in Brighton, John moved to Scotland at the age of nine before settling in Bradford at the age of 18 in 1983. Always having felt like somewhat of an outsider, it’s this which helps him to resonate with his photographic subjects. ‘When people talk about photography being a mirror, I absolutely believe that,’ he tells me in a chat after the talk has finished. ‘When I’m photographing people who use drugs, because I did that myself when I was younger, I feel like I’m photographing myself – or how my life could have turned out.’

Relationships are vitally important to John – he doesn’t ‘smash and grab’ pictures and then move on to the next. It can take weeks or even months to build up to the stage where those in front of his lens feel completely confident with his presence. That’s not to say that once that trust has been established, it’s an easy ride.

‘They [Gary and Maree] said to me at the beginning “you can photograph anything you want,” but when you’re there and it’s very late at night, and the atmosphere is quite strange, you’re constantly thinking, “do I photograph this, or do I not photograph,”’ he explains. ‘You’re just learning on the job day by day.’

Shot over a period of eight months, John would spend several hours with Gary and Maree in their flat. It was a dirty and dark place, and at the time the UK was in the grip of a heatwave – which didn’t help. Gary and Maree have a largely on/off relationship, characterised by intense periods of being ‘on’, with arguments and fall-outs which inevitably led to break-ups.

‘She [Maree] was really hyper,’ John says. ‘She was the life of it, really. If I’d photographed just him, it wouldn’t have worked, but it was the dynamics of their relationship – and the intimacy and toxicity – that made it.’

Gary’s leg was amputated in the summer of 2016, and he’s been a drug user for the best part of 30 years. Maree is a lot younger, but is also in the grip of a drug problem. Clearly, these are vulnerable people – something which John is always mindful of. ‘People might talk about, is it right for a photographer to take images of people like this – but I think the bigger scandal really is how people are living when they’re ignored and people aren’t taking care of them,’ he says.

There’s no denying that these pictures are difficult to look at, something which John acknowledges but doesn’t shy away from. ‘Doing the talk today, there was a woman in the front row who could barely look. I don’t want to put people in distress, but it’s important work. All I care about is making honest pictures.’

The work came to a natural conclusion on a happier note: Gary received a false leg and was just beginning to learn to walk again, hopefully getting his life back together in due course. It’s clear nobody would rather see that happen than John – ‘I’m very close to them both. I care about them. Sometimes this project might have been draining, but sometimes it was absolutely wonderful.’


Grain Magazine December 2017

British photographer John Bolloten is based in the northern English city of Bradford, one of the most deprived places in the UK. One hundred and fifty years ago Bradford was one of the richest cities in the world due to the riches generated by the industrial revolution but for many years now it has faced economic decline and has significant levels of poverty. It is also one of the most ethnically-diverse places in the UK where over a hundred nationalities live and has experienced enormous levels of immigration. The present government’s brutal austerity policies over the last seven years have hit residents hard and has led to large amounts of homelessness and even more difficult challenges for the city’s dependent drug users.

It is within this context that John spent two years working on his latest book Nothing To See Here (published by Fistful Of Books), a monochrome tome that bears witness to the gritty underbelly of Bradford. Images of people injecting heroin, smoking crack cocaine and overdosing from spice are mixed with photos of local sex workers, alcoholics and a close look at the hard lives of homeless people.

At 52 years of age, John was a late developer when it came to photography and only bought his first camera eight and a half years ago. Like most, he says that the first three or four years was spent taking “rubbish shots” until he found his own style and started to specialise in social documentary photography, often with a large dose of classic street photography thrown in. His first long-term project (six years) focused on the ageing figures of the original era of UK punk rock called Punk Survivors, a large archive of work that has not yet been published. His first book of street photography Bradford Street came out in 2014 and soon sold out and was followed the following year by Belgrade, shot over the course of 6 days in the Serbian capital. John was inspired to visit and shoot in Belgrade after discovering Boogie’s book about the city, a book that John describes as a “textbook way to photograph one’s own neighbourhood in depth”. He met and spent some time with Boogie while there and states that “I learned a lot from a photographer that I really admired and it helped me focus more on the type of photography I really wanted to make”.

