Stuart Roy Clarke


Stuart Roy Clarke is an English documentary photographer, author, exhibition-artist, speaker. His major works include The Homes of Football and Cumbria Surrounded and Glastonbury All Mine''.''

Life

Clarke was born in Berkhamsted, Hertfordshire, on 19 August 1961, the youngest of three children of Mary and Roy Percy Clarke, a quantity surveyor. Clarke's childhood was at 61 Egerton Road, Berkhamsted - the family home for all of 61 years. Clarke's paternal grandfather was head of the town Council 1935-1939 when many of the town's facilities were opened.

Career

After several years of working for local newspapers in Hertfordshire and as a freelance photographer for the magazine Time Out in London, Clarke went to live in The Lake District, where he began The Homes of Football in 1990.
Other bases include Hathersage in Derbyshire and Louth in Lincolnshire. The home for the work has been above all at Armathwaite - in Cumbria.
The football opus, documenting the changing face of the game, was self-funded initially but then evolved into a touring exhibition hired by various municipalities and shown in 80 museums and art galleries over a 15-year period. In 1997 Clarke also opened a permanent gallery to his football work in Ambleside, in the English Lake District. The gallery closed in 2012.
In 2005, he started Cumbria Surrounded, which went on to win the Lakeland Illustrated Book Of The Year in 2010.

Exhibitions

The Homes of Football

The Homes of Football is composed of photographs taken entirely on medium format film, without cropping, using a Bronica camera and a standard lens. Latterly Clarke has utilised iPhones to modernise his work.
Clarke began The Homes of Football in the wake of the Hillsborough Disaster and the resulting Taylor Report. The earliest photograph in the collection is of four boys at Kilbowie Park, home of Clydebank, in 1989—a club and ground that has since disappeared. During the 1990s, Clarke made thousands of trips to football matches, photographing the crowd and the grounds themselves. The focus was on the ordinary football supporter, rather than the more 'glamorous' side of the game. Clarke was also the only official photographer for The Football Trust from 1991 and its successor The Football Foundation until 2005. The collection has been supported by the Professional Footballers' Association.

Exhibitions (UK unless specified)

