As career trajectories go, nobody could say that Perry Ogden had taken the road-more-travelled. A successful fashion photographer, in recent years his shoots for Vogue and campaigns for Ralph Lauren have been used to finance considerably less glamorous personal projects. Pony Kids for example, his collection of photographs depicting the Smithfield market horsey set, was published back in 1999.
“It sounds like more of a leap than it actually is”, he explains. “I’ve always had other projects going on. And even when I’m doing fashion photography, my shots are less glamorised than is the norm, I think. I’ve always been interested in natural portraits, in capturing human faces just as they are. So there‘s always been an element of social realism to my work. The way I got into fashion photography was through doing realistic portraits of people. Of course, fashion is a little bit seductive, but it‘s never been what I planned to do for the rest of my life. I still do it, but that‘s for money.”
Curiosity fired by his experiences on Pony Kids, Ogden decided to follow-up with some of those he had photographed and interviewed. Unsurprisingly, he found that many of these marginalised children had wound up passing through the juvenile courts.
Sitting in the children’s court, he and writer Mark Venner became aware of the huge numbers of traveller kids who seemed to be processed through the system. The two years spent observing this phenomena would form the basis for Pavee Lackeen (The Traveller Girl), Ogden’s debut feature film and a gritty depiction of life for an eleven year old itinerant girl as played by Winnie Maughn.
“I believe in cinema as an art,” says Ogden. “But at the same time I never wanted to make a fine art film that winds up being in a gallery. The kind of films which inspire me have always tended toward realism. So I looked at everything from Italian neo-realism to the Dardenne brothers to Ken Loach to Alan Clarke. Like they often do, I wanted to drain the narrative out of the film to get at something real.”
Well, mission accomplished. Pavee Lackeen is an unconventional affair with few concessions to plotting, preferring a freeform, documentary approach which utilises improvised dialogue and non-professional actors mostly drawn from the travelling community. How, I wonder, did he gain the trust of this most insular grouping?
“It was a long process, starting with Mark and myself at the Smithfield Courts,” says the director. “We would follow certain kids and certain stories and we became aware that there were a lot of kids - nine, ten, eleven years old - who weren’t there because they had done anything wrong. They were there because they were at risk and there was no other way of dealing with them. More often than not, they were just left back out on the street, because the only alternative is to lump them in with older kids who have become criminalised. One day, we saw one kid putting on a great performance for the judge and he turned out to be Winnie‘s brother. He had kicked a Garda car in some fracas and made a big play of pulling up his jumper to show bruises he claimed came from a Garda beating him. We thought that he put on a great show, so we decided to follow up. And from there we met Winnie. And the camera just loves Winnie. She has a magical quality. But there was nothing I did to impress them. I was just me and we all happened to get along.”
Having gained the trust of his subject-stars, there was still a great deal of organisation required given the controlled, yet improvised nature of the project.
“There are some shots in some scenes that are total verité,” he explains. “We just happened to keep watching and then captured them. So we set up scenes where we could keep shooting 360 degrees if necessary. If the scene involved Winnie walking down the street and she happened to talk to someone, then we’d go with it. We didn’t have the time or budget to rehearse everything with the kids, but that helped keep things spontaneous.”
Inevitably, though with little justification, there have been mutterings about exploitation, an accusation Mr. Ogden firmly repudiates.
“I have heard this before,” he says. “But I would say to anyone who suggests such things that it’s a rather patronising view to take. I mean, are they suggesting that because these people are poor that they’re incapable of differentiating between good and bad or positive or negative. We’re probably all guilty of it, but that’s a total projection of middle class values. I mean, Winnie would kick your arse right out of the caravan if she didn’t agree with you. She’s very bright, as is her mother. She spend all her time complaining now that I made her wear dirty jeans for the film. She says she’ll only do another film if it’s glamorous.”