The Stencil: Kissing Coppers

This stencil was spray painted by Banksy on the side of a pub in Brighton in 2005, and at least two other paintings appeared in Ladbroke Grove and Soho around the same time. The original pub graffiti has since been sold to a New York gallery for an estimated £500,000 - £1,000,000.

The Location:

The location for this image was an alley way in the Hamilton CBD that I have actually shot in before- it has some interesting elements within it, and I think it worked really well for this image.

Wardrobe/Props etc:

• I was working to a reasonably small budget with this project, so all the expenses had to be kept to an absolute minimum, and for that reason I was unable to get real ex-issue Bobby helmets, instead I had to settle for a couple of very nice replicas which worked pretty well.
• Ex-issue British Police shirts, tie, belt, epaulettes and insignia (only 1 pair). I spent a bit of time researching the insignia system for the British police, and I initially thought I would try and find the right letters and numbers for a real section in Brighton (where one of the stencils was painted), but in the end I decided to go with ‘BK’ for Banksy, and ’79’ because when I looked on Banksy’s Wikipedia page, the birth year estimate was in the 1970’s (this has since been removed). As it turns out the Sotheby’s website has him down as being born in 1975, so I was a few years off..
• Genuine Police handcuffs and baton

The Shoot:

This shoot was quite difficult to prepare for, mainly because it was so hard to find the models for it. I honestly didn’t think it was going to be such a big deal and that I was going to exhaust so many different avenues with absolutely no success. I was beginning to think there was no such thing as ‘gay pride’ in Hamilton… Then finally, one evening I went around to a couple of different gay bars in Hamilton and left some flyers with them. The next day I had my models, and they were awesome. They recently celebrated their civil union and were of a handful of people that I came across throughout my project who had actually heard of Banksy.

This image was shot on a rainy afternoon (in the high res file you can actually see the rain drops falling) and I decided to only use natural light for a couple of reasons. 1) I try and avoid getting my gear wet whenever possible, and 2) I wanted the final image to look reasonably natural, as if the viewer had just been walking down the street, turned their head and saw a couple kissing in a quiet alley way.

It is also the first of a handful of new images that I will be releasing that have not been seen before (they were not included in the original exhibition in September).