Alfie Whiteman

0:00Right. Hello. Exclamation mark. [My name is Alfie and I'm a director and photographer. [sighs] Yeah, it's what I am. And firstly, it feels surreal to be here on this stage telling you that you know identity. It's it's a funny thing, isn't it? The dreaded question. So, what do you do?

0:28you know, why am I doing it? What do I want to do? What am I doing it for? These are some of the questions that I was asking myself for the past 10 years. You know, we live in a world of job titles and where we need to decide what we want to do at such a young age. And it's, you know, it's ridiculous. How can we know what we want to do before we even know who we are? You see, for me, it was was no problem. I knew exactly what I wanted to do. As Olivia let you guys know, I wanted to be a professional footballer when I was 8 years old.

1:01That's that's what I wanted. And I know it's pretty niche, but I did want to be a goalkeeper, which is slightly more niche. Somehow decided that diving around on the ground and getting a ball smashed at me was what I wanted to do. So naturally, when I signed for an academy when I was 10, the dream became became real. You know, I was obsessed. Everything else subsided.

1:26I'd watched the greatest saves of all time on YouTube over and over again. Reviews of goalkeeper gloves of boots. See, I got my my pres on there. You see, at school, I was the footballer. Yes, you can laugh. You can laugh, but it's who I was. Yeah. I don't know why I was trying to look like Cristiano Ronaldo. I didn't didn't even I didn't even like him that much. Um, but that's what I was known as. You know, I'd leave school early to go and train. I'd do tournaments around the world and stuff.

1:57And, um, when I got my four-year contract and scholarship two years early, I knew that's what I was going to do. So, everyone was talking about what universities are going to, what colleges, and I didn't even know the names of them, you know? I know. I knew what I wanted. I wanted to play for England. I wanted to be the best in the world to get a Nike deal or Adidas or Puma or whatever [snorts] to have a Gucci wash bag, drive a Mercedes because that's what being a footballer meant.

2:23And you know, that was the environment I was in. And we're all products of our environment, you know, especially when we're young and malleable. Now, that was it. I left school. I left [snorts] home at 16 to go and live the dream. I won't go into all the details of what it's like clawing your way through the youth football system. We're here to talk art and design people, but essentially when I was around 17 or 18, I started to get this feeling in my stomach, this burning feeling, and I didn't quite know what it was, but my world felt small. It felt like I was in a bubble. So, I started drawing again. I started taking pictures. And I say again because I was

3:02very lucky to have wonderful creative parents who encouraged art, took me and my sister to galleries and we complained to my dad about all the old movies we had to keep watching. But now I now I thank him. But this feeling was still there and I realized it was because I didn't have any friends. [snorts] Know why the violins weren't playing guys but I thought how does one make friends? You know there's no like Tinder for friends. I'm like 17 years old. What am I supposed to do? people make friends at college or university.

3:33So I literally started going into shops and chatting to people and um it worked. Like my best friend I think is here, you know, we literally met buying Japanese socks at the same time. Yeah. Yeah, we did. [laughter] [gasps] And I got a girlfriend too who I did me on Tinder and her best friend was a director. I was like, "Wow, director Schumas, she makes movies, right? That's what directors do." And one time we were on holiday and we're going to the beach and we're like, "Come on, we're going to the beach. Come on, let's let's go." And she's like, "I can't. I got to do this.

4:10I got to do this treatment." I What? You sick? You got a rash? Treatment for what? What are you talking about? She said, "No, no, no. It's for a music video." I said, "A music video? No way. That's pretty cool." And um through this example and others, my my world started to open up. Possibilities, learning doors started to open. I started meeting more people. And before I knew it, I had this kind of parallel life appear. And I had these two identities. And I didn't reveal one to the other. In this new creative world, I didn't like to say I played football.

