Meth Mouth

Meth Mouth is a term used to describe the discoloration, rotting and broken teeth in the mouth of a person who has an addiction to methamphetamine. This extreme tooth decay is a condition that occurs in many people and it is believed that the drug causes it. Methamphetamine causes the saliva glands to stop producing saliva so a person will experience an extremely dry mouth. This allows the acid in the mouth and in food and drink that is consumed to eat away at the protective enamel on the teeth. Users also may obsessively grind their teeth and may not brush their teeth for many days while on a binge.

Methamphetamine is produced from a range of highly toxic chemicals, which can cause many problems for an addict. Lithium, muratic and sulfuric acid are key ingredients in methamphetamine and these are all highly corrosive. When a person smokes methamphetamine in a pipe, these chemicals are heated, vaporized and inhaled which can cause sores on the inside of the mouth. The corrosive chemicals also coat the teeth causing significant decay to the enamel. If the drug is snorted, the chemicals are drawn down the nasal passage to the back of the throat and coating the teeth with the substance.

Heroin is known to cause serious oral health problems and in chronic long term users, bad teeth, bad gums and missing teeth are often apparent. In surveys of injecting heroin drug users, up to 70% described problems such as teeth snapping off, teeth falling apart, gum disease and trauma. These problems are often a result of a lack of dental hygiene, access to health care or not caring about oral health due to drug addiction.

Individuals who are addicted to heroine or other opiates often experience severe decay in their teeth. This is because the drug causes them to crave sweet foods and drinks but their lifestyle often ignores the importance of mouth care. Additionally, many addicts consume sugary drinks and foods because they are inexpensive and readily available. Taken from alcoholrehab.com

I recall photographing Cherie Blair in 2009 and observing her absolutely perfect teeth.

See also portrait of Fungi & Lynch, 2013.

Detail from Image_3843, Will & Lakella © Richard Ansett 2015

Detail from Image_4040, Kayleigh © Richard Ansett 2015

Cherie Blair © Richard Ansett 2009

Detail from Cherie Blair © Richard Ansett 2009

Working with Monsters

I am currently working with a pool of amazing Spanish and South American assistants, all girls, all recent graduates or studying MA's. I can't underestimate the value of the huge amount of time we spend in the car together to discuss photography. Themes usually revolve around the fundamentals of what we are doing and why we are doing it but equally important is silence, a lot of silence; I have found that girls are more comfortable with this than boys. My perception is that boys, particularly heterosexual boys, demand more attention than girls. (although there are some notable and well known exceptions).

I worked with one boy who was so shy, I was concerned he might be autistic, this combined with his terrible grasp of English, made him amazingly useful with the most sensitive subjects. He had very little skills or technical knowledge but if there was a self harmer or vulnerable teenager, I would always use him and I created many important images with him. One of the greatest talents an assistant can have is to render themselves virtually invisible so that the subject forgets them or equally they can be essential in creating an atmosphere that brings out an interesting response in the subject.

There can be a lack of anything tangible to do on my shoots, as I can seem incredibly self-reliant and I imagine it must feel quite unsatisfying to work with me if you do not accept the essential role that your personality plays in how I build a relationship with a subject and the space. The assistant is a vital component just by being themselves.

The hardest thing for these sensitive and brilliant people is to cope with the shifts in mood and energy as I struggle to respond to new environments, I project a lot of frustration that must be quite wounding (see images of Maria de la O Garrido) but this is discussed in early interviews with them and I continually remind them of this possibility. I often can snap at an assistant during a shoot purely to elicit a spontaneous response in a subject, who might have started to become comfortable in my presence. The priority is entirely the capture of a moment and nothing must get in the way.

Maria is a student at Central St Martin's Fine Art MA, she played alone in her room as a child and now she works best alone in her studio playing with her new toys, her mother's name is Solitude.

Image_3919 © Richard Ansett 2015

Image_3918 © Richard Ansett 2015

Image_3921 © Richard Ansett 2015

The Miniature Train of Pedras Del Rei

My very first memory of taking a photograph was as an eight year old boy on holiday with my family in Portugal in 1974. There was a miniature railway that transported the tourists from the resort to the beach, which still exists today. Follow the link for a short film so you can experience it to.

