James Hudson 
After an initial adventure as a BMX rider in the Great Yarmouth, Blackpool & Krone circuses, James Hudson's first real job was photographing skateboarders for magazines. Now his photographic projects are usually constructed from unposed images taken in everyday situations and often out on the street. He has just completed a residency at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford and is currently editing several projects of old photographs and photographing a new project in the west end of Oxford.
If you want to get in touch please text or phone on: +44 7970 478377
The colour of snow at night
..more
15 Black & White Photographs mostly taken in Scandinavia.
Dirty Weekends
Series of 14 black & white photographs taken at vintage car trials and races in the UK between 2000 and 2009.
"Sixty four people cannot be wrong" says my father. He is talking about the relatively small number of people who have turned up on some hillside in the middle of nowhere to attempt to drive their vintage cars up some marked out section. It is often raining. When the car starts to loose traction you have to bounce up and down. You get dirty. Nobody comes to watch. Maybe someone with a dog.
Racing vintage cars on tracks is not much different. Dogs are not allowed into the track. If it is not raining when you race it probably will be when you have to drive your roofless car home. Then something will probably break and you will get oily or sit and wait for the breakdown truck or have an adventure. It is not like formula one. It is so much better. I am glad only 64 people do it.
James Hudson, 2012.
Change in Form: Metamorphosis in the Ashmolean Museum
Series of 16 black & white photographs taken in the museum during a 2010/2011 residency and inspired by Ovid's stories of metamorphosis.
Visitors to the museum mimicked exhibits and statues, portraits looked down at them and everybody seemed involved in a piece of unconscious theatre. Boundaries between people and objects started to blur. Glass cabinets started to contain visitors, and everything in the museum became an object. Even my box of photographs of them started to resemble its own cabinet of curiosities.
I then remembered reading about statues coming alive and people being turned into animals and objects in Ovid's stories of Metamorphosis. In one story Daphne becomes a tree and in another story Pyrrha and Deucalion create a new race of men from stones thrown on the ground. These changes in form, and the frustration caused by an inability to speak, happen over and over again in the stories and they suited perfectly what I was seeing in the museum.
James Hudson, 2012.
Foam Book
Edition of 7, hand made, french folded, books produced in 2010 consisting of 15 colour images in colour sequence.
Skate Park Life
Mixture of 15 colour/black and white images taken between 1990 and 2008 in skateparks in the UK, Scandinavia and Brazil.
The first time I went to a skatepark was in the early 80's. It was next to a pig slaughter house on Strawberry Road in my home town of Retford in Nottinghamshire. The skatepark had been built some years earlier at the tail end of the 70's, no doubt after much local council debate and whose completion coincided perfectly with the death of the first skateboarding craze in the UK.
As a skatepark it was not very good, for a 13 year old boy it was a unique and exciting place. This was not somewhere that your parents had been to, it was not an organised, recognised sports facility like a tennis court or a football pitch. Retford skatepark was the kind of place you went to smoke, a place to smash bottles and to fight. It was a bit rough and I do not ever remember being there on my own.
As we got better at doing tricks on our bikes the Strawberry Road skatepark started to feel a bit limiting. The constant sweeping up of glass and the noise and smell of the pigs, were never really endearing features of the place and I went there less and less. We built our own ramp in the garden, started to enter competitions and began to travel to bigger and better skateparks.
In the early 90's I started taking photographs seriously and contributing them to specialist skateboard and bmx magazines but it was always the trick, or the rider, that was the focus of my pictures. The overall environment of the skatepark was not really of interest to me at the time, I just took them for granted.
Riding my bmx and taking pictures for magazines eventually stopped and I got involved in other work. Occasionally I would end up in a skatepark and sometimes borrow a bike or a board and have a go. In 2003 I started riding my bike again a little more seriously. I was again regularly in skatepark environments but I looked at them in a different way now: the tricks and the riders were not the only thing that mattered. My interest was now much broader and I started to photograph it in a different way. No longer ignoring the people who were just hanging around and now looking at the whole space. I finally saw skateparks as places people grow up and not just place where they do tricks.
My renewed interest in riding my bike soon dissolved, not so much the physical strain but the fact that I knew it could never feel as good as the times I had spent riding and growing up in skateparks.
This collection of pictures is from skateparks during an regularly interrupted period between the years 1988 and 2008.
James Hudson, 2009.
A review of Skate Park Life by Iain Borden
At first viewing, James Hudson's photographs of skateboarding seem to be as much about the peripheral spaces and moments of skateboard and bmx parks as they are about the acts of skateboarding and bmx riding themselves. Sure, there are some great aerials, carves, stalls and other tricks on view here, but they are mostly consigned to the background or edge of the frame.
Instead, skateboarding and bmx appear through a whole series of other devices. Action, such as it is depicted, is often reduced to a sense of anticipation, with riders waiting to drop in or simply standing on a board. Or it is visible through the implication of an act that has already taken place: a skater lies prone and board-less at the bottom of a bowl, blood trickles down a skater's arm, or the rear window of a car is seen smashed by an errant board. And in some images the rider's presence is withdrawn almost entirely, and made apparent only through the pervasive extension of the length of a board, or through a shadow stretching out into the bowl.
