Smoking Scally was a series of short films produced for Queerupnorth the Manchester based arts festival. Its subject matter 'The Scally' was very much of the city. A distinctly regional and nuanced look, the Scally evolved from the casual fashions of the football terraces.
Styling / Photography / Imagery / Text ©Andrew Durham 2004-2005.
Featuring a young ruffian clad head to foot in Nike defiantly blowing smoke over the audience from a variety of domestic settings, the films explored the attitude and uniform of the Scally through a series of fetishised portraits and colourful vignettes. They were screened by BBC Manchester on their video wall in the city centre. The outdoor screenings added a new dimension, inverting the familiar relationship with the TV by taking the private domestic realm and making it public. They were mistaken for live broadcasts in some instances partly because the BBC frequently screened live events. They acquired a playful edge. On the surface they could have been adverts for Nike, but their purpose was ambiguous and disorientating without an obvious commercial agenda.
2019 Reappraisal:
Fashion and brands, place and non-place, sexuality and identity, the fantastical and the mundane, the erotic emerging from repetitive everyday rituals. It's surprising that these themes aren’t being explored more often today. To put it in context, Smoking Scally was made in 2004, four years after the first UK Big Brother and 1 year before YouTube was founded.