After flirting for a couple of years with pure street photography, John says he got bored with a lot of it and much of the gimmicks in the genre and decided to mainly focus on work that was deeper and more meaningful. Asked for his key influences, he immediately mentions names like Don McCullin, Boogie, Miron Zownir, Eugene Richards, Scot Sothern and Josef Koudelka. He says ”all of these photographers immersed themselves into particular communities and (sub)cultures and produced stunning work that really hits you on an emotional level. I knew I had to go much deeper with my own work and head to the frontlines”.

He goes on, “my city has always had a dark side but no-one had ever gone this far before in documenting the harsh reality of Bradford life. I knew Bradford well having lived and worked here for over 35 years and understood the mentality of the people. Therefore, I didn’t need to go elsewhere. I could go out everyday and build up a strong body of work. Photographing on the street here is never easy and people are suspicious of photographers. Getting insulted, or even worse, a physical confrontation is an ever-present hazard. However, on the whole people can be quite warm and friendly once they have sussed you out so the best tools I really had was being genuine, honest and being interested in them. I didn’t want to just grab random shots of homeless people camped out in doorways. I wanted to get to know them and document their existence honestly.”

Nothing To See Here took him to his physical and emotional limits. He says “I knew that making this work had many risks attached to it. I was spending time with very vulnerable people with unbelievably challenging lives and I could only successfully complete this project if I had their trust. On many occasions I photographed people injecting heroin and crack in outdoor shooting galleries and was around people clearly worse for wear through their heavy drug and/or alcohol use. I got verbally abused a few times and once I was physically assaulted. However, I chose to dig deep and keep working so that I could make sure that I had enough material with depth.”

Many of the photographs in Nothing To See Here make grim viewing. A man with a badly-bruised eye and another with a deep cut to his forehead after being hit with a beer can. A young woman with a badly-scarred arm from cutting herself. A female spice overdose casualty with her eyes to the sky, appearing to be somewhere between life and death (“she almost did die” John says). Various photographs show partial nudity and bodies bearing the physical effects of years of abuse. But there are other softer, more heart-warming and humorous moments too. The sense of community, some larking around and a tender embrace between a younger couple. John stresses that “the important thing for me was to be a human being first and photograph all of these people with respect. I was not interested in putting across any moral view about the individuals I photographed or the activities they were doing. I just wanted to capture these moments without judgement.”

John also says that “my book is simply just a witness to what I saw in the world of drug dependence, alcoholism, destitution, homelessness and prostitution. It has no other role than that. This kind of work can be easily misunderstood, including the motives of the photographer, but I am not interested in engaging in discussion about this as often those who express dislike or disgust will likely never understand this work anyway. Like those photographers who say that one should never photograph the homeless. Why not? They are part of society like everyone else. If someone hates the work then I am happy with that as I would rather get a strong reaction than indifference.”

Nothing To See Here has had a very positive reaction. For John the biggest reward has come from other photographers that he deeply admires. He says “I have been blown away with it being endorsed by Boogie, Miron Zownir, Scot Sothern as well as fellow British photographers like Peter Dench, Ricky Adam, Derek Ridgers and Jim Mortram. All of these are known for strong social documentary work. When you get recognised by some of the bravest photographers on the planet then that tells me that I am going in the right direction. I also got positive reviews from as far as Turkey and Thailand. I am a great believer in never stopping learning and I want to keep pushing myself to do raise my game.”

So what about the people in the book. What did they think of it? John replies that ”everyone who has seen it has really liked it and were happy to be in it. I knew it would be a book before the project finished so I was telling people I was taking these photos for a book and not one person objected to that. They trusted me that I wasn’t looking down on them or ridiculing them and what they were doing. Even though I have sold out of all my copies, every week I am asked for a copy by people living on the street. I also still have friendly relationships with many I have photographed and still follow their lives closely and how they are getting on. Since the book was published five months ago though, 4 people in it have already died. In some ways, they are immortalised and live on in my book. They did exist and I was proud to know them and have fond memories of the moments that we shared.”

