liquid luxe…

Although he was something of an evil despot, suppressing his people relentlessly, I also found him rather comical.

Here’s some pictures of Kim Jong Il looking at things to remind you of what a clown he was:

http://kimjongillookingatthings.tumblr.com/

The legend has it that he died while travelling by train. Oh ‘Dear Leader’, you will not be missed.

A good friend of mine from Ohio, who’s a massive photography aficionado asked me about where to see Photography in London. This is my response to his request:

Photography in London

Tate Modern frequently has good shows on including comprehensive retrospectives of established artists. A Diane arbus show just finished there and there are 2 shows on there I want to check out at the moment:

http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/exhibitions/

The Photographer’s Gallery is about to re open in early 2012 and frequently has great shows on although the space isn’t huge. Just before they closed they had a Sally Mann retrospective which I really enjoyed.

The Victoria and Albert Museum has a massive archive of photography and they feature photography frequently. They have a show on at the moment which looks interesting (but isn’t strictly photography) about postmodernism:

http://www.vam.ac.uk/content/exhibitions/postmodernism/postmodernism-about-the-exhibition/

The National Portrait Gallery always has some great photography showing in the permanent collection. The Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize 2011 is on at the moment which always has a really high standard. I haven’t seen this year’s yet. Critics haven’t been kind about this year’s show, saying things like it’s the same show every year and the work all looks the same but last year’s show was great. I do agree that they tend to show a particular type of portrait, quite composed, direct to camera, mostly daylight, possibly slightly desaturated. I think they need to look for ‘le petit quelque chose qui fout tout par terre’, which means ‘the little thing that fucks everything up,’ according to Christian Laboutin.

I always check the Telegraph’s Photography Section which seems to have the best listings and the best online photography section of any of the Papers . And Time Out is worth checking out to see what the major shows are that are on at the moment.

My girlfriend is an artist so she drags me around to a lot of art shows too which is great cause I get to see a lot of stuff I wouldn’t otherwise check out. Recently I really enjoyed the Wilhelm Sasnal at the Whitechapel Gallery. It’s a painting show which I wouldn’t have gone to see otherwise but the real gem on at the Whitechapel was the Government Art Collection curated by Cornelia Parker. Go for Grayson Perry’s etching alone although there’s plenty of other unusual, quirky and fun pieces on show too. And the curation is a joy in itself.

The Hayward Gallery generally has some great Art on show. Although I have to say I was bored by Pipilotti Rist’s tedious navel-gazing ‘Eyeball Massage’. The show would have been great in a nightclub as background wallpaper but in a gallery context felt dated, frivolous and tedious. Also showing in the Hayward is George Condo. I don’t think Mr. Condo is someone I’d like to meet. I found his art derivative and puerile. But don’t let that put you off the Hayward, The British Art Show 7 (in the Days of the Comet) earlier in the year was truly inspiring, surprising, fresh and thoughtful.

Oh and don’t forget the Barbican. Previously they’ve had big shows of Nobuyoshi Araki and David LaChapelle although their emphasis on Photography seems to have waned in recent years.

And as you’d expect in a city of this size, there are loads of smaller galleries such as Printspace, Flowers East, RifleMaker et al. And a stroll down Cork Street or Vyner Street is always rewarding….

(Andreas Gursky’s Rhein II which recently sold for $4,338,500 at Christies, New York in November 2011, currently the highest price paid for a photograph. Dodgy photoshopping though, ay?)

Shot this a long time ago. It wasn’t published in the end. Such a pity… but you gotta move on. Hope you like it.