  • 1991: The Homes of Football, Burnley Towneley Hall Art Gallery, Barrow Forum 28 Gallery, Leeds City Museum
  • 1992: The Homes of Football, Stoke Museum & Art Gallery, Derby Metro Gallery, Birkenhead Williamson Museum & Art Gallery, Coventry Herbert Museum & Art Gallery, Bath F-Stop Gallery, Wigan History Shop Museum, Hove Museum & Art Gallery, Bournemouth Russell Cotes Museum & Art Gallery, Scunthorpe Museum & Art Gallery
  • 1993: The Homes of Football, Maidstone Library Gallery, Bilston Museum & Art Gallery, Aylesbury County Museum, Durham DLI Art Gallery, Fulham Library Gallery, Mansfield Museum & Art Gallery, Peterborough Museum & Art Gallery, Huddersfield Art Gallery, Westminster House of Commons, Hitchin Museum & Art Gallery, Middlesbrough Art Gallery, Southend Focal Point Gallery, Blackburn Museum & Art Gallery, Guernsey Museum & Art Gallery, Salford Museum & Art Gallery, Milton Keynes Exhibition Gallery
  • 1994: The Homes of Football, High Wycombe Guildhall, Grimsby Heritage Centre, Swansea Industrial Museum, Belfast Ulster Museum, Carlisle Tullie House Museum & Art Gallery
  • 1995: The Homes of Football, Bradford Industrial Museum, Warrington Museum & Art Gallery
  • 1996: The Homes of Football, Reading Museum & Art Gallery, Edinburgh City Arts Centre, Liverpool Museum of Liverpool Life, Coatbridge Summerlee Heritage Park
  • 1997: The Homes of Football, Arbroath Art Gallery, Forfar Methen Art Gallery, Paisley Museum & Art Gallery, Prescot Museum, Barnsley Cooper Gallery, Stockport Art Gallery
  • 1998: The Homes of Football, Bristol Museum & Art Gallery, Kilmarnock Dick Institute, Yorkshire York Museum, Wrexham Arts Centre, Falkirk Callendar House, Birmingham Mac
  • 1999: The Homes of Football, Holyhead Arts Centre, Dunfermline Pittencrief Museum, Kirkcaldy Museum & Art Gallery, Exeter Museum & Art Gallery, Cheltenham Museum, Dumfries Museum & Art Gallery, Stranraer Museum, Kirkcudbright Museum, Lincoln Usher Gallery, Luton Artezium, London RIBA
  • 2000: The Homes of Football, Gillingham Library, Strood Library, Solihull Arts Complex, Oldham Museum & Art Gallery, Darlington Art Gallery, Hull Ferens Art Gallery, Watford Museum, Wakefield Art Gallery
  • 2001: The Homes of Football, Leamington Spa Museum, Sheffield Galleries, Warrington Museum
  • 2002: The Homes of Football, Leicester Museum, South Shields Museum, Coventry Herbert Art Gallery, Leeds Corn Exchange, Bolton Museum & Art Gallery
  • 2003: The Homes of Football, Cardiff St.David's Hall, Sunderland Art Gallery, Salford Lowry Outlet, Reading Museum & Art Gallery, Shrewsbury Museum
  • 2004: The Homes of Football / Football in our Time, Gateshead Library, Lisbon University Portugal, Bristol Museum & Art Gallery, Norwich Forum
  • 2012: The Homes of Football, National Football Museum, Manchester
  • 2013: The Homes of Football / True Colours, National Football Museum, Manchester
  • 2014: The Homes of Football / Northern League 125, National Football Museum, Manchester
  • 2018 - 2019 The Game, National Football Museum, Manchester
  • 2021 Football During Lockdown, with Amazon Prime, Manchester Cathedral Gardens
  • 2024 The Homes of Football Projected Large, The Printworks, Manchester

    Semi-permanent exhibitions

  • 1997–2011: The Homes of Football at Ambleside: three-storey Museum
  • 2001–2007: Homes of Football: At The Football Association HQ London
  • 2014–2019: The Homes of Football: In the Courtyard of FA Centre of Excellence, St George's Park National Football Centre

    Critical response

called the work "A unique and wonderful collection of football scenes. Stuart Roy Clarke puts a new perspective on the game."
Bryan Robson, the then manager of Middlesbrough, wrote in 1996 that “Stuart Clarke has brought to life the international game of football with a series of outstanding, innovative and often witty photographs.” Mike Foster, General Secretary of The FA Premier League added in 1998 “The exhibition really is paradise for any lover of football. The feelings I had were not dissimilar to walking into an empty stadium; soaking up the atmosphere and letting your imagination wander – you really do lose yourself in the surroundings”... and in 2010 on the release of an anthology of Clarke's Homes of Football work adds "I never tire of looking at the photographs. They are captivating and evocative of a football lovers’ halcyon
Kevin Roberts, CEO of Saatchi&Saatchi, described the Ambleside gallery as "an amazing experience" in a 2009 article about Clarke's work.
Philip Köster, managing director of '11 FREUNDE - Magazin für Fußballkultur' wrote that "Clarke depicts football at its core, which eventually makes its indestructible: passion. Whatever he takes photos of he always searches automatically for the emotional centre of the picture. Clarke is a documentalist of change, an incorruptible contemporary witness with a camera.”

