2017, a year with designers and makers

In the last year I was lucky enough to work with some incredible designers, makers and architects both here in Scotland and in London. Although most of my creative energies in 2017 were focused on my return to art school (still processing that btw) and drawing and painting, this work was some of the most fulfilling and inspiring of my year. 

I truly love editorial photography work with designers and makers and approach it in much the same way as I approach photographing people - slowly, tentatively, looking for the heart and the story behind what makes my subject what it is and the fleeting moments of light and shadow that tell a little of that story.  

It's not an approach that works for all commercial clients (if you're looking for glossy brochure images I can point you in the direction of people much more adept at that than I am!) but when I find the artists and visionaries who love light and dark, story and soul, barely there details and a sense of catching something that was almost lost as much as I do, magic happens. And although I seem to be continuing on at art school, searching for the connection to fine art that I misplaced somewhere a decade or so ago, I hope that the universe makes me some time and sends me some more of those incredible designers, makers, artists and dreamers that I have loved working with this year.  

Here are a handful of my favourite images from some of these collaborations. (Many are part of a long term project that I hope will continue into this year and that I will be able to share with you when it's completed!) 

You can see more of my editorial and commercial work here

Knitwear by Verisimilitude 

architecture, curation and design by State of Craft  

Bill Cunningham New York.

Recently, since I discovered Netflix, I've been watching tv while I work. I usually watch fairly mindless, dialogue heavy tv series, seeing as how I am am mostly looking at my work while I'm working (honestly) and anything more subtle gets lost on me, but today I watched something different and it was so good that I had to share it with you. 

Bill Cunningham New York is a beautiful, gentle film about a beautiful gentle man. Cunningham is an octogenarian fashion photographer who has been taking pictures on the streets and at the parties of New York for the NY Times since the 1970s, and that is as much as I knew about him before I stumbled across the film and remembered that someone somewhere a long time ago had said it was good. 

Despite what you might expect, the film is not about photography and it's not about fashion, it's about a gentleman and an artist, striving to make pure work in a desperately commercialised industry. Bill Cunningham is a quiet, infectiously cheerful, unassuming man who until he was evicted lived in a tiny kitchenless and bathroomless studio in Carnegie Hall, sleeping on a camp bed, surrounded by filing cabinets full of his negatives. He travels around New York on his bicycle, with his old Nikon film camera slung around his neck, wearing a blue jacket that he first spotted on some Parisian street cleaners and thought looked both practical and was a nice colour. He is 84. 

The film is about him in the simplest way that a film can be a portrait of a person; it follows him working; interviews him about his thoughts, life and ideas; speaks to the people who know and love him, (which seems to be everyone, he is an immensely lovable man - something that becomes apparent almost as soon as the film begins) and leaves the viewer to fall for and feel for the man as it goes. There isn't much that I can say about him or the film that doesn't feel inadequate; it's quietly moving and inspiring and if your heart isn't a little bit broken by that interview with him (you'll know it when you see it) then you might want to get your heart checked, because it's likely defective. It's been 3 hours since I watched it and I still feel tearful. 

*image Bill Cunningham by The Sartorialist

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