Styling:Holly Chaves
Makeup:Gigi Hammond

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Fashion Editorial for Face On Magazine

Model: Jessie @ Premier Model Management
Styling: Holly Dowsett
Hair and Makeup Paula Valencia

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Clara is a recent graduate who wanted a look book of her final collection. Model is the lovely Carola

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William Wilde designs primarily in latex. We shot this look book to showcase his new collection ‘Vixen, Kill, Kill”

Hair and Makeup by the talented Steph Lai

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Just in case any of you think I’ve unfriended you anwyhere, I thought I’d let you know that I’ve removed my profiles from Facebook, Twitter and Google Plus as I felt I was wasting time on them and I find some of their practices abhorrent. In particular facebook’s attempts to become the second internet which involves knowing even more about you including your music tastes and where you happen to be in geographical space at any moment in time. Not to mention facial character recognition. Just a bit too creepy for me, thanks, especially when it’s all in the name of selling advertising.

I also dislike the way twitter forces people to think in soundbites. While I admire attempts to be concise and clear in thinking, I have the feeling that complex thoughts are not well expressed in 140(?) characters and encouraging people to think like this is a definite dumbing down of our culture.

This desire to disconnect from these services occurred after a recent trip to China where most social networking services – facebook, twitter, even youtube are blocked by the Chinese government. While I don’t condone censorship in any form, I came to realise how little I need these services and how much time I waste on them. Shortly after my return, I stared reading ‘Jaron Lanier – You are not a Gadget A Manifesto’ which seemed to reinforce my decision:

“Online culture is filled to the brim with rhetoric about what the true path to a better world ought to be, and these days it‟s strongly biased toward an antihuman way of thinking.”

I may start a facebook page in the future for my Photography but I no longer want to have a public profile.

Stylist Kelvin Barron
Hair Vicki Lord
Makeup Paula Valencia

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TFNC asked me to create some new images to update their site. Fun shoot. Thanks to Olivia at TFNC for organising everything.

MUA and Hair: Gigi Hammond

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Shot La Roux for a Nissan Campaign just before christmas. Really nice to chat with actually, very down to earth.

Thanks to everyone at Digitas agency for putting the shoot together.

You can see more of the collection at http://belle-et-bonbon.com/

Models Lina and Heather @ Nevs

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read it and weep. did I really say I like having sex to relax? they must have caught me at a kooky moment:

http://urbanitychic.com/2011/06/the-spotlight/photographers/spotlight-interview-hugh-omalley-photography/

Came across these in my archives. Simple look book for Jeannie McQueeny.

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Makeup Louise McCarthy
Model Catia Gomes

I think these work best you when you see them as a series.

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Oh dear, where to start…

I went with little expectations to this show in terms of content, but was expecting it to be of a similar calibre to last years work which was exceptional. Because the photographer’s gallery at Ramilies Street is currently being renovated, the show is temporarily at Ambika P3 gallery just beside Baker Street. The space is a bit unusual – I think it used to be a concrete testing facility – but don’t quote me on that. Upshot is, it’s quite industrial in feel which might gel well with Thomas Demand’s work but not so well with the others in the show.

As you enter the show, a large scale image by Thomas Demand hits you front and centre and is installed as if on a large stage which complements the work nicely but strikes me as a bit odd as it’s the only one that has this degree of curation. It would have been nice to see a little more of his work in the show. If I remember rightly this was the only piece.

Roe Etheridge’s work trumpets it’s eclectic nature and the fact that there’s a mix of commercial work and personal work but leaves you with a patchy feeling as if it’s neither here nor there, a bit random but not in a good way, yet I have to say that personally I liked his work the best as it genre hops and leaves you a little perplexed but in a fun way.

Elad Lassry, the work is a bit too dry for me. It screams CONCEPTUAL all over the place in a sort of wanky art school way with nothing to grasp hold of.

Jim Goldberg, individually the pictures are impressive but the way they are curated is a mess and leaves you not wanting to engage with it at all. One whole wall is nearly empty while Roe Etheridge and Elad Lassry’s work is cramped together into one confusing cube.

Overall I was very disappointed with the show and felt that if these are the photographers who’ve contributed the most to contemporary photography in the last year then it’s in a pretty poor state. But I know that not to be the case. It’s a selection panel’s bad taste and poorly curated to boot.