Above all, however, it is the other stuff that emerges in these photographs: not the pure dynamism of a skateboarder on a ramp or a bmx rider on a wall, but the everyday, occasional and accidental stuff that just goes on at skateparks every minute and every hour of the day. So we see young kids at Area 51 in Goteborg messing around in the bottom of a ramp, or a shirtless rider at Canteloes arguing with just-off-frame skaters. We also see other people seemingly unaware of what is going on just around the corner or over their shoulder: a man at Drammen who is turned away from a vertical bmx-er to the left of the image and a kid determinedly not watching a skateboard aerial on the large ramp at St Neots.
Hudson's images are, then, the very antipathy of much skateboard and other sports related imagery, where the actual activity is usual rendered into a hugely dynamic but very often context-less performance. Here, however, the performance is still present, but not made central, not made into a heroic single figure. The most beguiling of these photographs for me are, therefore, those in which a veritable polyphony of actions are taking place. At one image at Canteloes, people sit and look in all manner of different directions, while one skater (holding a shopping bag) prepares to drop in to a shallow bowl. At Malmo, some stare expectantly at a skater perched on a steep ledge, but just as many others are looking determinedly elsewhere, while a young mother tried to photograph her son on a mobile phone camera.
In another image taken at Malmo, a women reads a paper, a young boy sits on his board and stares at the floor, two young men stare out across the park, and four teenage girls chat among themselves - meanwhile a skater, in the middle right, shoots a double-axle carve in tough-looking concrete pool. Each of these five acts has equal weighting, each has the right to take our attention, and all together they make up a social setting made up of communication, speculating, thought and energetic action. It is an idyllic scene, a utopia of doing and thinking.
And of course none of this would occur without skateboarding, and skateboarding, that most social of sports, would not occur without them. Hudson's images do not then, ultimately, displace skateboarding to the periphery; rather they radically expand the centre, and show us that the world of skateboarding and bmx is much, much greater than an explosive spectacle.
Iain Borden BA MSc MA PhD FRSA HonFRIBA, 2009.
Hippodrome: 1988 & 2008
Series of 22 colour photographs, one half taken in 1988 and the other half taken during several visits to the Hippodrome Circus in Great Yarmouth in 2008. Produced as a limited edition of 20, signed, 7"x7" books consisting of a mixture of digitally printed pages and tipped in colour prints, a loose cover and a hand made black card slip case.
20 years ago I ran away to the Hippodrome Circus. I was riding my BMX in competitions for a sponsored team and Peter Jay, the circus promoter, asked if I wanted to ride in a show that he was putting together. I thought about it for around 3 seconds and then said yes. A few weeks later I sat my last A level, packed up my van and left home for the first time.
The Hippodrome Circus at Great Yarmouth is one of only a handful of purpose-built circus buildings left in the world. Houdini, Max Miller and Lily Langtry have all performed at the Hippodrome over the years and the circus floor still drops down to create a swimming pool at the end of the show, as it has done ever since it was built in 1903.
During that 1988 circus season I lived in a flat over the top of Boobs Show Bar (alas no longer there) and for three months did two, 10 minute shows on my bike every day. It was an amazing experience. I returned home after the circus season had finished to get my terrible A level results with a feeling that I had really lived. The exam results did not matter as I had already been offered a job in the show at Blackpool Tower Circus the following year. University would wait (actually it is still waiting...). The year after Blackpool I did a season in Germany touring with Circus Krone, but then decided to leave the circus world for more traditional employment in publishing and I never again performed in a circus ring.
In 2008 I found myself living as near to Great Yarmouth as I was probably ever going to (in Stamford, about 2.5 hrs drive away) and there was never really any doubt that I wanted to go back and photograph the Hippodrome Circus. So, driven by curiosity and nostalgia, and exactly 20 years since I had first been to Great Yarmouth, I finally went back.
Almost nothing had changed. In fact one of the ramps that we had hoisted up into the rafters backstage after the final show in 1988 was still hanging there looking at me. The smell was slightly different (we had elephants and tigers in the show in 1988) but the atmosphere was exactly the same. I felt a little queasy when backstage on the first day photographing and the music that signals the start of the show began. It was like a wake up call and it made me want to go out into the ring for the opening parade like I had done so many times before.
During the show the artists are in this magical and dangerous performance, but backstage they are normal working people (well, normal circus people). Circus does not have really well known stars like in film or theatre, everyone has to do some of the dirty work too. I was immediately reminded of this contrast between being the centre of attention in the show: music, lights, smoke, applause etc. and then it is over and you are backstage: washing your clothes, painting the props, cleaning, moving stuff around. Then you go home, or go out to get some food, and no one knows you, nobody looks, you are just normal. The heightened visibility you had during the show is gone and you then feel a bit invisible.
Ever since I stopped performing in the circus I have been missing it. Not enough to regret stopping, or indeed enough to start again: just missing it. Being back at the Hippodrome was wonderful, it allowed me to feel part of it again but without being totally involved. But I was taking no real risk by being there again shooting pictures and therefore received only a compromised enjoyment of it.
The Hippodrome Circus is amazing. Circus might be a traditional entertainment but in an age where so much of our entertainment is mass-produced, screen based, quick, safe, and delivered to us in fairly sterile environments, the Hippodrome show still stands out for me as something very human and raw.
James Hudson, 2011.
Note: During the period I was editing the photographs I had taken during the summer of 2008, I dug out some of the shots I had taken when I had been at the Hippodrome in 1988 and it seemed right to put some of them with the new images. The images on the left pages of the book are re-photographed prints that I took in 1988, all the other images were all taken in 2008.