Photographer & filmmaker Oscar J Ryan Bold, brave, beautiful, often with sharp wit and outrageous cheek.
What stretches your creativity the most? What makes you grow as a photographer?
Anything where the budget is super tight! It makes everything harder to work around and therefore more creative ways are needed to deliver a good piece of work. It’s more hands-on, tiring, and fewer people are involved so you lose the skills of fantastic people you usually can work with. I always think it’s best to be the least talented person in the room. That’s hard when it’s just you in the room!
The charity work I did with City Harvest is a good example of working with little to no budget (above & below). The energy of the people involved is inspiring – it creates sparks that make things happen out of nowhere. That sort of work is special, it is soul work.
City Harvest People Report campaign. They are the best of the best, doing important and vital work.
Oscar’s series of confronting life-size prints shot in a school playground convey the size of the issue and the scale of City Harvest’s solution. 1 in 4 children doesn’t eat because the cost of living and food has risen so much that people cannot afford to feed their families and pay bills, with malnutrition and rickets becoming an increasing problem in children.
From October 2024, the portrait of will be roaming the UK on the side of a 26t truck rescuing food from farms and distributors to feed people in need.
Louis Dunford – The Angel (North London Forever). Shoestring budget shot all on a 90s tape camcorder. I showed Louis how to use it and gave him instructions on what to film around where he lived (The Angel, Islington), film family, friends, loved ones etc. I would then cut it all together to show the essence of community in this working-class upbringing of Louis and his sensational storytelling ability. I then digitised 30 hours of forgotten tapes found in a draw at his family home. They were full of sensational moments over the years such as 10th birthday parties, Christmas, anniversaries, the lot. I started to notice the same faces cropping up over a 30 year time span so took moments from those forgotten tapes and split screened them with the present day footage. We saw growth but the same personalities, changes but the same smiles. It blended together perfectly. It became a very poignant edit that I did sat next to Louis and was extremely personal. He saw family memories of loved ones he had lost. I wanted to make a film that everyone could connect with. Once it was released it quickly spread like wildfire with all the conversations and comments being “this isn’t my family but I feel like it is”. Perfect. In the end this grew so big that the Arsenal football community adopted it as their own due to the stories of north london life and family. It quickly became their official anthem and the whole stadium sings it at every single game.