liquid visions…

This week, the 17th of March (St. Paddy’s day, no less) Sophie Ristelheuber was awarded the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize along with a nice fat cheque for £30,000. She was awarded the prize by Terry Gilliam in London.

I’d been to see the show recently and I quite enjoyed it. Some of the show was a little dry but still rewarding. Donovan Wylie’s images of the maze prison at first hit you with their sterility but with a little context you could see he was making a number of quite profound points about confinement, conformity/homogenisation, isolation and punishment.

Anna Fox’s images struck me for their playfulness and they struck me as the most enjoyable part of the show at the time but writing this a couple of weeks later I can barely remember the images. Ooops, sorry Anna. I must disclaim that she was one of my tutors at University although I didn’t know her very well. One of my friends Riika had helped with the construction of Anna’s displays.

Sophie’s images are of war scenes but the aftermath of war scenes. There’s been a bit of a kerfuffle over the fact that her images are (heavily?) manipulated in photoshop afterwards. And Seán O’Hagan in the guardian worries that we are no longer dealing with Photography but Conceptual Art in the Photography Prize. This debate over the so-called ‘truth’ in photography is not one that’s likely to abate soon. It’s been going on since the dawn of photography (and is especially vibrant in the genre of fashion photograpy). O’Hagan seems to lament the fact that the prize was not awarded for somebody advancing the medium of photography as a whole but rather as a reward for her art. I feel that he somehow overlooks the content of the images and focuses on the form. The images are powerful as political statements as well as being intriguing to look at.

Purists like to bang on about how little post-production they do to images but frankly my dears, I couldn’t give a damn. Photoshop the hell out of it if you like, Miss Ristelheuber. I don’t care if you used a freakin’ huge Hasselblad with gull wing doors or if you used a disposable party camera, if the end results are good, I don’t see any point in arguing about the technology. Spin it round the Hadron Collider (the large one, even) a few times for good measure if it gets your rocks off. Meanwhile, others beg to differ. A Ukrainian Photographer Stepan Rudik was recently awarded 3rd prize for his story in the Sports Features category in the World Press Photo competition. He was later disqualified for having removed a portion of a foot from the raw image. Have a look for yourself.

My mind boggled at the fact that they weren’t chastising him for his vicious crop, converting to black and white, the massively added grain or the heavy vignetting – they disqualified him for removing a tiny nubbin of a toe (that did mar the impact of the image). Not that I have any problem with Rudik’s post-production. In fact I was impressed by his crop and how he had managed to distill the essence of the moment into a powerful image from what was otherwise a relatively banal shot.

While we’re at it, this story about a photographer, Jose Luis Rodriguez, disqualified from the Wildlife Photographer of the Year (after having won) for his use of a hired wolf.

More information here. In this instance liberties were taken. A firm slap on the wrist rightfully deserved. Naughty!

Creative license taken to the extreme – Ralph Lauren recently had to make an embarassing apology after someone got a bit over the top with the editing suite…

Check the way her head is bigger than her waist. Initially it was thought that the retouching was done by a third party but embarrasingly it was done in-house.

Sometimes the Photoshop Crop tool is all you need…

A few things I’ve really like recently. Not sure if i am going to incorporate them into my work somehow but I’ve really felt enlivened (is that a word?) by them.

Alex Box’s makeup – this is a short video about her book that she created with Rankin. What’s fascinating for me is the way the process evolved from something fixed and static and deliberately controlled into an organic exploration.

I am Mercedes Benz. Yes I know, it’s a car ad but it’s still beautiful. Makes me think of Edward Hopper, David Lynch and Philip Lorca di Corcia. Loving the underexposure, intriguing… Shot by Josh Brolin, director of ‘No Country for Old Men’

And last but not least, a short video for Savanah Wyatt‘s accessories, thanks to Miggy for the heads up.

advertising shoot for a jewellery client of mine for a new range.

shot on location on a couple of beaches in Devon

Model: Kate @ Premier
Styling: Shelley Fannell
Makeup: Alex Gillott
Hair: Gigi Hammond
Assistant: David Wise

oh the shameless self-promotion of it all….

I occasionally shoot menswear. This for a recent client who called me up on a Monday and we shot on the Wednesday.  I had his retouched images back to him on the Thursday afternoon (18 looks).

I like it when a plan comes together.

