He shot the YBAs boozing, canoodling – and shaking up the art scene. Now the photographer has found inspiration in some other unruly characters: his lurchers. We join him for walkies in rural Suffolk
‘F
inn! Finn! FINN!” Johnnie Shand Kydd is having trouble keeping his inquisitive lurcher in sight. Finn may be an incredibly sweet-natured dog but he’s hard of hearing – and has previous for disappearing on this particular walk.
At least the photographer has experience in dealing with unruly characters. In the 1990s, he found himself embedded with the Young British Artists, granted free rein to shoot the hedonistic, chaotic and wildly creative art scene that birthed Tracey Emin, Damien Hirst, Sarah Lucas and more. Shot in black and white, these images upended the convention for artists posing in their studios, easels in hand. “I just wasn’t interested in that at all,” says Shand Kydd. Instead, his photographs capture Hirst balancing a tower of hats on his head, Emin in a rubber dinghy with Georgina Starr, a newly pregnant Sam Taylor-Johnson (then Taylor-Wood) and a whole load of partying, boozing and canoodling.
Shand Kydd wasn’t a photographer when he began documenting the scene – he claims he’d barely taken a picture before in his life – but he was a former art dealer who understood artists and their delicate balance of ego and insecurity. The YBAs quickly relaxed in his presence. “It really wasn’t very hard,” he says with a laugh, happy to play his talents down. “Taking a photograph is the easiest thing in the world. You just point and click. It’s finding something to say that is the hard bit.”
