Matthew Smith
Matthew Smith is a British documentary photographer who is based in Bristol. Matthew Smith studied in London College of Printing and began his photography career by taking images of British culture in the 80’s.
Matt Smith has had many exhibitions including:, 'Vandalism - Graffiti, Censorship and Crime - Hereford Photography Festival 2002’ ‘Underground England - The Brewhouse Theatre & Arts Centre - Taunton 1997’ and the most recent exhibition in 2015; Lost in Music - The Print Space - Village Underground - London.
Matt Smith is well known for his work photographing the protest and rave scene and attended many of the events including the poll tax demo in March 1990, Reclaim the Streets, The M11 link road protest, G20 protests and Freedom To Party.
“Exist to Resist is a social history book by Matthew Smith born out of a love for UK's rave, sound system, and festival culture. It is a photographic celebration of community gathering and grass roots democratic activism in images made between 1989 and 1997.”
“It draws together stunning images captured between 1989 and 1997 that depict gatherings and grass roots democratic activism from that brief period that ended all too quickly with the Tory government’s passing of the 1994 Criminal Justice Act”
http://www.youthclubarchive.com/store/pre-order-exist-to-resist
Matthew Smith said “My intention was to bear witness to this culture and to provide a positive personal truth in order to counter mass media and political representation of the lowest kind"
My take on the above quote is that Matt Smith wanted to create a positive outlook from the free party scene from a personal point of view, to me it seems he is saying that the media and the political side of things show the raves negatively as he is saying 'representation of the lowest kind'. To me Matthew Smith in a sense, has used his book Exist to Resist as a way of showing a history of the relationship between protest and politics.
Here are some example images from Matthew Smiths book 'Exist to Resist' :
I love Matthew Smiths work, I have been interested in his work for around two years now and I have been in contact with him and we have spoken quite a bit using Facebook Messenger, he agreed to do an interview with me we both agreed we would prefer to do it on messenger as more of an informal chat and we got talking quite a lot he told me about the camera he uses which is a Olympus point and shoot and told me I was a hipster for using a an 0M10...
I asked him some questions and he sent me a link to an interview he had just done that week with a radio station. I did not receive any answers to the questions as of yet, however I have had a message from him apologising and saying he will try and do it soon.
It has been interesting messaging a well known photographer on an almost personal level, I never thought I would have the confidence to message a photographer or an artist but I have and I am very pleased that I did. I feel now I can message other photographers and it won't seem so daunting. It has been a comfort knowing I have a photographer that I feel comfortable with messaging and it makes me feel privileged in a sense that he has the time to just chit chat about his work and asks me about what I am doing etc.
Matt has replied to my questions on the 14/01/21. These are the questions I asked Matt Smith:
1. How old were you when you first attended a free party?
2. What made you want to photograph the free party scene?
3. Do you think a lot has changed from how the parties were in the past to what they
have become now?
4. Are you concerned about the future of events due to the current circumstances going on in the world?
5. In your opinion do you think that the media can portray the parties in a negative way ?
I have copied Matt Smith's response to my questions off of facebook and posted them here:
Matt sent Today at 14:22
“I grew up in and around a small west country town...We first started going to village discos in local village halls while I was in 6th Form...I passed my driving test at 17 which was a necessity then if you wanted any real freedom...from village discos we graduated to having big house parties in farm and manor houses rented by groups of friends and students from the local art college...They were a lot of fun....Me and my cousin started to do art college parties in a small local club playing all kinds of music in the early mid 80s...We went on trips to London and Bristol to find nightlife there...We had friends in London who had a squat in Notting Hill and that was a destination for us for a bit as we loved reggae and it was an outrageously glam place for us young country bumpkins with all kinds of illicit fun happening...My first pill in 1986 came from there and blew my young socks off, and I did it at a friends big house party near Bath...It was such a powerful experience I didn't think I'd ever do another one...I couldn't believe a human body could experience so much pleasure.
Then in 1987 we went to Glasto for the first time and found the Mutoids and their Carhenge with drumming and craziness that went on for the whole weekend non stop...There was no dance music then but there were dub tents with huge sound systems in them and all that went with that culture...Later that year I went to art college in Stoke and it was only really then for me that dance music became a thing through rap disco and electro, and raving entered our consciousness.
The Hacienda in Manchester was just up the road so went there quite a few times...But it was in Stoke that a friend of mine from my hometown was running an after hours secret acid house night called Introspective that started at 4am and I guess that was my first proper rave experience...White sheets lit with UV and smoke so thick with strobe lighting so you could scarcely see your hands in front of your face at times...There was like a uniform of crew cuts, tops off and trackie bottoms for the boys and the girls in just bras kind of hands in the air praying to the bleepy hypnotic music. It was interesting but not quite as fun as the free for all sprawling house parties back in the West Country. In the second year of my photography degree in the summer term that I went to photograph Glastonbury for 4 weeks in 1989.