Model: Harry
Grooming: Stephanie Stokkvik
Assistant: Muriel Schouten

I recently shot for London Designer Emma Bell for Vauxhall for a night she is putting on. Emma is getting a lot of media attention with her designs made of food and other mental visions. The shoot involved a car covered in pick and mix with models Rael and Rosie (whose image i stumbled across in the national portrait gallery yesterday).

You can see coverage on Dazed here and further coverage on Planet Notion.

Close Up at the V&A Friday 26th September 2008

I’ve always been greatly inspired by Nick Thornton-Jones and Warren du Preez. Their approach is frequently to eschew the well-trodden commercial line and to play on the borders of art, fashion, technology and science.  When I heard that they were giving a talk at the V&A about their work, I nearly wet myself with excitement and I made sure I got down there pretty early to get in line, not dreaming that I’d manage to get a chance to see them.  I couldn’t believe my luck when I got to the front of the queue and was told that there were seats available.

The talk was on in the National Art Library and before the talk started we were invited by Warren and Nick to browse around various images from the archives.  There were prints by Julia Margaret-Cameron, Man Ray,  Moholy Nagy,  Eadweard Muybridge and others.  It was amazing to see these images from the archives up close and personal.

During the talk, Nick and Warren described their working methods while showing a slideshow of their work.  They admitted they were a little nervous about talking about their work as they had never done so in such a context before.  I felt especially privileged to be there when I heard this.  They described their method as ‘trying to recreate in camera, what used to be done in the dark room’.  And although there is often a lot of post production in some of their work – they mentioned ‘render farms’ processing their work for weeks – they aim to capture the bulk of what they do in camera.  The work that they had lain out for us was all relevant to their practice too – solarisation was a favourite technique of Man Ray’s and the creation of pictograms was a favourite method of Lazlo Moholy-Nagy.  Coincidentally there was a Hungarian sat beside me.

The slideshow was really mind blowing – what has mostly stuck in my mind was the work they did with Alexander McQueen. And I shit you not when I said the hairs stood up on the back of my neck.  There was something chthonic, elemental, raw and occult-like about this series.  They admitted themselves that the shoot had been something of a happening whereby they were in the grip of forces  beyond themselves, of an energy that was more than the sum of the players in the shoot.

Ultimately I think it was very brave of them to reveal so much of their practice in public.  There were a few moments where Warren interrupted Nick with phrases like ‘without revealing too much of our methods’ and would turn the talk in another direction.  Nonetheless I was quite inspired.  To see more of their work, have a look here: Warren Du Preez, Nick Thornton-Jones

and I’ve borrowed a few of their images from their UK Agent’s website Artist Representation/Management

I hope they don’t sue my ass for it.

One of my clients, Designer Rebecca Cella, who I’ve shot for on numerous occasions has had a few of our images placed in Tatler and also in Fabric. Haven’t seen Fabric yet but these are the images used in Tatler. Nice to get another publication under my belt. It’s not exactly 20 pages in Italian Vogue but it’s good to make some progress…

These are the images she chose…

I bought this book on Amazon recently and found it really informative and inspiring:

Fashion and Advertising (World’s Top Photographers Workshops). There’s some beautiful images from photographers like Alexi Lubimorski, Warren Du Preez and Nick Thornton Jones, Solve Sundsbo, Richard Bush etc. It’s mostly fashion based but there’s some strong beauty and still life in there as well. The interviews with the photographers are invaluable and they’re not precious about sharing their information going as far as to reveal their lighting setups.

Also invaluable are the interviews with the photographers about their career, their relationships with clients and magazines, their methods and how each shoot developed from conceptual phase right through production, post and on to publication.

The book was published in 2007 and is available from the usual online retailers but i remember seeing it in the bookstore in the National Portrait Gallery when i went to see the Vanity Fair exhibition recently.

Revamp are an umbrella organisation that work in tandem with Cancer Research UK, taking ‘finds’ from the various charity shops and revamping them with the help of a number of up and coming designers to transform them into completely new designs.

Pretty smooth shoot. Minor hiccup at the start where we tried to work with fabrics draped across the back of the shot but it really looked too cluttered and just messy basically. There weren’t enough of the materials to make it work and the clothes are all so different we would have had to change the set with every shot so there wasn’t enough time to make it work either. We pared the look back to something a lot more basic.

Models Erica and Liberty from Cape Models

Make Up: My Alehammer

Hair: David Cordeaux

Big thanks to Jen from Revamp for styling and co-ordinating the shoot and also for the really cute hand painted skirt which she gave to me for Adele, my Petaling Jaya bunny.