Rising Stars: Meet Matthew Farrar of Santa Monica

Today we’d like to introduce you to Matthew Farrar

Hi Matthew, we’re thrilled to have a chance to learn your story today. So, before we get into specifics, maybe you can briefly walk us through how you got to where you are today?
Towards the end of my school days it was customary for each student to be sent out on a period of work experience. I had no idea what I wanted to do. I wanted to play bass guitar at school but that was declined by teacher who then handed me the trumpet in a recruitment push for the brass band. I was not the best at maths or english or history though I did enjoy the subjects. I did like art and technical graphics and PE and my hobby at home was taking photographs.

I was thus placed in the largest commercial photographic studio outside of London. It was in the arches beneath the old Victorian railway station in Brighton, on the South coast of England. Day one in the studio was a fashion shoot for a lingerie catalogue. I remember quite vividly the three beautiful women parading their attire in front of this young 16 year old boy who was busily trying to keep his cool and at least look as if he new what he was doing. I was teased and my blushing cheeks could not hide the fact.

I soon learned the art of composure, studio lighting and composition. I would load film for all formats of cameras and I would spend hours in the dark rooms processing and printing. The homely smells of the chemicals are coming back to me as I write this. To my delight I was offered to stay on as an apprentice. I would be earning Fourty pounds a week while photographing cars and watches and pens and hifi speakers and all sorts. It was truly a great start for me and looking back, one that I didn’t appreciate enough at the time.

At the same time I had bought myself a bass guitar and started playing in a band (as a hobby of course). It tokk no time to decide that we were going to be the best band in the world and my attention swayed from photography eventually driving me up a different road. The photography studio fell on some difficult times and this made my transition a little easier. There was even less money down this road but as a band we were creating. I would get early morning jobs to pay my way and then spend most days and nights making music. We signed to a Danish record label and even made and appearance on MTV. We had a lot of fun for far too long but I came away some new exciting skills in sound recording and music production.

I went back to school to study more on this subject and soon found myself as head of the sound department at the all new Glyndebourne Festival Opera House. The in house band, so to speak, was the London Philharmonic Orchestra. I was working on the production team with some of the biggest names in theater, and it was a wonderful place to work, hidden away in amongst the green rolling hills of the South Downs National Park near my home town of Lewes.

From classical music I went back to Rock n Roll and moved to London to become Head of Sound at The Luminaire, an award winning music venue on the Kilburn High Road. I was mixing bands from all over the world most nights of the week. I saw some great bands come through on their travels around the world and ultimately jumped on to that band wagon. I was picked up by a new band from France and together we earned our stripes by playing all the old venues that London had to offer. We worked our way around the UK and over to Europe and eventually the World before things in this circus started to go a little crazy with band and management politics that really forced my love of the industry to falter.

I jumped off the tour bus here in Los Angeles having met my wife to be, while performing at a Doug Aitken art festival in Oakland just outside San Fransisco. We very quickly became a family with the arrival of twin boys . I did a little more touring after the first two years which was great for me at the time but closer to home is where I was needed.

The Pandemic hit hard and forced my shift back in to photography. I was shooting architecture and fine art while on the road and so I began to sell my pieces through online art galleries. It was good money when I actually made sales but never regular enough to consider myself a full time artist. I began shooting real estate. I shot some fabulous homes around Santa Monica and Beverly Hills, I found clients and lost clients as I was navigating my way into the business before finally finding some consistency in my work. I picked up some commercial shoots too which bought me full circle. I felt comfortable again knowing that I had done some time in the studio and had the knowledge. I still need to find my business head and not look at photography as just a hobby.

Alright, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
Rejection is pretty hard to take, but it is one of the greatest lessons. Being signed by a record label in our early 20’s was our first major goal and of course we thought we had hit the big time, only for the band to later be dropped as the label was sold on to a much bigger one. It seemed as if all the hard work and nurturing over the years had been scrapped due to either one persons taste or their bank balance.

The change from analogue to digital mixing desks was a real tough one. I was so confident with mixing my bands, I knew every control knob on the desk and what it did and I could watch what was going on onstage and make the slightest adjustments immediately with a quick glance down. I really was working live and felt as if I was part of the band. All of a sudden these new machines came in to the venues. They had little computer monitors on them and one knob would control various different parameters. There were endless menus to flip through to find the right page to make a slight adjustment and add some reverb or delay or EQ the voice. I was no longer watching the stage but I had my head down at this tiny screen trying to navigate this new thing. It was as if my expertise had just been taken away from me overnight. I was having to start again and this time I was learning on the job with only the short soundcheck times to learn my way around.

When I decided to pick up the camera again I had a whole new world to discover. That of digital photograph. The Image manipulation and post production using software such as Photoshop. There was so much more to learn but the versatility and scope was amazing and once learned, made the whole process or camera to print, super fast. The old analogue printing process took quite some time with the mixing of chemicals, printing test strips at different exposures, dodging and burning different parts of the print, hanging and drying, all done in the darkroom under the red light or complete darkness in the case of color prints. With Photoshop all this was possible and more while sitting at the comfort of your own screen and pressing some buttons. Yet all this new stuff took time to learn, and I needed to get going and earning some money.

I studied the methods of Real Estate photography on line and tried to copy the best of them. The editing looked like fun as several images were laid on top of each other and you would just paint in the best parts of each image, Blending the natural light with light from a flash, object removal or a nice sky replacement.

