Capturing the inner spirit of true confidence

A new photographic exhibition celebrates the art of swimming. Sarah Freeman speaks to Paul Floyd Blake, the man behind the lens.

It’s one of the paradoxes of Paul Floyd Blake’s career, that while many of his subjects are elite sportsmen and women, who push their bodies and minds to the limit, he spends much of his time sat in front of a computer.

When we speak, after four months marooned in his office, he’s grabbed a rare opportunity to get out on the Yorkshire moors and breathe in some albeit freezing fresh air.

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“It can be a very sedentary lifestyle,” says Blake, whose latest exhibition, Different Strokes: Extraordinary Swimmers, is currently on display in Harrogate. “It’s odd really, I spend a lot of my time photographing and being amazed and inspired by these incredible athletes, but the reality of the job is that it involves a lot of sitting down.”

Different Strokes is part of the Imove project, which was launched three years ago to organise a programme of cultural events tied to London 2012, and was born out of a portrait Blake did a few years ago of Paralympic swimming hopeful Rosie Bancroft.

The image won the 2009 National Portrait Gallery’s Taylor Wessing photographic portrait prize and it also sparked the interest of Jane Grant. The 65-year-old lost her right leg just below the knee following a motorcycle accident and wrote to Blake explaining the freedom she had found by swimming at Harrogate’s Starbeck Baths.

“I was already involved in the Imove project, but when Jane got in contact the idea of the Different Strokes exhibition fell into place,” says Blake. “The aim was not to focus on disability, but to capture the inner spirit of these swimmers and show the confidence and freedom that being in the water brings them.”

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As well as the photographs of both Rosie and Jane, the exhibition also includes images of Danielle Bailey, who was just four years old when she lost both her legs and hands to meningitis. In June 2010, she was identified as potential talent through the Playground to Podium initiative aimed at getting more young disabled people playing sport.

Eighteen months on, the teenager, who is also based in Harrogate, has been accepted onto Britain’s swimming development programme, won three gold medals and for Blake sums up the power of sport.

“I was never particularly academic and at school, sport was the one thing I really looked forward to,” he says. “I never achieved great things, but when I was out on the football pitch or out on my bike I did feel a sense of freedom.”

While Blake always had a love of photography, when he left school he worked for years in a laundry until he moved to Yorkshire and his partner encouraged him to pursue his passion.

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“When I was 13 we went on a family holiday to Ramsgate,” he says. “It wasn’t that far away from home, but it felt like a different country. I took a picture with my mum’s camera of the sun going down over the harbour. I’ll never forget when we came home and got the film developed, that picture of the sunset looked just beautiful. From then on I knew I wanted to be a photographer.

“When I told that story to my mum a few years ago, she said, ‘You know you didn’t take that picture, it was your brother’. I don’t know which of us is right, but I do know that seeing it was where my love of photography started.”

In 2002, one year into a college diploma in Halifax, Blake managed to secure work experience with a photographer who had been commissioned to chronicle the cultural programme being run alongside the Commonwealth Games in Manchester.

“It was a fantastic experience and really confirmed that this was what I wanted to do for a living,” says Blake, who later enrolled on a photography degree at Bradford University. “I never set out to specialise in sport, it really just happened by accident and five years ago I began the Personal Best project photographing 16 young athletes who had been identified as having the potential to make it at the highest level. I’ve been back to see them every year and the change in them is incredible. They were 12 or 13 when I first met them, but now they are young men and women.

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“It says a lot about sport and how tough it is to really succeed, that only one of them – Leeds badminton player Gabby White – has made it to London 2012. That’s an incredible achievement, but all of the 16 have a story to tell. For me Personal Best and Different Strokes are much more about the people behind the sport.”

Different Strokes: Extraordinary Swimmers, Mercer Art Gallery, North Gallery, Harrogate to June 5. 01423 556188. Personal Best opens at Impressions Gallery, Bradford on June 24.

The freedom of swimming

Jane Grant, one of the swimmers photographed by Blake, says: “After losing my leg, swimming was the one place I felt graceful and completely free. Swimming has kept me pretty well physically and that’s a huge natural anti-depressant.When I am swimming, I get into a space that is close to meditation. It’s absolutely central to my being and I have not been as fit as I am now for decades.”

Details of the Imove project have been posted online at www.imoveand.com

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