I know this work is supposed to make us question what photography is as a medium but intellectual games are boring to play when the images don’t seduce. They don’t need to be pretty but show them to us in a way that makes us want to look.

Maybe next year…

Images from a recent client shoot. New Jewellery Designer Miranda McCarthy. Pieces for sale via Paul Smith. Main website for London Bird

Hair and Makeup: Steph Lai
Model: Nadia @ FM

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simple test with Agnes @ Premier

Makeup: Gigi Hammond
Thanks to Sissy Best at Premier.

I shot this test before the New Year but only got around to retouching it in early January.

Makeup by Nina Turner
Models: Nina and Vittoria at Leni’s

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I shot this campaign for Kit Heath Jewellery a couple of months ago. We shot in Hartland Abbey – a lovely country house in Devon. It was weird shooting there. There was no phone coverage – absolutely no signal – for a good 10 minutes before we arrived and total blackout all day. No texts, no calls. It was like being in a horror movie. Peacocks roaming around the grounds all day.

Thanks to Hepsie and Yasmin at Kit Heath for organising a great shoot.

Hair: Gigi Hammond
Makeup: Alex Gillott
Model: Thea @ Models 1
Styling: Shelley Fanell
Assistant: David Wise

Trade Coverage:
Professional Jeweller
Retail Jeweller

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I shot this just before christmas…

Styling: Sarah Nash (Carol Hayes Management)
Makeup: Megumi Matsuno (Carol Hayes Management)
Hair: Akio Nishiyama (GC Agency)
Model: Inga at Nevs

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I was commissioned to shoot this editorial for Labb Magazine but then they went and folded didn’t they? What can you do? Enjoy!

Styling Kumiko Yashiro
Makeup Steph Lai
Hair: Ryutaro

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I photographed Carmit Bechar of the Pussy Cat Dolls and Hofit Golan (socialite and FTV presenter) at Amika Night Club and hotel Verta for Face On Magazine. A crew from FTV covered the shoot, coverage of which you can see below.

More images from the shoot after the video.

Makeup: Maddie Pearce
I was assisted by Freddy Lee. Trying to get further credits. Will post as they become available.

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Look book for lingerie client MC Lounge. All items available for sale in Harrods.

Model: Ruby
Makeup: Alex Gillott

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I had a few clients recently who wanted lingerie on location. I didn’t have any in my book. I’ve shot a lot of studio lingerie but none on location. I know, I was surprised myself. Anyway, I hired a few hotel rooms in Brighton for the day and we put this together.

models chloe and charlotte

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I shot this test recently with Liliana Winarska. During the shoot, my neighbours shouted at me for using a communal space. What a drag. Shots are nice though.

Styling: Liliana Winarska
Makeup: Steph Lai
Hair: Gigi Hammond
Model: Elise @ Premier

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Fashion Photography is dead, long live Fashion Photography.
Viva La Revolución

[This article appeared in Labb Magazine volume II, August '10]

I got a call from a production team recently asking me if I wanted to go on TV to discuss retouching. It was when that Twiggy campaign came out and everyone was banging on about how ‘ohmigod, she doesn’t look like that in real life’. I knew the topic was a real hot potato and being the evil photographer I am that fritters away my days with nubile young lovelies, eating the drugs and generally having a rather swish lifestyle living in the glamorous fashion world, (daaahlinks!!!) I knew that I was the designated whipping boy du jour and politely declined this golden opportunity to get my fingers well and truly burned and make a fool of myself on national television (again). If they’d seen me in the frozen foods aisle in Iceland (perhaps it’s all one big frozen food aisle in Iceland) trying to figure out which fish pie is cheaper per 100gm yet simultaneously least likely to give me cancer, they might not have been so quick to put yours truly on ye olde speed dial. It’s not all glamour chez moi a Hackney, innit?

Later, in a bout of Esprit d’escalier I wished I’d gone on and ranted about ‘you can’t handle the truth’ or about how tv presenters lie when they wear make up and what the hell is reality anyway since cubism and post-modernism and Lacanian fragmented mirroring and … Anyway, I digress, my point is that I saw the big gaping hole they were digging for me.

