Sophie Green: Gypsy Gold at the Appleby and Ballinasloe fairs

Gypsy Gold at the horse fairs

Green's interest in traveller culture began, by her own account, with the Channel 4 series My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding, and with a decision to go and look for herself rather than accept a broadcast version. The shoots took her to regional horse fairs across two countries: Appleby in Cumbria, Ballinasloe in Ireland, and Wickham in Portsmouth in the south. Horses are traded at the fairs, families reunite from across long distances, and young people look for partners.

What the series records is closer to inventory than narrative — fashion, make-up, eyebrows, hairstyles, market fakes, leather, bits and whips, traditional carts, cockerel fights, singing birds and fortune-tellers. Green has described the process as organic and the result as a spontaneous, intuitive reaction to what she observed, and has been explicit that she did not want the project to become a deep intellectual narrative. It was made to record what caught her eye, in a subject area that usually arrives pre-loaded with commentary.

That refusal is the interesting decision. Traveller communities are among the most heavily editorialised subjects in British photography, and a series assembled from incidentals rather than arguments leaves the reader to assemble the picture. Green's own summary of the work — that for all the criticism travellers attract, she found plenty of gold — is the closest the series comes to a thesis.

A practice built on unconventional beauty

Green is a social documentary and portrait photographer based in London. Her stated interest is in British culture, communities and marginalised people, and in using photography as a way of reaching an insight that is not available on the surface. The register is consistent across her commissioned and personal work: unconventional beauty found in an ordinary, unstaged environment rather than constructed for the camera.

The approach suits editorial commissioning, and she has published widely — clients at the time of the feature included the Sunday Times, the Financial Times, VICE, Man About Town, Re-Edition, Victory Journal and i-D.

Prizes and exhibitions

Green was nominated for the Magnum Photos Graduate Award in 2015, selected for the IdeasTap and Magnum Photographic Award in 2014, and included in the Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize.

Her work has been exhibited at the National Portrait Gallery, Four Corners, Photo London at Somerset House, Dray Walk Gallery, the Truman Brewery and the Houses of Parliament — a spread that runs from institutional portraiture to East London gallery space, which is a fair description of where documentary portrait practice sat in Britain in the middle of the decade.

Read from a distance, Gypsy Gold is a useful test case for an argument that runs through this archive. Documentary photography is routinely judged on the strength of its thesis, and a series that declines to make one is easy to under-read as merely decorative. What Green's work demonstrates is that the decision not to interpret is itself a position — and in a subject as heavily narrated as traveller life in Britain, it is arguably the more demanding one to hold for the length of a project.

The client list is also part of the story, because it shows how a personal series and a commercial practice can share a single eye. The titles Green worked for at the time split into two camps — newspapers and their supplements on one side, fashion and youth-culture magazines on the other — and Gypsy Gold is legible to both. An editor at a broadsheet reads it as social documentary; a fashion editor reads the same frames for the eyebrows, the hairstyles and the market-stall leather. That double legibility is not an accident of the subject. The horse fairs are one of the few places in Britain where dress, grooming and display are still fully public behaviour, performed for the crowd rather than the camera, and a photographer whose starting interest is unconventional beauty will find there exactly what a sociologist would — recorded from a different direction.