liquid luxe…

Shot this earlier in the year. Look Book/Advertising for Jan Si.

Model:Elisabetu Stanciute

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Stylist Erika Ippolito
Hair Erika Salvaggio
Makeup Jay Arik
Model Vika @ Models1

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I shot this for Vita in early January. Her collection was inspired by woodland nymphs so we wanted to create a kind of autumnal forest mood. more images on her site

Model Kasia Kay @ Zone
Hair and Makeup: Louise McCarthy
Asst.: Cat Linton

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

Models Lina and Heather @ Nevs

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

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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

This story was published in the Phoenix Magazine which was distributed during fashion week.

Editor: Hannah Kane
Fashion Editor: Leigh Keily
Bookings Editor: Eddie Blaghborough
Styling: Reemé Idris
Models: Irina@Nevs and Lois @ Storm
Makeup: Steph Lai
Hair: Hannah O’Mara
Assistant: Marin Hunter-Menzies

‘A’ Dress by Anna Piercy

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I was very excited to receive a visit from George Eko, the editor of Labb Magazine. George was in town to help out with distribution of the latest edition of Labb which is available in magazine stores throughout London. The magazine looks gorgeous, is printed immaculately, colour rendition is perfect and the content is lush. I also wrote an article: ‘Fashion Photography is dead, long live Fashion Photography, Viva la Revolucion’ which was published in the magazine. George is a pleasure to work with and is keen to support emerging talent in the industry. I hope to work more with him on upcoming issues!

I have 2x editorials in this issue.

This menswear editorial was styled by London Stylist Samuel Joseph Smith: pieces by soon to be graduates of the RCA, including RCA graduate and international menswear designer Courtney McWilliams who has since gone on to design for Givenchy and also some items by Rick Owens.
Grooming by Alex Gillott
Model: Richie @ Models 1

I also have another story which i blogged about previously which ran in the magazine under the title ‘Lux et Nox’ with a nod to Bill Henson whose work I am a big fan of.

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Ohmigod Hugh! This happened aeons ago! This is ancient history already.

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Universities represented included:

Amsterdam Fashion Institute, The Netherlands
AMD Akademie Mode and Design, Hamburg
FHNW Academy of Arts & Design – Institute Fashion Design, Basel
Saint-Petersburg State University of Technology & Design
LASALLE College of the Arts, Singapore

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Click the image for a larger version.

And here’s a composite of all the girls in one image

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Isn’t it bizarre how composites of women always end up looking like Natalie Portman? It’s as if she’s the template of the ‘ideal’ woman.

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.

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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…

Makeup: Alex Gillott
Hair: Gigi Hammond
Styling and Post: Hugh O’Malley
Model: Whitney @ Leni’s Model Management

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met this lovely lady while covering a show at the valmont recently…

dress by Lida O’Reilly, a designer from Mauritius.