In May 2017, at the end of a week-long commission for the Brighton festival, Eddie Otchere picked up his camera and ventured out into the countryside. As hikes go, it was fairly unremarkable: he wandered into the South Downs and then wandered back again. But for a committed Londoner like Otchere, whose 25-year career as a photographer has been intimately tied to urban subjects – he documented the rise of drum’n’bass in the mid-90s and is best known for his revealing portraits of rappers such as Jay-Z and the Wu-Tang Clan – this walk marked the beginning of something new and unexpected and even, he admits, a little bit terrifying.
Over the next year, Otchere kept going back to Sussex, visiting Bloomsbury Group sites around Lewes and skirting the white cliffs at Seven Sisters. He would return home to Mitcham in south London with striking images of dogs and sheep and human silhouettes, of trees and beaches and the wide-open, “shaved” landscapes of southern England.
He didn’t set out on these trips with a clear objective in mind. “At first, I was just being an urban kid looking at things going, ‘Wow, a cow!’ ‘Wow, a horse!’ ‘Wow, a river!’” Otchere says, with a self-mocking smile, when we meet in central London. “I was also starting to respect the politics of rambling, because there’s not many parts of the world where you can literally traipse through the land. Most places have got barbed wire cutting across everything.”
While other metropolitan photographers were scouring rural Britain for insights into Brexit, Otchere found himself being drawn deeper into England’s past. Noting the regular occurrence of yew trees in country churchyards led him to consider the importance of yews in pre-Christian rituals and the yew longbows at the Battle of Agincourt. In the absence of trees almost everywhere else, he saw forests cleared to build the boats of empire.
As a photographer more used to dealing with rappers than empty fields, he struggled at first to capture the countryside on film. “In the absence of having people to shoot, I had to find something to cling on to, and it became animals,” he says. “The dogs of Sussex, in particular, became really fascinating for me. Sometimes urban dogs look really browbeaten, whereas country dogs are full of life and energy. You ask them if you can take a picture and they stop and are like, OK, and then they walk off.” He chuckles. “I remember one dog just turned its arse to me and gave me a look like, there you go.”
Gradually he began to orient himself, though it felt like learning a whole new discipline from scratch. “Any five photographers can shoot that same hill, but a landscape photographer really makes it pop,” he says. “So there were a lot of technicalities I had to get my head around. I had to change developers, I had to change the way I process my film.”
The bigger challenge, he says, was justifying the project to himself. “There’s always that guilt where you think, hold on, I’m not a landscape photographer, people might just laugh at the work and go, what is this, it’s naive – because it is a bit naive. So I began to think, this isn’t me. I began to develop some anxiety about it.”
His recourse, he tells me, was to “consult the oracle. I read a book about Henri Cartier-Bresson, and there’s a wonderful moment in there that really sorted me out. In 1968, as Paris is burning, where is Henri Cartier-Bresson? He’s in Versailles, taking pictures of trees. All these young photographers are on the front lines getting their arses whipped, and he’s clicking trees and birds.”
If the French master saw fit to depict nature in a time of great social upheaval, it made Otchere feel better about “rambling around Sussex and taking in clean air” in the era of Brexit. More than that, he began to appreciate the importance of changing the narrative and doing what people least expect of you.
There’s no obvious cultural reason why Otchere should be photographing black musicians instead of shrubland and churchyards. “I did a DNA test recently,” he tells me, “and basically I’m more Irish than I am African. My ancestors have been traipsing around these islands for as long as anyone can remember. Really, this urban pigeonhole that I’m in is a choice I made, because at 16 I loved hip-hop and became part of that culture. But that culture’s moved on” – he makes no secret of his preference for 90s hip-hop – “and so have I.”
Otchere’s understanding of this new direction in his photography is still evolving and will continue to do so – he’s planning to extend his rambling to Wales, Scotland and Ireland, while keeping his various other balls (music portraiture, teaching, DJing, writing books) in the air. But whatever the historical, social and cultural themes that emerge from this project, the personal meaning already seems clear. This is the record of a photographer breaking out of his comfort zone, however unsettling that may prove, and venturing into pastures new. “You have to take risks as a photographer,” he says firmly. “You have to tell new stories. You have to go off-piste.”
