Page 9 - BiTS_03_MARCH_2020_Neat

BiTS:
That leads me to another question, if you’ve been doing it for 25 years, how on Earth do you keep track
of all the stuff?
JN:
Well, I’m probably not the most organised person. I went digital in 2005. Have loads of stuff on film
which I hardly ever use. I have not digitised my film stuff yet. I’ve lost some things through the years.
Recently, I’ve had some serious hard drive crashes, unprecedented ones. I’m not sure; I can’t even
imagine what I might have lost. But I just keep trying to back up stuff. I have two eight terabyte hard
drives attached to my desktop computer which I can pull up on my laptop and then I have about ten

external portable hard drives. I keep trying to back up, but sometimes you don’t win. Sometimes you
just get unlucky and I’ve lost stuff, but you just hope that you have enough when magazines come
calling [chuckling].
BiTS:
What decided you to go for this book and how did you decide on 50 rather than 100 or 25, or whatever
it may be?
JN:
Well, if it was my choice, I’d do 100. What happened is the publisher who lives in Twickenham, South
West London here, has an office near where I live. We had met a couple of different times 'cos she’s
done a documentary on Eel Pie Island. She does music documentaries and also, she seems to support

women authors and she called me into her office because she liked my photographs. She said we should
do something with your
photographs, they’re really good
and what should we do? And then
we started talking. I thought she
was going to say just do the
photographs of Chicago Blues,

but we started talking and we
said what about women in blues?
And we started Googling and
doing some research and we
found out that there was no book

out there about today’s women
in blues. She said what about
women in blues. And I’m like,
okay. Then I thought, ooh, do I
have all the photographs, but of
course I did. But then she decided
on 50 because she is doing this

series of different women in art.
Her next book is 50 women in
sculpture. She decided that
number 50. There are so many
people I didn’t want to leave out;

I go come on Cheryl, like who’s gonna count? I gotta get Rhiannon Giddens in there. Who’s gonna count
and say, oh my God, I hate this book. There’s 51 people. I wanted so many more women in there and
the book is 240 pages and it was supposed to only be 200. So she’s like, no more interviews. She cut
me off. And then for all the women that I left out of the book, I said can’t I just put their photo only in