This was a piece of work I did in my final year at uni. 

It began as a smaller set of portraits about the Young BNP. I’m not in any way a supporter of said Party, but I found it really interesting the types of kids that were heavily involved in this, and spent a lot of their time organising and working with the BNP. 

Most of the kids I spoke to were not what you’d expect when you hear BNP, they weren’t skinheads who spent their time getting drunk and smashing things up, but normal kids with very strong beliefs. 

This was what my documentary was getting at, I wanted to show that it wasn’t just these stereotypical people who were members of this party and who believed in those types of things. Normal, everyday kids were as well. 

Now obviously this was met at uni with certain cautious feeling. One way of looking at this work would be to say that it was pro BNP. I can’t stress enough that it wasn’t, isn’t and never will be! If anything I thought of it as a warning about how popular this party has become and how “normal” and everyday their members are now. This to me is a scary thought. 

After spending a few months travelling the country and meeting these kids, I became really interested in the ideas that people had when thinking about certain political parties. I had no idea what these people were going to be like when I went to meet them and never had any problems at all. They were all perfectly nice and hospitable, even in Burnley! And so the project developed into a study of this idea. I started meeting people from other political parties, talking to them and making portraits. The work became about this idea that people from certain parties looked a certain way or were from a certain background, and so I began to explore these stereotypes people have. 

Here is a small selection of the work I did, but to see the documentary in full please visit http://davidransom.org/ypa.html