4:44I didn't want to be judged as a football or pigeon holed or it to be the only reason I was in a room. And then in football, you know, when I was playing, it was very much a 24/7 football attitude. If you did anything else, you were distracted. You weren't committed. You didn't want it enough. So, I hid all those things out of fear of them being used as ammunition against me if I did have a bad game. And I think as well, just general insecurity of kind of being a bit of the odd one out. You know, to my teammates, I was I was a hippie. That was the extent of the definition.

5:16But I then felt caught between these two identities. You know, I didn't feel like a photographer or a filmmaker or or an artist. You know, I was like, ah, it's just a hobby, a kind of what if, you know, maybe if life had gone differently, but I'm on this path. But yeah, I didn't really feel like a footballer either because, you know, I no longer really identified with the wash bags and the cars and those kind of things. You know, my idea of a footballer was one that played week in week out in the Premier League, and I was stuck behind a World Cup winner and the captain of the club and country. So,

5:49yeah, it was a bit tricky, but I'd worked so hard and I'd given up so much I was, you know, desperate to try and make things work. And then my agent called, he said, "Hey, Alf, there's a there's a team in the Swedish top flight. They want to take you on loan." And I thought, "Oh, man. Stockholm. Stockholm is pretty cool. Yeah, I like the sound of that." And he said, "Ah, no, no, no. It's a small town. It's got a population of 5,000 people. It's like, ah, okay. Here's my chance to prove my identity. So, I flew out the next morning and here I was in Deaf. Now, I feel a bit bad that picture is not really doing it justice of the train station. Um, but when I arrived, all the journalists, they said the same thing.

6:30They said, "Wow, it's very different to London here. How are you going to cope?" And I think I got asked maybe five or six times and uh my response was, "Yeah, I just want to help the team, you know, get three points down the league." And um I love trees. The trees are lovely here. I think I really did say that. But deep down it was a complete unknown. I had I had no idea, you know, I'd been removed from this life in London, you know, when my friends, they were they were doing real things, you know, they were doing fashion for music videos and personal projects.

7:03Personal project. H Yeah. this place thinks of one of those. You know, I had my football schedule. What was I going to do with my other time? So, I started looking far and wide for an idea, something that I found exciting, far away from me. And I had this idea. I thought it was pretty cool. And I uh wrote a treatment up for a film, not a rash. And uh I just couldn't do it. I couldn't actualize it. And this frustration grew. The things I wanted just didn't feel tangible. And I thought, who who am I kidding? you know, I didn't go to film school. I didn't I didn't go to art college. Like, I've gone down this different path. You know, I didn't feel like my ideas I didn't feel qualified to have an idea that was

7:42worth anything. And I really started to question who I was. So, I did what any reasonable person would do. And I went to live in the woods. Yes, there's my cabin. The shower was outside. The toilet was a bucket in a shed. I'd been reading uh a lot of Henry David and I kind of thought of myself as like a budget Gen Z version. Uh, except I I didn't make anything. And the the supermarket was only 10 minutes away.

8:09Yeah. And the guys, it's nice. They thought this was fake, so I kind of had to add a couple more times. But I promise I did eat also solid food. I promise. Um, but it was here that I really started to sit with myself and got introspected for the first time and started asking myself again, what am I doing? Like why am I doing this? It's worth noting I also came out of a long relationship here and you know that first heartbreak it's uh it's a good one. Um and I would go to this jetty here on the left and I go watch the sunset. I was real like cliche man in the woods, you know, eating steak and boiled eggs off chopping boards. Um and listening to like lectures by Alan Watts. But I

8:54started going here every day. It kind of became part of my routine. And you know I even went when the sun wasn't out. And there's one particular day there's a torm brewing and I just sat on that jetty and it was shaking in the wind and I thought what am I doing here? Feeling sorry for myself, feeling a bit lonely, feeling like Milhouse, hence the the picture. And I thought, oh, this would be a sad photo.

9:18I thought, well, I've taken enough of this bloody sunset and these nice trees. So that was it. I started taking these self-portraits with not much thought. I didn't really know why. And they just kind of became this photo journal. You know, I just found a means to make something. And it was the first time that I started making something where I didn't have a particular goal in mind.

