 On Saturday the 25th of March 2006 photographer Bob Carlos Clarke checked himself out of the Priory Hospital in London where he was being treated for clinical depression. Despite being an in-demand photographer who had created many successful ad campaigns throughout the 80s and 90s he was depressed at the thought of himself getting older. Most of all he was doubting his own talents, shunned by the National Portrait Gallery at least in his mind and the taste makers of photography, the critics, the creators and the writers who decide whose work should be faded and whose work should be dismissed. It was in this dark frame of mind that Bob Carlos Clarke was walking the streets of south-west London when he came to a train line at a level crossing. Bob Carlos Clarke is best known for his beautifully toned and tinted black and white photographs of rubber-clad women. He also created real-life images and portraits of celebrities and eventually established himself as a reputation as an extremely versatile photographer and an exceptional printmaker. I was first introduced to the work of Bob Carlos Clarke through the pages of amateur photographer where Bob used to write articles for them and give us insights into the world of a professional photographer. These recount a story and one of these has stuck with me throughout the years and the story about this is to my mind quite an iconic image of Bob Carlos Clarke and he was in the cemetery in Putneyville with this model who she was tired and she was cold and unhappy with just standing around in the fading light dressed only in this skin-tight rubber dress. Just that very morning her fiance had cancelled their wedding and the last thing that she really wanted to do was to be photographed. So eventually the shoot wasn't going too well and Bob Carlos Clarke asked her what she wanted to do and her response was that all she wanted to do was cry. So cry she did and we ended up with this beautifully haunting and melancholy photograph that once you've seen it just sticks in your mind. Initially he achieved much success with his large glossy coffee table book. It's in these books that you see fantastic examples of this hand-tinting process that Bob Carlos Clarke had arrived at by his experiences in a very small and cramped dark room that he set up initially where the table would collapse on itself occasionally. The rumble of the train going past would shake the enlarger and he would have to time it so that he could get sharp-ish prints that errant hoses would end up spraying chemistry everywhere within the dark room and it ended up with this approach what Bob Carlos Clarke calls brutalising his photographs and I love this idea that it becomes a very organic process that you don't really see very often today in the world of digital. Bob Carlos Clarke said that he made more money from selling his property than he ever did from his photography but he was always aware of the importance of remaining sensible about his commercial viability and he said that magazines required not art but just pictures of a sexy, salty girl. He said there's no point in being arty, there's no point in doing strange lighting or finding props because they just won't run the photographs and consequently he won't get paid. Bob Carlos Clarke was most proud of his documentary photography that he created in the book White Heat which was about Harvey's kitchen in the late 1980s featuring the up and coming then up and coming Marco Pierre White which focused not on the dishes that Pierre White was creating but on everything that surrounded him this this crazy frantic world that that Bob felt echoed his own life in the dark room quite quite neatly. This alchemy for creating from nothing and the photographs that Bob Carlos Clarke produced during this period with this book they set the tone for this hard-living tormented celebrity chef that we're so familiar with today and of course propelled the book White Heat into the best-sellers list. The body of work that Bob Carlos created throughout his career was original, it was diverse, challenging and often very beautiful. You can't walk past or see one of his photographs without having an emotion of some description and they are arresting if nothing else. They're not really the sort of photographs that one would hang on the wall even his simple photographs of the stones on the beach the twisted fork and the spoon these contain the same sort of feeling that Robert Maplethorpe's flowers had. Occasionally his photographs can fall flat and they can just be you know a one-trick pony but at their very best his sumptuous photos reflect this inner struggle and a turmoil that that Bob Carlos Clarke felt throughout his entire life and certainly about his career as a photographer. Bob Carlos Clarke's insight into the world of photography I think is extremely candid and we can take a lot from this insight that he gave us and one of those things that he was always a realist he was aware of the thickness of fashions in photography and that his own work was difficult it can be controversial and it was at the mercy of cultural and social changes. He realized that he wanted to become a photographer who could survive and to do so he needed to do a little bit of everything so you see his work cropping up advertising cars editorial fashion spirit jeans all sorts of things you felt the becoming known for just one thing was far too dangerous and that those photographers who are known for a specific thing invariably run the risk of falling out of fashion themselves he felt the secret of success was to be as self-pleasing as possible to do things just because you want to do them like Henry Cartier-Bresson, Jacques-Henry LaTrigue and Robert Frank the greatest photographers are the ones who don't photograph anyone but themselves like most photographers he wanted not only to be successful, wealthy in mind but also wanted to have the respect of his peer group and and other photographers just have this this validation. Bob Carlos Clarke understood that at the heart of his photography were the ghosts and memories of events past as he became older these ghosts took on more of a gripping hold in his mind he felt that his work somehow was no longer relevant he wasn't in as demand as he was in the 80s and 90s for commercial photography he was unhappy with the advent of digital that is rising up and he felt was kind of cheapening the art form of photography like a lot of photographers and artists who are exceptionally talented he held himself to a really high standard that was completely unattainable and of course failed to recognize the the recognition that he was getting from his peer group eventually all of this struggle had become too much to bear and on that Saturday almost 15 years ago Bob Carlos Clarke stood beside that level crossing in southwest London took a fatal step and was hit by a passing train in the days following his suicide almost as if to rub salt into these emotional wounds of being unrecognized in his lifetime by the National Portrait Gallery a portrait of Bob by his 14-year-old daughter Scarlett was put on display there just days after his death it wouldn't be until 2013 that his photography would be collected by the National Portrait Gallery