Photographer Profile: Ron Hewit

Happiness, for Ron Hewit, is the careful creation of images that shed a new light on the mundane or hint at stories beneath the surface. For his latest project, he tells Tim Cumming, he’s returned to the Scottish scenes of his youth to document a poignant passing and capture the quality of slow-fading family memories

shots is sitting with Ron Hewit in a Greek eatery called The Life Goddess in Bloomsbury, a semi-demolished plate of meze and a bottle of Greek red between us. Hewit alerts my attention to the window to a courtyard behind me, the blank exterior wall behind that, and the shadow cast by an unseen ladder, the accumulated layers of space and framing exactly the kind of chance assemblage that features in his work.

“Looking at the framing of that window,” he says, “even the shadow on the wall makes me happy.” Happiness, as well as beauty, is in the eye of the beholder, and Hewit has an acute eye for beholding the image that expresses human stories – labyrinths of tyre tracks on a car park rooftop, or a pedestrian crossing sign stuck incongruously in the foreground of a mud-churned wilderness, with no pedestrians, cars or road in sight.

A sub-editor by trade – that is, a field surgeon of the published word, apron smeared with the blood and sinew of bad grammar, errant facts and misplaced apostrophes – Hewit was a camera obsessive long before entering journalism, carrying his 35mm camera about the landscapes of the Scottish borders where he grew up. He returned there recently, in the wake of his father’s death, to document the long-abandoned smithy in which Hewit seniors toiled through the decades of the 20th century before the fires on that ancient industry finally went out.

It’s been a long time since anyone struck the anvil there, but Hewit’s photographic memoir, The Last Blacksmith, published on the Caught By The River website, strikes gold as a poignant evocation of time, memory, place and passing.

“You know how sub-editors scan noticeboards and things for typos and misplaced apostrophes? The itch to look for correct words is like the itch to look for the right photograph, the right frame.” He pauses. “But it’s the opposite of looking for the error – it’s about finding perfection. The sub-editor’s eye is looking for mistakes, but the photographer looks for completion.”

Hewit has plans for a book and exhibition of The Last Blacksmith. “This is the only time I’ve had a project that had a beginning, middle and end. I wanted to photograph my father’s workplace as it was, because it had been unchanged for the best part of 50 years, a treasure trove of cobwebs and dust.”

The challenge was to capture that atmosphere without disturbing the natural darkness of its interior, or the metaphysical chiaroscuro of the smithy’s abandoned tools – what Hewit calls its “unfathomable machinery”, their names long lost to memory. “I took pictures in natural light, with a wide aperture, and because I didn’t have a tripod it was all handheld, which is why they have that really narrow depth of field, so you only have a little of the frame in focus. It comes out really well, in retrospect. It has this slightly dreamy quality. The quality of memory.”

In a world bent on continual change and redevelopment, it’s remarkable that the smithy still stands at all. “It’s like a living museum,” says Hewit. “It’s simply always been there. Life without it is almost inconceivable.” That it does still exist is down to Hewit’s brother moving in to the old family home, smithy attached, when his father moved out and up the street – business for blacksmiths was winding down and ceasing to be a part of a living culture, vanishing into the shadowy world of the past. They do things differently there, and we are left with the remains.

“My brother keeps it just as it was, but in years to come who knows what will happen? It’s just standing there, slowly decaying. Which is quite poignant as well. Here are all these tools which are no longer used. There was stuff I wanted to ask my dad and grandad, but I can’t do that now. That idea of the fading away of memory – suddenly a generation has evaporated and the knowledge has gone with it. It’s spooky. It’s quite scary, in fact.”

That sense of place, of story, the narrative that springs up and out at you when you set the right frame around the right visual image, is an essential part of Hewit’s aesthetic. An early influence was Hockney’s Cubist Polaroid mosaics, and years later he’s developing his technique, combining multiple exposures and intentional camera movement.

“It’s about making it different, more abstract, kinetic. If it’s handheld, it’ll move, and you’ll get this effect, so it’s a record of hand movement and of the image at the same time. It’s just trying to look at things slightly differently – whether it’s a good or bad picture is up to the people looking at it, but I’d define a bad picture as clichés, things you’ve seen a thousand times before, that don’t make you stop and wonder at what the story is.”

Hewit’s website (ronhewit.photography) includes projects such as The Wood Green Triangle, turning what is commonly perceived as a rough-edged spread of unlovely, ungentrified north London into an urban landscape of wonder, mystery and magical tells. In the Buildings & People project, the human element – the people – seem dwarfed by the scale and spirit of the city rising around them. It’s like Tarkovsky’s Solaris manifesting in a car park in N22.

Photography is a democratic art, in that almost everyone has a camera, and the means to exhibit on digital platforms like Flickr or Instagram. “What makes it difficult is making your image stand out,” says Hewit. “Why should anyone look at your pictures, out of the billion and one pictures taken every day?”

The answer is in the work itself, in Hewit’s image, say, of two young girls balancing a mattress on their heads as they walk through a cantilevered housing estate, Alexandra Road, in Swiss Cottage, snatched at waist height, sight unseen, after Hewit spotted them walking towards him from a distance. He knew he had it in the frame. “That’s what makes a good photo – it’s more than the sum of its parts. It makes you think, what is going on?”

His next project begins in April at the National Centre for Circus Arts in east London. “I’ve been to see the students in action,” says Hewit, “and it’s a really vibrant, fast environment so it will be challenging to capture their dynamism and enthusiasm. It’s a departure from static subjects like landscapes, seascapes and car parks, but you have to challenge yourself, don’t you?”