9:41The first time I wasn't thinking about what an audience would make of it, clearly. Um, and I returned from Sweden. And I was there for about a year and I came back and I showed some of my close friends these photos and they were like, "Oh man, you got you got to do a book. You got to you should exhibit these, you know, and I thought I don't know like what what's going to think of this.

10:06Yeah, I'm not quite sure." And I just wasn't ready to put them out. And I thought maybe they never need to be. But you know what they did do was prove that I could make a personal piece of work. So I'm back in London, back at the club. there's a new manager. I've played some games now. I'm like, "Right, time to keep the ball rolling." We go on preseason. We do our tour of Asia. And of course, I broke my leg, didn't I? I went and broke my leg. Um, and no, this isn't the classic ACL football injury and couldn't play again. I did play again, but what it did, it meant I missed the next two transfer windows and was a stark reminder of how fickle a

10:42life in sport is. So, I doubled down on everything else. you know, I started assisting more. I started being more intentional with my photography, reaching out. Now, I'd always loved music, you know, like we all do. But through mutual friends, I met a wonderful guy called Femi who founded this online radio platform called NTS. And we went for lunch and we were chatting and I was like, "Wow, music's like so good, you know, it's great. Love music.

11:11I It's like the best thing." And he said, "Man, you should have a show. You should have a show." And I was like, "Yes." And I thought, "Okay, here's here's a real thing I can do. There's something I can do." And I was adamant that I was going to go and do it from the studio. I wasn't going to do it on my little laptop in my bedroom. Um, I want to do things for real. And I watched a few YouTube videos of how to fade in and fade out. And my friends were like, "You'd be fine." I turned up with my little USB and I I wasn't even sure if I'd loaded the tracks on properly. I was like, "Wait, I can't just orcs on Spotify." And I got into the into the booth and I was like, "Oh man, it's like I'm in a fighter jet.

11:48What's going on?" And I went and spoke to the engineers and said, "Oh, guys, it's just it's a little different to my setup at home. Do you mind just and they were looking at each other like who the hell is this guy? Like where is footballer? What's he doing here?" [snorts] Um, but anyway, the show ended up going quite well and um suddenly people were like, "You're a DJ? No way." And I was like, "What a DJ? What is this? Is this this how it works? You can just like kind of do things and you know there's no rules. So something clicked.

12:20Now I didn't actually want to be a DJ, but I'd learned something. So I started going to acting lessons. I started putting color armors up and down more and doing courses. You know, I stopped thinking about my identity in terms of my job or what I was paid to do and just started being myself. Which brings me back to those self-portraits. There's them not flashing on the screen.

12:41I'll let you actually look at them a bit more. I met this wonderful guy called Eddie Frankle who's an art critic and he was up at the training ground and we got chatting and we were chatting and I was like, "Man, like you know art's super cool. I really love art." He's like, "Oh, what kind of what kind of art do you like?" I was like, "Ah, you know, like love photography. Photography is really cool." He's like, "Oh, yeah." I was like, "Yeah, you know, I like take some pictures here and there." Yeah.

13:04Yeah. He's like, "Oh, you have you done something?" I was like, "Yeah, yeah, I did a little project when I was in Sweden." He said, "I'd love to see them." I was like, "Oh, yeah, sure. Cool." So, I got to send art critic these pictures now, who's like notoriously harsh. Anyway, he sees the picture and he goes, "I want to exhibit these. We want to put these in the gallery." And he's one of three people who runs OF Gallery in North London. And he said, "We also want to put your diary entries in there as well." And I was like, "Okay, sure. You know what? Let's let's do it. I don't care anymore. I don't care what people

13:36think that much. Um, and this all coincided with me being part of the team that won this this trophy, which was great. It was, you know, it was cool and everything, but I still had this feeling inside him. I still didn't, this burning was still there, you know, was sitting on the bench just like wasn't quite for me. And that preseason, I went to another club. I was sitting in the change room and I was thinking, what am I doing?

