Happy Snapper Spends Five Years Documenting Bingo Clubs

Fascinated by the whole concept of bingo and its popularity in the UK, German photographer, Michael Hess has spent five years travelling from bingo club to bingo club to take photos of the clubs and the people who play. His interest was inspired by a number of things; first, because bingo is not popular in Germany and second because the photos he takes, look as though they were taken in the 1960′s. One of his favourite images is of a man playing bingo, and most of the photos were taken in Liverpool and Newcastle and their surrounds.
Hess enjoys watching people play bingo as this inspires the photos he takes; when discussing his work he also explains that many of the old cinemas in which these clubs are housed offer even more inspiration. His preference is for the smaller independent bingo clubs as these clubs have a great deal more character and this is also where he has found more character in the people playing.
We have often discussed the fact that the older, smaller and more true to form image of the bingo club is falling by the wayside at a rapid rate. They find it more and more difficult going to keep up the business in a war of attrition driven by the big brand names. Of course there are added external factors such as unfair taxation, relatively new no-smoking laws and online bingo – but not as much as one might perceive; not in the light of the different demographic of customer. Pictorial records of these bingo halls and the people who play in them have been recorded for posterity by Hess. What is really interesting is the fact that the clubs and characters he prefers to record already appear to be trapped in a time-warp. There are some photographs taken in 2008 which look as though they were taken 40 years ago.