My Last Hazy Summer

So I had a bit of a session processing and scanning old films and I found this half-frame film I missed from the summer. The images were taken on an old Olympus Pen-EE of my summer at home in the Isles of Scilly. It's sad because it was probably my last chance to go back for an extended period of time, at least for a while.

School ends in June and then I have to start looking for work experience and a job and other real life things. Though I miss it hugely there is no future for a fashion photographer in the Isles of Scilly.

Six Year Old Film

When it comes to processing black and white films each film type, size and ISO determine a different film processing time. This means that lazy people like me shoot a lot of black and while film and then don't process it for ages. However this is a new record for me. I processed this mystery film and it turned out to be six years old. 

These images were from a time when I had just started studying A level photography and personally looking back at them is so interesting to see how I've developed to now. 

Walk a Mile in a Wise Man's Shoes

This set of images was created over two days in the streets around London Fields in Hackney where I live. 

I was approached to collaborate on this project by the very lovely and incredibly creative stylist Marina Magalhaes who wanted to do

a still life but rather than shooting it in the studio take it to 

the street instead.

So we created these site specific installations each in 

a different street setting, representing a different famous 

thinker.

I had so much fun, though it was really hard trying to stick bin

bags to stone walls. It was a really creative challenge that I was

happy to be a part of.

The images were intended to be quite tongue in cheek, 

we wanted people to see them and laugh, which many passers by 

did when they saw us photographing them.

I hope they make you smile:

(Albert Einstein)

(Abraham Lincoln)

(Salvador Dali)

(Mahatma Gandhi)

(Charles Darwin)

(Sigmund Freud)

(Polaroids and 35mm coming soon!)

New Title

I am really excited about my new blog title:

Isn't it stylish!

Designed by my friend the very talented graphic designer Nathan Lance.

Check out more of his great work at: Sleep And Sleep Design.

Innocence

This set of images was a project for an elective I did a little over a year ago now. The elective was called Fashion Film and Photography and it studied the way that film, fashion and photography all inform and inspire each other.

These images were based on a small genre of films that I don't think really have a specific name but I like to call "unsettling-films-about-girl's-schools" such as Peter Weir's Picnic at Hanging Rock, Peter Jackson's Heavenly Creatures and (more specifically referenced here) Lucile Hadzihalilovic's Innocence. 

 All these films reference the relationships shared between close groups of girl friends, which is a theme I will be revisiting for my Final Major Project that I am shooting next month, though the shoot will be very different from this.

These pictures specifically reference the cinematography of Innocence, shot on 35mm Portra-VC they mimic the saturated colours used in this film, though the poses chosen are reflective of all three of these films. 

I think the fact that I chose a film with this title Innocence is quite interesting in hindsight because looking back on these images they were a far more innocent way of working than my working process now. The models features are myself and my best friend at the time Holly, and my boyfriend Dan (who is also a photographer) took the photographs for me. We modelled because we were down in Cornwall where there are no model agencies, and because though we were 21 at the time of this shoot, we are both short and both look very young, reflecting the innocent theme. 

 We styled ourselves to look like characters from the films... it was like I was playing at being a fashion photographer, though I guess I still am, but now the game seems less innocent, more considered, more like I have so many other people to please, not just my friend who is posing with me. 

 I feel so blessed and lucky for the progress I've made in the last year - I have learnt a lot and learnt quickly by throwing myself into that learning full of blind faith and a positive attitude. However I feel that through this learning process I have lost a little of the innocent creativity I was so full of when I first moved to London.

  Now because I am working with bigger teams there are so many more people to consider and while I love love love working collaboratively sometimes when there is so much more to organise I lose sight of the creative impulse that drives me to produce work in the first place.

 That's something I need to hold on to, the reason I love fashion photography:

The potential to tell stories, express ideas and explore what I feel is beautiful in the world.

Paris When It Sizzles

As you can see from my previous post about walls London is currently grey. It's February and rainy and back in springtime Paris is where I'd like to be.

These images are from a trip I took with the very lovely and very talented fashion designer Suzie Laloe-Punchard to Paris last spring.

(Images shot on soon-to-be-defunct 35mm Portra-VC for these sizzling colours.)

Walls

I think it's something about fashion photographers... but we really seem to have a thing for nice walls.

Because the straight-up photograph, which was first pioneered by iD in the 80s, is now so established as a legitimate form of fashion photography the street has taken on a more abstract identity 'to become a blank canvas ready to be filled by the imagination of the reader' - (Rocamora & O'Neil in Shinkle:2008).

Marina and I were scouting for walls that will become our blank canvas, a theatre to act out a project involving site specific art/fashion installations on the East London streets.

More to come soon, until then, enjoy the lovely walls: