Artist Interview – Corinne Cumming

So my name is Corinne and I’m a photographer in London. I shoot a lot of live music and events but I also work very heavily in the LGBTQIA+ Community. This includes club nights, Cabarets, drag shows, and portraits of these artists in my studio. At the moment I am working on a really awesome project called Pride Inside UK, where we’re putting queer people on billboards, shot by queer people. My role at Pride Inside is director of photography.

When I was 14, I applied to do the photography GCSE at my school and my family bought me a little point-and-shoot camera for my birthday. But when I got to school after that summer I found out that I wasn’t on the course because my art teacher didn’t think I was good enough at art to be good at photography. Then when I was around 16 I started going to shows in Camden and asking if I could take pictures in exchange for free entry to shows. When I was 18 and I started university at Kingston, I saw Banquet Records at freshers fair and I asked him if I could shoot for them and the rest is kind of history!

So when I used to shoot for Banquet Records, they gave me my first paid job. I would shoot the club nights on Fridays and they would let me take photos when bands came through whenever I wanted to. Whilst I was at uni I just tried really hard to meet as many people as possible and that’s how I ended up shooting for Punktastic, Bring the Noise and AltSounds. From there I guess it was just about getting my name out there and working really hard on being a better photographer. When I graduated uni at 20, I went straight into being full-time as a photographer through shooting various club nights and working with small bands and publications.

Photography definitely is something that helps me when I’m having a bad day. It’s probably because of the social aspect that being a photographer brings. A lot of the time you’re at home on your own if you’re freelance or self-employed, but when you’re actually out taking photos, you’re with so many different people. A lot of them are your friends and that helps me to get out of any bad mood I’m in.

One things that really helps me when I’m having a bad day is cuddling my sausage dog Cecil. He is just an absolute joy and has been such a godsend. The last year or so has been really hard for myself and my family and I don’t know how we would’ve coped without him.

Pride Inside is a project that came about because we’re all in lockdown and usually we would be taking to the streets in bright colourful clothes, showing the world who we are. Three weeks ago Ginger Johnson was reading an article about how billboard companies were unable to sell that advertising space. She then went and asked them if they would be willing to sell us billboard space cheaply, but they went one better and gave us 1200 billboards across the county for free. So my role was to find photographers up and down the country who are LGBTQIA+ and ask them to take photos of people near them – while socially distanced – who are also LGBTQIA+. We then turned those beautiful images into billboards which you can see all across the UK from the 15th of June to the 30th of June whilst also raising money for the LGBT Consortium.

Pride is so important because look at the world right now. There are still so many injustices towards LGBTQIA+ people. Trump is trying to block queer people from adopting children. He is taking away the rights of trans people to medical care. And here in the UK, Liz Truss is taking away the rights of trans people to access the spaces that are safe for them. Just this week, Sarah Hegazi, a Queer woman in Egypt took her own life because in 2017 she was imprisoned for waving a rainbow flag at a concert in Cairo. She was sexually assaulted and tortured. She escaped Egypt for Canada but it proved too much. Things like this should never happen in 2020. The fact there are still people being imprisoned and tortured and violated for their sexuality and who they are, is an awful injustice.

Everybody in this campaign is amazing! We have Louise in Bristol who escaped the Rwandan genocide and now lives here as an equality specialist. We also have Anick who is an incredible campaigner on intersex issues and rights. The list truly does go on!

You can find out more about Pride Inside UK by following us on socials @PrideInsideUK, checking out our website prideinside.co.uk and donating to the LGBT consortium via the donate page on our website.

Check out more of Corinne’s work: