fashion, backstage

I don't know if I've ever mentioned that I went to art school planning to study fashion design. I've loved fashion ever since I bought my first copy of Vogue at 15. I was flying home from Paris with my mum and it was the only English magazine in the airport shop. I fell in love. Yet over the next couple of years something changed, big bad things happened in the world and I decided that fashion was frivolous, that there were stories to tell in this world. So I studied photography instead, hoping that maybe I could tell them. People often asked me if I ever fancied combining my two loves and going into fashion photography, but I always said no. Fashion photography as I knew it was about creating stories, not capturing them, and I've never had any desire to create stories. Then someone offered me the opportunity to capture a story, to spend some time behind the scenes at a fashion shoot, photographing the process behind creating those flawless images that you see in magazines and on websites. 

I spent the whole day with a group of amazing women who were working together to create something beautiful and I did that thing I love; capturing moments that individually might not mean a lot but that add up to tell a story that otherwise you might never hear. 

fashion; Teija  

make up; Francesca Martin 

(official) photographer; Zoe Barling 

model; Martina

Home Truths

'The work in Home Truths: Photography, Motherhood and Identity aims to challenge long held stereotypes and sentimental views of motherhood. Set against a backdrop of the seemingly insatiable appetite for pictures of celebrity mums, streams of Instagram bumps and babies and a history of the Madonna motif in art history, the work here addresses changing conditions of power, gender, domesticity, the maternal body and familial relations. It is a critical space for the representation of mothers to exist aside from more reductive cultural assumptions of mothering.'

Hanna Putz, Untitled, (LL1), 2012 © Hanna Putz

This exhibition opens today at the Photographers' Gallery in London, with an accompanying exhibition on the theme of motherhood and loss (sob) at the Foundling Museum. Looking through the preview gallery for the main exhibition I see a combination of really beautiful photographs of mothers and motherhood (Elinor Carucci's The First Week literally took my breath away, for obvious reasons) and a fair bit of conceptual work, which isn't exactly my bag, but I'm really looking forward to going to both. It's been a while since I wrote a Things I've Done in London post (because I haven't been doing owt) so maybe I'll reprise that series once I've been!