I guess that was where I discovered my first proper free party in a cafe outside a double decker hippie bus with a sound system hidden under its tables. It certainly wasn't in any of the programs but that unpredictability was what made Glastonbury back then. They played deep house and somebody gave me my second pill and that was that. I was there for well over 12 hours, made all kinds of friends I never knew I had never looked back. So by that time I must have been 22.
Later after art college had finished in 1990, 1991 and 1992 I spent time working in London but it was then back at home in the West Country that free parties just became the thing to do at weekends. Barns and farmhouses, chicken sheds, woodlands and local traveller sites were where they happened. People even discovered that you could hire the same local village halls where we once had village discos but instead we had raves, sometimes much to the annoyance of the local parish councils.
Then of course Lechlade, Radstock, Chipping Sodbury and Castlemorton happened in 1992 that was when it all went bonkers and all of a sudden the freedom of our youth was under threat from the CJA outlawing the culture that we all loved so much. Sound systems like Circus Warp, DiY and Spiral Tribe had become legendary and the allure of their music and the free party people of those times who went to make the parties happen were just the stuff of life that everybody wanted to be a part of. We all decided that we had to do something to oppose the CJA and its attack on our liberty so at that point we all moved to Bristol, hooked up with some people with a rig and began working to create the culture threatened by the government. For the next ten years that became my life.
So there was never just one point, one event that I could define really. It was a progression of living your best life and doing what you thought was right and standing up to the evil of government to maintain a quality of life that we all enjoyed and loved.
That was what made me want to photograph the culture. In the mainstream press of the time there were disgusting lies and headlines that were not true. Murdoch and Thatcher were close allies at that time. So as the opposition to the CJA grew and grew one of the consequences was the growth of an underground media to oppose those lies and gross exaggerations. Schnews and Squall were the two main organisations that set out to provide diy culture with its own media in order to fight the fake news peddled by the mainstream. I started to give them images of our protest activities, parties, and also attended traveller site evictions to try and show what was really happening. For a time I used to get invited to take that work to squat parties and show it at raves via slide projectors.
It wasn't just Murdoch and Thatcher though. It is the job of the BBC to maintain the status quo. They maintain a myth that they are somehow balanced and unbiased but that has never been the truth. They are as much involved in producing government propaganda as any of the multi millionaire owned print media.
Culture is never static, we are all involved in a constant evolutionary process and change is ever present. There was a seismic change in the parties when ketamine arrived on the scene in a big way. The Police have also evolved their tactics to disrupt, stop and vilify "illegal raves".
Digital surveillance has become significantly more advanced with the advent of social media too. It is telling that you will never hear of free parties in the media any longer. Just illegal raves. The language is significant in its constancy and endless repetition and it is used for a reason. The music has diversified and become much more accessible as digital technology has taken over everyones lives. You no longer have to go to a party to listen to the music because it is everywhere.
The CJA was passed making the culture criminal. At the same time that cultural enclosure by legislation has given birth to the massive festival industry that is so successful today. Until COVID came along that it is. I haven't really been to many free parties over the last decade but I still live in the west country and still love free outdoor parties as much as ever and 2nd and 3rd generations of free party ravers have taken over the mantle of keeping the culture alive. At first it was kids of people who brought them to our parties that got rigs and started to do parties of their own. Now it is the children of their children I guess.
The fascist and even more draconian penalties that we are now seeing imposed on modern free party people are bound to have an effect in the future too. I don't think we have ever faced a more fascist future than we are facing now with the combined impact of Brexit, Covid and all its future implications dictated by the same right wing organisation that started to persecute the culture in the 80s and 90s.”
Matt Smiths answers are incredible, I never thought I would be hearing his life story from him! I have been fascinated by his responses and I am so happy that I managed to get the courage to talk to him over social media. It goes to show that using social media platforms really is a great way to converse with fellow creatives. I never thought I would be speaking to a photographer that I have been reading about for over two years.
This truly has been a great experience, reading Matt Smiths answers has really inspired me and given me an insight to some of the history that I have been researching, for example he mentions the criminal justice act, where he says CJA, the Castlemorton rave and even mentions the change in technology from a personal perceptive and that is a great primary source of information for my projects, especially my dissertation.
This has shown me the importance of social media when it comes to creating contacts within the creative industry. I deleted Facebook and Instagram off my phone because I feel it is too addictive, I was considering deleting messenger as well, but now know that it is important to create contacts using social media platforms. If I did not have Facebook messenger I would not have been able to find out half the information I have found out through actually talking to Matt Smith, which is great.
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