John continues to shoot in his city. “I try and photograph every day and am always working on a main project and a couple that that exist in between. I published a book called Shabash about the lowest level cricket league in Bradford that was well-received nationally and has led to me being commissioned by the English Cricket Board for some work. A season spent photographing the grass roots football in Bradford will be my next book Field Of Broken Dreams which is currently being edited. I also have an ongoing project based inside the Shia Muslim community in Bradford. My current long-term project is a detailed investigation into the grime music scene in the north of England which is currently titled Generation Grime. This has also been challenging but it is coming together slowly and surely into coherent work. All of my projects are gritty in feeling and while obviously some are more hardcore than others I would like them all to be taken as a whole to be recognised as a record into the real life of the city of Bradford. Much of this work is based within communities and subcultures that are off the mainstream radar.” He states that “it is really difficult to be recognised as a photographer and work on very limited resources but I just keep pushing on. First and foremost I shoot for me but hopefully I can get more people interested in my work.”


Japan Camera Hunter October 2017

“Nothing to see here” is anything but as it take you into the dark underbelly of central Bradford. These 64 pages of A4 black and white photos will smack you in the face with reality. It’s a bleak peak into some rough neighborhoods of England. Brutally honest, his subjects hold nothing back for his lens. It’s an achievement how comfortable he makes them feel to give him such an honest expression. A lot of the images can’t really be featured here, as it shows some graphic drug use. Drug abuse’s brutality is candidly represented as John gives us access to a grim world. Shocking, yes. But perhaps something that does indeed need to be seen.


Photobite April 2017

When I graduated from university in 1995 with a degree in Photographic Studies, it was generally understood, if you didn’t make it as a photographer, you had failed. If you ‘hung on’ in the industry working as a technician or gallery assistant, you had failed. Now the smart thing to do is excel in a profession that may not be related to photography at all, IT perhaps, and apply yourself to photography in your spare time without the pressure of having to earn a living. And shoot local. I had drinks recently with the commissioning editor of a national newspaper supplement. He asked me if I knew any skilled photographers in Newcastle, Norwich or the Bradford area. I said I could travel on assignment to Newcastle, Norwich or the Bradford area. He said a local photographer would keep the budget to a minimum. I said, “Oh”. Then I recommended photographers in Newcastle, Norwich and the Bradford area.

Editorial budgets are now rarely available to send a photographer across the globe. I no longer expect to be flown to Los Angeles to document a dwarf convention, or to Illinois to snap a town celebrating the superhero Superman. Shooting local makes sense. For today’s commissioning editors, a local photographer is crucial; they have the knowledge, contacts and confidence. They can execute a commission more effectively, quicker and more cheaply.

A combined archive of documentary photography shot by photographers resident in an area can arguably deliver a more effective and accurate portrait of a nation. Here, I’m thinking of Jim Mortram’s reportage, Small Town Inertia, which comprises intimate, compelling and often challenging portraits of people living on the margins in East Anglia and Tom ‘Photie Man’ Wood’s images of strangers, neighbours and friends living in and around Mersyeside. And there’s Document Scotland, a collective of five Scottish documentary photographers brought together by a common vision to witness and photograph the important and diverse stories within their nation and the collective, A Fine Beginning, offers a platform to discover and showcase photography being made in and about Wales.

When not at his job working in public health, Bradford-based photographer John Bolloten shoots local. I don’t recall how I came into contact with Bolloten, but I’m glad I did. I’m not sure how four of his publications are on my bookshelf, but I’m glad they are. Nothing to see here, was the latest to arrive: an exploration into homelessness, destitution and drug and alcohol misuse in Bradford. I’m usually uncomfortable with photographers who photograph the homeless. They don’t usually ask, applying the brasher, smash and grab approach popular with some modern street photographers. I usually advise aspiring photographers not to photograph the homeless. But why should the homeless be ignored? Bolloten hasn’t ignored them. He asked them to collaborate. You can tell he asked because they stare unflinchingly into the camera. They show Bolloten their drugs in pin sharp detail; they show him injecting their drugs; they show him their tattoos, their bruises, and some women, show him their breasts. It’s Britain photographed at it’s most brutal and bleak; it’s Bradford and uniquely Bolloten.