Books

  • The Homes of Football
  • Passion of A Nation, Little Brown & Co
  • More Than A Game, Random House
  • Football In Our Time, Mainstream
  • England The Light, Giant Step
  • Scenes From A British Summer Country Pop Music Festival, SRC
  • Cumbria Surrounded , SRC
  • The Cradle of The Game, SRC
  • The Homes of Football / Where the Heart Is, Bluecoat
  • Britische Fussballkultur in Den 90er Jahren, Panorama
  • The Game, Bluecoat
  • The Game Revisited, Bluecoat
  • The Game, Relegation Press
  • Football During Lockdown , Amazon Prime Sports
  • Glastonbury All Mine , Relegation Press

    Television

  • A Common Passion, ITV written and presented by Stuart Clarke
  • Splendid Isolation, ITV written and presented by Stuart Clarke
  • The Homes of Football / Stuart Roy Clarke, Northern Stars / National Football Museum / British Sea Power
  • The Homes of Football / Inside Out, BBC1
  • The Homes of Football / True Colours, FIFA Football Mundial
  • Stuart Roy Clarke / Sport in Focus, BT Sport
  • Christmas University Challenge / ITV Studios, BBC2
  • German World Cup Summer Recalled, 11mm Football Film Festival Berlin

    Mentions in published works

https://www.pitchpublishing.co.uk/shop/football-wind-and-rain Football In Wind And Rain (The Making Of The British Game), John Williams

The young Stuart Roy Clarke soon decided that much more interesting than events on the pitch at Vicarage Road was the strange stadium architecture and the antics and characters present in football crowds. He began to take his camera to games to make his own extraordinary photographic record of the menagerie of Britain's varied clans of football supporters, and of the mainly eyesore stadiums to which they seemed so deeply and mysteriously attached. He was already on what was to become his Homes of Football journey, recording and reporting on British football stadium life from the ground level up. Relying always on single-shot colour film and employing no fancy 'improving' technology, he captured what was, by then, a rapidly changing fan and stadium terrain. Clarke was able to produce a vital visual record of the before-and-after impact of Hillsborough and the Premier League era on stadium architecture and culture.
His commission, via The Football Trust was to chart the impact of this public investment, including the transformation of the national stock of elite British football grounds. Few major clubs at that time kept detailed historical records or housed even amateur historians; none had convincing museums. Times have changed since. Certainly, very few British football clubs were likely, faithfully, to record their own immediate past at this critical juncture or to chart, through photography or other means, the bumpy road into this challenging new future.
Clarke was now carefully recording the key features of historic British football stadiums before their modernisation or potential destruction; he was on hand to report on the demolition of some great, historic, British sporting buildings. He had also developed a keen eye for capturing historic local sporting spaces in decline: sagging stadium storage sheds or merchandise shops; shabby, but distinctive, ticket offices; grisly food outlets; strange toilet facilities; stretches of weed-infested terracing. He was skilled at seeing the abstract beauty of vivid newly painted stadium walls and stairwells. These were buildings, passageways and spaces that most fans might only see in passing, or might regard as barely functional eyesores, some of them awaiting likely demolition. Clarke's photographs somehow revealed their wider cultural value and historic significance as if they should be preserved at all costs, perhaps even listed as national monuments. He was becoming the visual record keeper of the sport, its homes and its people. And all at a critical moment of convulsive change.
Clarke went on to develop a remarkable visual map, a portfolio of photographs of fans and places, with supporters, volunteers and workers often captured at lesser outposts.
Certainly, his images of British football culture and venues in a period of rapid change in the early 1990s are routinely poignant, frequently humorous and typically respectful of both places and his human subjects. As well as stadiums and fans, there are also careful studies here of mainly lower-level, otherwise 'hidden' club employees and service workers: bouffant tea ladies, spectacular young burger flippers, laid-back match stewards, insistent club programme sellers. His interest as a chronicler of a sport in deep transformative change was never in the occupational lifestyles of the elite players, or even in the spectacular youth fan subcultures of the stadium. This highly visible inversion of the traditional football hierarchies - the role of workers and ordinary tans highlighted and represented over those of owners, directors and players - is central to the ethos of Stuart Roy Clarke's wider football project.