I positioned myself with the family camera up against my face, standing by the railway tracks, waiting, my excitement growing as the train slowly approached. I took the photograph.

Months later when we had finally used up the roll of film, the prints came back from the chemist and I could not find the image but there was a strange picture of some empty tracks. I had pressed the button too early.

The train is millimetres out of frame on the left hand side.

This was the first of many clear memories of failure with a camera and only in hindsight have I come to understand that the root of my devastation was and still is a great passion for the experience of capturing a moment. Through my early teens I experimented more with ways to minimise the probabilities of missing events by setting up controlled scenes and waiting for events to occur within them. I started with a fixed tripod and shutter release set up by bird feeders, capturing very close up images of garden birds and this eventually led to spending hours in hides in the countryside. It is inescapable that this need to minimise loss had carried forward into years of creating deliberate scenes for the exploration of humans.

I feel that if there is one thing I share with anyone who is committed to photography as a medium is this sense of terrible loss when we feel we have failed and the equal and opposite 'petit mort' from the success of capturing a vital moment and holding it.

The Miniature Train of Pedras del Rei © Richard Ansett 1974

New Mother Dog and Horse

Image_6085, New Mother Dog and Horse © Richard Ansett 2015

Detail from Image_6085, New Mother Dog and Horse © Richard Ansett 2015

Mother & Child, UK

Image_8286, Mother & Child, UK © Richard Ansett 2015

Detail from Image_8286, Mother & Child, UK © Richard Ansett 2015

Image_8284, Mother & Child, UK © Richard Ansett 2015

Venus as a Boy

In Room 44 of the National Gallery, London, sitting quietly is Bathers of Asnieres, 1884, I forgot this was in the collection and it blew my socks off, like bumping into a major celebrity in the aisles of Tesco or perhaps Marks and Spencer. I was even more delighted to discover a little dog, sitting obediently by its owner in the bottom left hand side above Seurat’s signature. It is barely able to contain its excitement as the boy makes the sound of the factory whistle in his cupped hands.

In our new age we can empathise with the irrepressible nature of Seurat’s subjects as they find space to express their humanity at odds with the encroaching industrial and technical revolutions.

Bathers are a commonly re-visited theme by artists and through our social evolution over the centuries since the early renaissance depictions of privilege, this dogma has been a useful foil to record the human experience juxtaposed to a changing world. Cezanne and Renoir obviously are key to the movement towards a re-interpretation of classism and these modernist interpretations de-construct the privileged aristocrats dipping their toes into their private lakes. Modernism and post modernism share this socialistic utopia bringing everyone into the previously elitist experience and with painting the original compositions can be literally distorted and re-drawn.

Photographically we are left only with realist interpretations, some romanticised, commercialised and sexualised like Bruce Webber’s beautiful perfect boys in ‘Bear Pond on a Gold Day’ and Ryan McGinley’s carefree youth’s but other artists reflect a more overtly political perspective as in Seurat’s painting. Boris Mikhailov’s great series ‘Salt Lake, 1986’ reflects the notion of humanity finding a way to express itself under the most extreme circumstances. This is the starting point in the eventual defeat of any oppressive state, it is why any limiting dogma is so painful to endure; it is not natural.

The Bather motif is an opportunity for photographers to work with nakedness, particularly away from the commercial stereotype we have an opportunity to explore the bodies of the ordinary human beings not narcissistically sculpted to glamorise the status quo (lovely and addictive as it is) but to celebrate the oppressed and hidden beauty of everyday humanity normally hidden from view, shamed by the unachievable perfectionism that sells us Mars Bars, now brightly lit and brought back into the foreground out of the shadows.

My bathers in Ukraine are brave metaphors for the defeat of the societal introjections; they inspire me by their example but my objectivist approach also exposes a vulnerability and a sense of humanity under attack that I share with Rineke Dijkstras’s beach teenagers. Both works are inevitably infected by the power of Botticelli’s original interpretation of Venus but the Venus in my work is a boy (Image_1664).

Image_1664, Venus as a Boy, from series Bathers © Richard Ansett 2011/IZOLYATSIA

Detail from Image_1664, Venus as a Boy, from series Bathers © Richard Ansett 2011/IZOLYATSIA

Stag Head Mount on a Table

Image_6213, Stag head Mount on a Table, Torquay © Richard Ansett 2014