Carnival 60: Ian Watts at Outernet
Fifty years of Notting Hill Carnival, captured by one photographer, projected across some of the largest screens in the world. The installation opens on 27 August and runs to 2 September.
©Ian Watts (@ianwattstv /www.ianwatts.org)
In the summer of 1976, a teenager living in a youth hostel in Harlesden bought a second hand camera and started photographing whatever caught his eye in the streets around him. Friends told him he should go and see what was happening in Notting Hill that August. He went, and he took the camera with him.
©Ian Watts (@ianwattstv /www.ianwatts.org)
“The Outernet exhibition is the culmination of a long photographic journey. It is particularly meaningful to see photographs made with humble analogue cameras and film in the 1970s and 1980s displayed alongside my more recent digital images. These photographs span generations of technology, but the people, energy, creativity and spirit of Carnival connect them all. For me, this is more than an exhibition of photographs. It is a record of a community, a culture and a changing London. It is a personal journey that began with a second hand camera and has continued through many years of photography and filmmaking.”
Ian Watts has photographed every Notting Hill Carnival since, bar one. Fifty years of Sunday and Monday afternoons. Fifty years of feathers, speaker stacks, steel, sweat and sound. That archive is now the source material for Carnival 60: Ian Watts at Outernet, a free immersive installation that opens on Thursday 27 August and runs through the bank holiday weekend to Wednesday 2 September, marking the sixtieth year of Carnival.
©Ian Watts (@ianwattstv /www.ianwatts.org)
The piece is built as a journey through time. It opens in full colour with imagery from recent Carnivals, the version most people carry in their heads right now. Then it drops back. Black and white photographs from Watts' first visits in the 1970s fill the Outernet screens, grainy and close and shot on film by someone who had only just worked out what the camera could do. From there the installation moves through a new collection spanning the 80s and 90s, then into a collage of images from 2000 to 2019, where you watch the thing scale up in real time. Bigger costumes. Bigger rigs. Bigger crowds. The final sequence returns the audience to the Carnival of today.
©Ian Watts (@ianwattstv /www.ianwatts.org)
“Ian’s Carnival story is itself amazing. The pictures that he has taken from being a young boy to today across six decades are a vibrant record of what Carnival is about and how important it is to the fabric of London. We are proud to be able to use his pictures to create this piece at Outernet and celebrate the 60th birthday of Notting Hill Carnival.”
Outernet is the most visited cultural attraction in the UK and welcomes more than 120 million people a year across screens that wrap the viewer completely. It is an unusual home for photographs that were made on humble equipment in a very different London, and that tension is the point.
©Ian Watts (@ianwattstv /www.ianwatts.org)
