People, Clothes and Getting Out of Your Own Head
One of Prasy’s first shoots - the dress was mine - the energy was her
I seem to have accidentally become the man who buys women's clothes for a living.
Not professionally, obviously. But I do spend an alarming amount of time rummaging through second-hand clothing shops in Newtown looking for things that make me think, That would be useful on a photograph.
I suspect several of the shopkeepers have their own theory about me by now. Half of them probably think I'm a cross-dresser with no taste in fashion. The other half probably think I'm a man who has completely lost his way in a women's clothing shop.
They're both slightly missing the point.
I don't really buy the clothes because I like the clothes. I buy them because I like what they can do to a person.
I've always been much more interested in photographing people than fashion. Give me an interesting face, an odd expression, a slightly uncomfortable moment or a glimpse of someone's personality and I'm happy. Put a beautifully dressed person in front of me who is carefully maintaining the correct fashion pose and, frankly, I start looking for ways to mess things up.
Which is how I've ended up with bags and bags of strange clothes.
A ridiculous jacket. An enormous skirt. A blouse that appears to have been designed during a particularly optimistic period of the 1980s. Things in colours nobody has willingly worn since 1977. Clothes that make absolutely no sense together. I’ve even used emergency blankets , household foil and a sense of adventure … so much fun
And that's precisely why I like them.
Because I've discovered that clothes can be surprisingly useful psychologically during a shoot.
Neha - foiled again !
For many women, clothes aren't just clothes. They can be armour, camouflage, confidence, identity, status, rebellion or simply a way of deciding which version of yourself is going to leave the house that morning.
Then you put a camera in front of someone and all those thoughts can become very loud.
Does this make me look fat? Is my stomach showing? What do I do with my hands? Am I standing properly? Do I look attractive? Why is he getting me to stand this way !?!
Suddenly she's not being herself. She's monitoring herself.
I remember one shoot where I handed the model a particularly absurd outfit from my growing collection. She looked at it, looked at me, and gave me the sort of expression that suggested she was reconsidering all her previous life choices.
She put it on anyway.
At first she was stiff and self-conscious. She was doing what people often do when they know they're being photographed — trying to work out what a photographer might want from them. Every movement seemed considered.
Then, at some point, the outfit simply became too ridiculous to take seriously.
She started playing.
I told her to exaggerate the movement. She did. Then she started playing with the skirt, turning, pulling faces, changing posture. Within minutes she had completely forgotten about trying to look beautiful.
And that's when the photographs changed.
The interesting thing wasn't the outfit. It was the moment she stopped worrying about the outfit.
That happens surprisingly often. Give someone something sufficiently unexpected to wear and you can sometimes short-circuit the internal conversation.
Instead of Do I look good?, the thought becomes What on earth am I supposed to do in this?
And that is a much more interesting place to photograph someone from.
The clothes become props rather than the subject. They give the model permission to exaggerate, experiment and, most importantly, play.
I'm not trying to photograph fashion. I'm using fashion as a kind of psychological distraction.
If I can get someone sufficiently out of her own head, even for a few minutes, the clothes disappear and the person starts to emerge.
And that's when I usually get the photograph I came for.
So, apologies to the second-hand clothing shops of Newtown.
I'm not a cross-dresser.
I just have very questionable taste in photographic props.