Maura Magazine July 2015

“Golden girls and lads all must/like chimneysweepers turn to dust”

Walk back from the postal depot with an oversize parcel, I pass a coffeeshop I never glanced into before. Actually it’s a large black-and-white photo in the window that catches my eye: Joan Jett in LA in 1978, sat on a hotel bed in a homemade Sex Pistols T-shirt. From the date she must be 20, but she looks much younger. The picture’s familiar, and in fact a wall inside the shop is hung with a mini-exhibition, of work by US rock photographer Bob Gruen. Gruen made his bones on both sides of the Atlantic in the ‘70s chronicling punk and proto-punk as an outfall of pre-punk US and UK rock, classic rock as it’s generally termed now.

So far so uncomplicatedly nostalgic, I suppose: echoes of the passions of my youth still resonate, when I run into them unexpectedly. But this story begins with Gruen only by way of contrast. It’s actually about another photographer, Bradford-based John Bolloten, whose Punk Survivors project I discovered on the internet, while searching for current information on Gaye Advert of The Adverts. Punk Survivors is self-explanatory: Its key strand consists of full face portraits of figures from UK punk in full early blush, 1970-80. As they are now: some long retired; other still very much active (Bolloten also photographs the shows and the fans).

Now the first thing you have to remember about UK punk in full early blush is that it happened a long time ago and was over almost before it began. And Gruen isn’t wrong: It did emerge from what came just before it, especially in America, and remains very much part of the first third of the story of rock so far. But much UK punk was also very determinedly local, even parochial in tone and stance: America was a cultural illusion to be broken with, which meant declaring yourself in the brogue of your own birthplace, whether this be Newcastle or Manchester, Edinburgh or Belfast.

The second thing is that no two UK punks blooded in that first spasm will agree with one another on ANY aspect of its definition – who was in and who out, whether it succeeded, where it flourished most true, what it meant, when and how (and if) it ended. Schrödinger’s punk: You only know it’s dead when a squabble doesn’t burst up out of the coffin.

Bolloten explains that the project began quietly enough on the day in May 2011 that he took pictures of Steve Lake (of anarcho-punk band Zounds) and ranting poet Andy T, two figures busy in and around the Crass ambit. A couple of weeks later he photographed the fabled grand old man of Britpunk, Charlie Harper of the UK Subs, now in his 70s, and began to feel there was something worth pursuing here. Over the next three three years he drew up an extensive wants-list of subjects and began to track them down.

Who’s he found? A Pistol, an ex-Pistol and a quasi-Pistol: Paul Cook, Glen Matlock, Eddie “Tenpole” Tudor-Pole. All four founders of The Damned: Dave Vanian, Rat Scabies, Captain Sensible and Brian James. Of those who played the dawn of punk event, the 100 Club Festival, September 21-22, 1976, no Clash, no Banshees, no Stinky Toys, but two Buzzcocks, Chris Spedding and a Vibrator, plus Vic Godard of Subway Sect. Of those captured live on the live LP The Roxy London WC2 (Jan-Apr 77): two Adverts, a Slaughter and the Dogs, an Eater, a Johnny Moped, no Unwanted, no Wire, no X-Ray Spex (Poly Styrene of course died in 2011).