Earlier this year I met twiggy at the Burberry show and she seems like a perfectly lovely woman but young is not a word you might casually use to describe her so if someone lightened a few ‘laughter lines’ would you blame them? Hey, I didn’t hear any complaints from the ol’ Twigster. Did you?

Have these people just discovered retouching? Are these the people who still haven’t gotten over the myriad betrayals of Santa, the Tooth Fairy, the Easter bunny, weapons of mass destruction and ‘I won’t come in your mouth, I promise’ and want revenge? The Pixies have a line in (song?) ‘La vida total es una porceria, porceria’ which roughly translates as ‘all life is a shitty con job’. Now I find that sentiment a little pessimistic but nonetheless I can empathise. The media in genera can play hard and fast with the truth when it suits their ends but then again, let’s face it, fashion photography was never about reality and we know we’re not in Kansas any more, thanks very much, you bolshie French complainers who want a Parental Advice: Explicit Retouching label on every advertisement. Let them eat cake.

Ok some careless dickhead made that Ralph Lauren model’s hips narrower than her head. Go crucify Tony Blair, instead please. He still hasn’t got his comeuppance for having that sexed up dossier guy assassinated. Go get him and leave Karl Lagerfeld alone! The man has enough pain in his life already!

Nevertheless, I appreciate how some of that stuff could understandably mess with a teen girl’s dietary habits but I blame the parents for not educating their runts about. Me, I get enough reality on my doorstep. perhaps when I am wealthy enough to knock together two town houses in chelsea and call it my studio like that famous singer from the 80′s who shall remain nameless. Ok you twisted my arm, it’s Bryan Adams.

Digital technology has moved fashion photography back solidly into the realm where it belongs, into the world of fantasy, the world of illusion, the world of, dare I say it: the world of Art, and simultaneously unchained us from the ties of long delays between capture and realisation and allowed us the instant gratification that we all want and need.

Take an image by Javier Vallhonrat and I think you are as rewarded by the lushness of the vision, as impressed by the perfection of the execution, and seduced by the rhetoric of the psychological dramas unfolding in a painting as you would be by the pre-Raphaelite’s work. Go spend an afternoon in the Tate and track down their work and you won’t think that our ancestors were all square dullards tightly bound and primly tucked. The rich sensuality and lucid yet dream – like quality of the work was a revelation to me.

Fashion photography too can be a vision of perfection, an ideal world we know we will never live in. Ok I may never have a whole suite of Louis Vuitton luggage, or loll about with writhing hot models in some curiously run down yet simultaneously chic location, or spend a boozy weekend with Abramovich and Dasha on a Yohji Yamamoto themed yacht replete with anti paparazzi death rays and multiple helipads (just in case, ok?). I accept your unattainability and raise you some. The genre has been variously proclaimed as dead, dying or on its knees for years now with many proclaiming that they had exhausted the limitations of the genre and moved on to moving image or to other artistic pastures.

The massive growth of the internets and all those lolcats saw quite a number of publications taking early retirement as advertising budgets plummeted and not only that, those tiny fiddly lil’ banner ads don’t need much in the way of photography. For a while, work became thinner on the ground for photographers but as Warren Buffet said: ‘it’s only when the tide goes out, that you find out who’s swimming naked.’
Now there is a plethora of high standard online magazines, online retailers and other forums that are creating a buzz on their own merits that I think is creating a new dawn for the dead.

A long time ago Mr Magritte told us: ‘Ceci n’est pas un pipe.’ More recently, David Lynch had his protagonists warn us in Mulholland Drive – ‘No ay Banda’ and De La Soul told us that ‘this is a recording.’ I think the point is that it’s not reality, it’s an ideal vision, Not a philosophy, more a divertissement. not the road but an often beautifully illustrated map.

Copyright Hugh O’Malley 2010