The Studio Chair

Many years ago when I had a huge studio Chapel on the A1, everything was painted grey BS00A05, even the tables and chairs. In this studio I did everything not very profitably from a seven foot tall brown bear called Pecca to building the deck of a cruise liner to the surface of the moon, which involved 50 bags of cement! Whilst it was interesting it was quite stressful. I had a lot of repeat clients and a handful of ‘favourite’ clients and strange things kept on happening. Like the time Santa got his great fat calves stuck in his riding boots and we sat him on the welcome mat in his underwear for traction whilst we pulled on the boots …took so long we missed the pub, but that’s another story. Not that such strange things have ever stopped.I worked on an adhesive tape catalogue for a lady client, it was deadly boring, one roll after another all perfectly laid out and shot on 5X4. Sometime later she rang to ask me to shoot a new product they had developed which was a tape without the adhesive, I was busy at the time and didn’t take too much notice, so I booked it in and she’d said she’d send some models and if I could supply the chair like the ones in the studio all to be shot on white cove, I still didn’t twig. Anyway, the day of the shoot a man and woman turn up, say hello and proceed to strip off right next to the cove and get down to strapping each other down with the tape. My assistant who nowadays is an accomplished photographer in his own right, well, he blushed and blushed and with the words ‘Well, Monty I’m going to leave you with this one!’ dashed off into the office. I ran through 5 rolls of 120 tranny on my Rolei 6006 and a bike came and picked it up for clip testing…that gave the lab a laugh. Film was delivered to the client and all was satisfactory.About a year later one of my favourite clients came in to discuss a shoot and holding in his hand a small brochure about bondage. ‘Monty? I didn’t know you did this kind of work’. ‘Err, how do you know it’s me?’ I said, ‘Oh that’s easy, I recognised the chair!’