Lolli Gamble

Lolli Gamble Cinematographer

Lolli Gamble/Cameraman

I’d like to introduce my cinematographer Lolli Gamble. His gift is, without a doubt, divinely inspired…but it does not come without a bittersweet story. Lolli, by all accounts, was a small infant so it wasn’t his size, rather his cloddish behavior and his stubborn unwillingness to leave a place that he truly loved that caused him to aide in his mothers untimely death. The doctors said they had never seen a newborn behave quite like the “Gamble” child…resisting their attempts to deliver him, even “paddling upstream” at one point…his mother could not endure it and she died on her eighth day of labor.

--Lolli’s Parents

So Lolli spent his early years with his father, Walter Gamble, a veteran of the Queen’s police on London’s Eastside. It was here that Lolli inherited his severely impeded Cockney speech as well as his love of spirits. On the fateful (and inebriated) night of Lolli’s birth, Walter had attempted to name him Walter (as in Jr.) but no one could understand his slurred request…they thought he was saying Lolli…so it went on his certificate of birth and he’s been Lolli ever since.

--Lolli, age 5, his father Walter, and his cousin Nardine.

Since it was impossible for anyone to understand Lolli’s early words, he learned to draw pictures or, in extreme cases, just stare at whatever it was that he wanted. All of this focused attention to detail opened a whole new world for Lolli. He was a savant of sort and chose photography as his means of expression. He was a mere six years old when he learned to capture people’s true, real nature when he assisted his father at the station shooting mugshots.

--Lolli’s first photograph….

I first noticed Lolli’s portrait work exhibited inside a shop window where he was working as a night janitor and photographer’s assistant. His natural instincts allowed him to capture to the true nature of a human face, and I knew that I had to train him in the art of cinematography before his talents were lost to the gutter lusts of the commercial world.

--Lolli’s early portrait work

It was just in the nick of time that I met Lolli and convinced him to explore the past with me. When I found him he was already exploring an exploitive side of his art form that was leading him down a dangerous, self-destructive path. In reality, he was (and probably still is) solely motivated by the possibility of rejoining his mother in the past. Lolli’s severe Oedipal tendencies require an outlet like the past to keep his future in check.

--Lolli’s destructive “experimental” work