Not everyone said yes; some hated the project, perhaps not wanting “to be photographed so intimately,” as Bolloten thinks. Others, still in his view doing stuff connected to punk, no longer want to be associated with it. To date there are more than 190 portraits, though the website, recently revamped and scaled back , displays just 60 currently. More may be added as and when a shoot can be agreed in his area, but the project’s winding down: trips to London became a logistical nightmare, especially with the flakier subjects (he names no one). Still, some became good friends. No two punks…

From far outside London, two Rezillos, an Angelic Upstart, a Stiff Little Finger, a Saint. From deep in the definitional weeds – ‘Pub Rock’ versus ‘New Wave’ – one each of The Boys, The Cortinas and The Kursaal Flyers. Moving (inevitably) out into the never-punk-to-me faction: a Strangler, a Hot Rod, a Boomtown Rat, Bruce Foxton of The Jam. And from the openly political wing, which flourished as tippexed lists on a thousand leather jacket-backs, add to Crass and Zounds a Conflict, an Exploited, a Flux of Pink Indians, a GBH, a Peter of the Test Tube Babies, a Subhuman…

For a movement that opened up rock gender-wise, it seems light on women: Penetration’s Pauline Murray, Fay Fife of The Rezillos, Hazel O’Connor, but no Siouxsie, no Toyah, no Slits, no Poison Girls (Vi Subversa is now 79). Gaye Advert, reluctant and notoriously put-upon pin-up of the movement – alternately drooled over and spitefully mocked, until she quit playing bass for a quiet life – now gazes out of her portrait amused and wise. Others here have (disreputably enough, in punk terms) grown handsomely into their looks. Tom Robinson is a distinguished silverback elder, as are Adverts singer TV Smith and Skids singer Richard Jobson. A 14-year-old underage cutie in 1977, Eater’s drummer Dee Generate is become a mature male model. Strangler bassman Jean-Jacques Burnel, greyhaired yes, remains baby-faced and wide-eyed. His international eminence Lord Bob of Geldof is an over-familiar tousled brand perhaps, but game enough to join in and look wary. The ever-recessive Subway Sect’s Vic Godard maintains an austere, near-uncanny seriousness. Familiar perhaps from a murderous early cameo in Game of Thrones, reprieved after a serious recent cancer scare, R&B robo-guitarist Wilko Johnson, of the contrarily named Dr Feelgood, glares out at you, a wired assassin’s mugshot.

On punk’s career clowns there has descended a melancholy: Eddie Tenpole, Max Splodge, Spizz Energi. I’d add long-faced Jimmy Pursey of Sham 69 here. I once saw him entertain a small child trapped among adults at a film launch party (a recently widowed parent hadn’t found a babysitter). Clad top-to-toe in shiny red leather, he identified with the child’s bored misery and took it on himself to divert her. Recall him in 1979 clumsily attempting to gather radically alienated skinheads back into the folds of the wanted and the catered for: Even at his shoutiest, he had an earnest generosity to him, today morphed into a mournful struggle with suspicion.

There are faces here that are very lived in, and some 24-hour non-stop partied in, every drink, smoke, snort or needle responsible for another line or fold forming. A small few have prospered and remain in the public eye; some are down on their luck. Some have maybe clambered out of the class layer they felt then imprisoned them; some have tumbled back in; some stayed who they were and fought for others. The quote up top – from Cymbeline – is Shakespeare’s eloquent reminder of universal frailty and mortality: Even the gorgeous have it coming to them. The Buzzcocks put it more bluntly, at once scornful and self-absorbed, in the 1976 song “Boredom”: “I just came from nowhere/and I’m going straight back there…”