The tough part was finding my composure, getting the correct angles, the correct exposures, working from room to room in a timely manner and hoping that when you got back you had covered every angle in the way your client expects. On top of which, each client likes different shots and has different tastes. So there was me thinking I knew it all and quite sure that my images would look great and I was ready to shoot. I spoke to realtors who let me in and gave me a shot. My first was a disaster. The family were at home and sad to be moving from their lovely childhood home. They had spent time and effort to make it look at its absolute best. I chose the morning to shoot and having just moved to Santa Monica, I din’t know about the June Gloom. It was misty and gray, colorless. How could I get a good shot of this living space with the back of a sofa taking up my frame, how could I get the whole room in without a super wide angled lens, how could I even get into the WC with my tripod ? I panicked, like I did when I read the questions on my exam papers as a kid. I just took as many shots as I could hoping that I would at least get some good shots. I got nothing but perhaps a nice shot of the big three car Garage door.

Needless to say I lost that client as I did subsequent clients. I was learning on the job but at the same time making a bad name for myself. I stopped and took a breath and worked on my routine. By offering free photos through the local rag and printing some fliers showing my new work, I eventually found a client who knew what they wanted and would talk me through their process. The client took the lead and asked me to tell the story of the house as If I were walking through as a potential buyer. She, the client, was tough on me but she got her results as did I. She helped me price my work too. “Thats way to cheep” she told me. ” you did a lot of good work and if we’re going to work together, we’ve got to respect each other. No what do you really want to charge”?

This was so important. I had done good work for people in the past and not got the call back because of the prices being too low or too high. I was shooting some big houses and spending a lot of time editing and I had to make it viable. I gradually got my shot count down, my confidence returned. I was finding my consistency. And now my photographs speak for themselves and I pick up work through word of mouth and referrals from the listings.

Appreciate you sharing that. What else should we know about what you do?
I like to think I do a bit of everything. I always wanted to do things myself, everything from sound to the video to the album cover and posters and flyers. I think I got this trait from my father who would always try to do everything himself from chopping trees down in the garden to fixing the car or rebuilding the house. Have a go, and if that doesn’t work then you can call for the pros. I learnt on the job, through assisting and through trial and error.

As a musician I really liked writing and recording onto multitrack tape. We had an eight track reel to reel machine which would regularly chew the tape just like the cassette players in the car would, but on occasions it would allow us to experiment and build our own masterpieces. We spent months in recording studios with bigger and better machines and so the experiments got bigger and wider. It was great fun and I’m really proud of the time and effort we put in to our first album was a fine effort.

As a sound engineer I co-produced my first album for the band I was working with. We had been together a few years before shipping all my recording gear down to the Cognac region of rural France in the summer of 2007. We set up studio in the garage of an old farm house began our work. We only had the ability to record two tracks at a time, so the balance of the microphones through the mixing desk had to be good at the source. This was was my thing. I loved to record as cleanly as possible. I wanted good microphones and a nice strong signal. Over the following weeks we put to tape the music we had been performing for the past years. I listen back to it now and still wallow in the wonderful memories of that time, the songs and the unfiltered and un-tainted artistic juices in full flow.

The live shows and the venues were getting bigger. With all the artists I worked with there were shows that really made the hairs stand up on the back of my neck. The flutters of excitement, like butterflies in the stomach, when you mix the live music to perfection. Some venues had special sounding rooms and other days the band were just on fire. When all these elements struck at the same time, magic was made. These are the treasured moments that I look back on. The memories being the only record of these times and I know I share these with everyone who was there on the night.

As a photographer there are some images that smack you in the face as you are about to release the shutter. The sound of the click as you look through the tiny viewfinder and capture that image permanently onto film and into your head . I remember the exact moment I took each one. I have series called ‘The Night Swimmers’ which all stemmed from that first shot. ‘Heavenly Swim’ was the title of the image and it really captured the story of what was happening at the time. The mood and the feeling of tranquility and desire, of effort and calmness. My best selling work by a long way. When I see it printed and framed in large format on the walls of beautiful homes I am filled with pride.

Is there anything else you’d like to share with our readers?
When I left school I was certainly not prepared for life as an adult. We were not taught about business and the race for money seemed to me to be a game with rules that made no sense. There was cheating going on and an I didn’t want to play that game. I was overwhelmed by how beautiful life on this planet was and convinced that only mother nature made the rules on how we should live together. To go against her was to the detriment of us all. Our treatment of the land and soil and the pollution we leave behind is just mind numbing. I often wonder what archaeologists of the future will discover about our civilization as they dig up the crap that we leave behind.

I know the love is there and most of us here on this planet want the same thing. With a strong, communal mindset I believe we can achieve this harmony. I excelled at art and woodwork, technical graphics, I liked French and geography and physics even though my exam results didn’t reflect it. I left school wanting to create and to share and I still strive for this today.

Creating art and showing it to the people takes a lot of work and finance. The camera, the computer the hard drives, printing and framing, the website build and the social media and marketing. It all adds up to a full time job with no certainty of financial reward. An art show or an exhibition needs heavy financial input in hope to make sales enough to cover your costs. It’s a big gamble.

I want my work to be accessible to everyone, whichever walk of life. When collectors and art lovers contact me through my website I am rejuvenated. It spurs me on to create more and that to me, is so fulfilling.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.mattfarrarimage.com// https://jamesfarrarphotography.com/
• Instagram: @mattfarrarimage.com / @jamesfarrarphotography
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/mattfarrarimage/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/matthew-farrar-20537540/
• Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/matt-farrar
• Other: https://matt-farrar.smugmug.com/Fine-Art-Prints

Image Credits
All images by Matthew Farrar