14:05like why am I doing this? And it got to the point where I had to call his helpline at the PFA, the professional footballers association who are amazing. And through speaking about it and through the support of my wonderful girlfriend Charlotte, my little sister, um I couldn't justify it anymore. I realized I was waiting for it to end. I was waiting for retirement, you know, 35 and 40. I was like, I'm 26, you know, like life's fleeting. Why why should I just slog out and keep going? And the coach of the club, he was like, "No, it'd be a crime if you stop. You can't stop." You know, being a football is like this social contract. But I thought, "Nah, I don't want to do it anymore." Um, so that was it. I called

14:47my agent and I was like, "I think I'm I'm done. I think I'm done." And he said, "Okay, you're going to be fine." I was like, "Oh, I don't know. Am I?" And that night I made this fire in the garden and stared into the flames and thought this is the the flames of this chapter and from the ashes tomorrow be reborn. Um but no I was looking into those flames thinking like okay now what the hell am I going to do? You know I didn't have anything set up. There was no plan. My plan was just to kind of keep planning.

15:18But the excitement kind of equaled the fear. And a few days later, I was one of five photo assistants handing film from one to the other packing down seaands. And I thought, "This is this is great." You my friend who I was buying socks with, you know, was a producer. So I was like, "Anything you need." I was driving, getting coffees.

15:38And then there was this one job where my friend got commissioned to shoot the World Tow Wrestling Championships. Yes, it's a real thing, I promise. And I said, "Oh man, like let me come hold a light for you. let me help out. And he said, "We'll have to share a bed in the pub hotel and I got 200 quid for you." I was like, "That sounds like a dream." And the day before he said to me, he's like, "Ah, Alf, they've uh they've asked for a video." I said, "I'll do it. I I can do that. I I'll do a video. I That's I said to my girlfriend, I said, "Oh, oh, this has to do this. This has to lead to the next thing. Like, here's a chance." And I turned up with my camcorder that wasn't

16:16like charging past 50%. There was like four other camera guys there. We're like fighting for positions. It starts raining and I cut this thing together and the client were bit like, "Oh, it's a bit long. Is it not more just like fighting?" I've got no revisions left with the editor. Sorry. But I put it out. Here's here's a few little gifts of it. Um I won't force it upon anyone. And um and I got an email from this guy like David. I was like, "David reviews." I was like, "Who's this guy?" I was like, "Who's this guy David who reviews things? H he's got no Instagram. Like, you need a login for his website." I thought, "Sure, you can you can have my video." Anyway, a few days after that, on the Monday, one production company

16:58reaches out, two, three, four, and then next thing you know, I'm in the wonderful offices of some such with the amazing Sally Campbell and signed with them. and they've been incredibly supportive over the past 11 months, which is when I made that phone call to my agent last August. And uh here are a few little bits that have made that are out. And um it's just been a year filled of learning and working with amazing people.

17:26And yeah, I I I can't quite believe yeah, the year it's been. And that exhibition is is on till September if anyone wants to go. And uh there's a book as well. They we also did a book. Um but yeah, here's here's what I'm getting at. You know, I realized my identity, it didn't change when I called my agent.

17:51You know, been shifting and shaping for years before that. Our identity is not what we do. It's not our job. It's not our job title. Especially in this world where we make things because what we make isn't separate from our life. It's made of it. you know, it's what we notice. It's what we do every day. It's what we love, what we learn. It's our view on things, you know. So, it was never to pick the right label.

18:16It was just to be my actual self cuz that's where your view of the world comes from. And that view is the only thing you can really bring to anything you make, whatever form it ends up ends up taking. And I'm still asking myself these same questions right now. What am I doing? Um, I probably always will. you know, the beauty of life and of of our identity that is continuously changing and things can turn on a dime. But it yeah, still feels surreal to be here and call myself any of it. But thank you [applause] [cheering]