“Golden” isn’t how I remember the punk that called to me back then. Colour printing didn’t reach the UK rock weeklies until the early ‘80s (cue the track-switch spearheaded by Adam Ant, and video). Nearly all rock photography published in the weekly inkies in the late ‘70s was black-and-white. If this was a limitation, it was treated as a glory, like the three-minute length of a 7” single: an obstacle which forced you to jump. There’s an argument, not entirely frivolous, that UK punk broke out as a thing precisely because the picture-takers and the subjects then were so intuitively attuned to exploiting restrictions; the bleached-out xerox fanzine image was a style just waiting to be artistically inhabited. Much of the rhetoric at the time was about the proletarian voice emerging raw and untreated here and now – and Bolloten’s plain array of faces still clearly nods to this, the males most of all, gaunt or thickened or weary but undefeated. Yet the earliest break-out images in UK punk were often strikingly self-conscious, even mannerist: knowing teenage gestures towards the bright monochrome poses and shadowed modes of Weimar and German expressionism many decades before, from Caligari’s stricken eyelinered twitching to Cabaret. Think of the iconic shopgirls at Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren’s Seditionaries (formerly Sex, formerly Let It Rock) – Jordan, Soo Catwoman, tiny little Debbie Juvenile of the startled panda eyes – or of the Bromley contingent (Siouxsie and Steve Severin and Billy Idol and others), plus all-important sometime-Banshee and future-Ant Marco Pirroni. Gruen snapped them all at Louise’s, a late-night Soho lesbian club, as did pet Pistols lensman Ray Stevenson. Unlearned underclass punk realism catalysed out of high-style pre-rock memory, and vice versa. Hooks fashioned out of contradictions, a glam of bin-bags and trash.

Part of me wants to say Bolloten’s pictures are a corrective to such youthful foolishness: that if punk was (as Severin says somewhere) “about being 16 and saying no”, then Bolloten’s are humane and dignified portraits of what it means to grow and up and through and out of such glamourised, self-dooming poses; to look back and (for example) watch your own kids, or theirs, re-enacting echoes of all this. I look back over nearly 40 years and of course I see children in many of Gruen’s or Stevenson’s punk pictures: some gleeful and brazen, some angry, many unhappy and damaged, scared and fronting – Joan Jett soft-faced and frighteningly vulnerable; Sid Vicious reading on a plane, crumpled and dwarfed among hostile and uncomprehending grown-ups; Elvis Costello in 1977 yearning and gurning to come across twice his age, and failing. But I also see something else: They were all young then but I was younger, and I identified with some of them and admired them terribly; something about the dress-up nihilism, the erotic anti-sex cosplay, the topsyturvy daring, spoke implacably then to me, and still does a little. If they now seem impossibly youthful, they also sometimes seem far older than anyone round them, infinitely, horribly older. It doesn’t at all surprise me when people grasp at avatars from more distant pasts: from futurism and Dada, from the English Civil War, or Greil Marcus’s dark dreams of the antinomian pogroms of the middle ages.

“Nostalgia for an age yet to come”: the chorus from another Buzzcocks song, better performed by Penetration. What’s moving in Bolloten’s portraits is as much as anything the intimation of unfinished business. I don’t know that I even now know what this business is, or ever was – and if I claimed I did I’m certain that no two other punk survivors would agree with me, or indeed with each other.


Ox Magazine December 2012

Too Old To Die Young

John, please introduce yourself. Who are you, how old are, where do you live, are you professional photographer?

I live in Bradford in the north of England and am 47 years old. I am not a professional photographer and have only been taking pictures for four years. Apart from photography, I publish a blog and also hold down a full-time job.

How did you get the idea to this series of old - or should I see ageing? - punkrockers? Were they shot especially for this series?

I didn’t have any planned idea to do this project. In May 2011 I noticed that Zounds were playing near me and they were a group I really liked when I was a kid and I had never seen them live. So I emailed Steve Lake to see if I could take his portrait. He said yes, so I met him and did that and also took a photo of the poet Andy T who was also on the Crass label. In the days that followed I started to think about photographing these artists from this extraordinary period in British musical and cultural history but how they look now, some thirty-five or so years on. By the summer of 2011 it really started to take shape and I begin shooting a few portraits every month. Right now I have done around ninety-five but still feel that I have got quite a long way to still go. All of the portraits after the first two or three were shot for this series.

Punk is - or was? - a youth movement/rebellion, how does that go along with the images of men and women looking like parents or grandparents?

Some of these artists were very political in their music and views but others weren’t. In fact the whole punk genre contained a wide variety of viewpoints and different styles. Even back in 1977 there were many older artists like The Stranglers, Knox from The Vibrators and Charlie Harper from the UK Subs. Undoubtedly it was a very powerful youth subculture but not necessarily always about rebellion. For example, many bands adopted very nihilistic positions. For me personally, I have always valued music that comes with a social conscience regardless of the age of the artist. In this project I deliberately do not draw distinctions between the different sub-genres of the music or push one particular angle. I want the portraits to speak for themselves as honest portrayals of the subjects.

Did you tell those you photographed that they would be part of a series or did that idea come later?

As I stated earlier, there wasn’t a plan at the beginning but that did come soon after. Therefore, I always explain to people what I am doing and why I am doing it. Most of the artists I have met have been happy to be involved, some I have needed to persuade and a few have declined. What I am also trying to do is show the humanity of the subject and that they are people just like us, people who are getting older but have a very special history.

Looking at your photos: do you think punk makes people age faster than their contemporaries or does it keep one young - at heart and on the outside?

I think it is a general rule that if you live life in the fast lane for a long time with a lot of alcohol and substance misuse then it is likely to take a significant toll on your health and how you look. I don’t think that punk artists are any different from anybody else really in that sense. Certainly keeping physically and mentally active keeps the person sharper. How people look though is very subjective and what one person might see in a photograph might be very different to the next person. For me, I am always focussing on the eyes and trying to capture something that lies within.

Do women and men age differently?

It depends on the person and their personal genetic make-up and lifestyle choices. There are people in their early twenties in the UK who look totally battered and some of the subjects in my pictures are well over fifty and look amazing.

Ageism has in recent years become an issue. Is there a message in your photos?

My message is always to view the person as a fellow human being like you and me. We have never walked in their shoes and every person carries a particular burden with them. With some of the artists I am conducting interviews where I ask them to reflect on their lives. If I can ever get this work published as a book then the interviews will illuminate further the portraits that are shown. Overall, this is a documentary project about ageing, focussing on an extraordinary group of people.

Did you observe anything special in regards to how the portrayed dealt with their age? Like attributes of youth culture (leather jackets, colored hair, etc.)

It’s a big variety. Some people still dress in a similar way and others completely different. One thing I rarely do is photograph them “in character” like on-stage. All the pictures are taken in natural light with the subjects largely wearing non-stage clothes. I want to show them as real people not specifically as artists.

Did you ever have any feelings from looking at your photos like "Man, he/she really looks old and not too good ..." or "Wow, I can't believe he/she is in his/her mid-fifties!"?

Those feelings can naturally arise but I always try not to be prejudiced by things like that. I want the portraits to be very honest portrayals and I can look beyond the superficial once I am doing my work. Personally I don’t really care what someone looks like as long as my work comes up to a decent standard. What I have noticed though is that every person is different and some are very self-conscious about being photographed in quite an intimate manner. A small number have been quite threatened by this project and have not wanted to be involved. Although this is disappointing, I cannot force someone to be part of it.

Is there one photo that you find especially touching - why? (Can you mail this one for print?)

I think the portrait of Wakey, the singer from the English Dogs will always be a special one for me. He is a real crazy character on-stage but I wanted to capture the man behind the image. When we did the shoot, he was giving me lots of typical punky facial expressions and I did get some nice shots. Then I asked him to be completely natural for the camera and everything clicked into place. A photo is always an exchange between the subject and the photographer and this occasion felt really special somehow, like we had made a connection. When I finished shooting, we spontaneously hugged and have remained firm friends ever since. He really gave me a lot in that session and really trusted me to capture him in a non-judgemental way. At that time he was going through quite a rough patch and you can see that he has a black eye in the picture.

Any plans to do an exhibition - apart from on your website?

I would love to do an exhibition and also publish this work as a book, both of those are the correct mediums for this type of work. Websites are OK but there is something much more aesthetically pleasing for these images to be in a physical form. I still have quite a lot of work to do and I think I will easily spend another year on this project. I haven’t approached anyone yet about publishing it and I don’t really know where to start. But I am starting to get quite a lot of interest and I am hoping that this project will be an important documentary piece for the history of punk and the people involved in it..