This Year I'm Loving...

...photographs by Nigel Shafran. My friend introduced me to his website and ever since I have been seeing his work all over the place (including on the front cover of Theatres of the Real a book I am using for my dissertation) and I just can't get enough of him. As a huge fan of William Eggleston it is really interesting to see a photographer take on this snapshot, everyday documentary style but give it his own edge. I am absolutely loving his work and I hope you will too. Here are a few of my favourite images but of course, do not hesitate to visit his website for a look at his full work.

Schilte & Portielje

Well it was that time of the year when I jump on to the Eurostar and journey to Paris for Paris Photo weekend. It was held in the Grand Palais this year and I thought it was the best one yet (well out of the three I have seen).

Whilst I could talk about the many beautiful photographers I saw there I want to mainly focus on the works by Schilte and Portielje, who I saw at the Kahmann Gallery stand. I had never heard of the photographers before but fell head over heels in love with their work. The dark black and white portraits were so beautiful, photography and styling wise. They have really inspired me with my project dealing with identity or lack of it and got me straight to experimenting with long exposures. I am absolutely blown away by their photographs and hope you feel the same. So here are a few of my favourites that I saw... I know you'll love them too!

Viviane Sassen

This month I am loving Viviane Sassen. I first discovered her after seeing her incredible In Bloom shoot in Dazed and Confused (see blog post 10th July) and fell in love with her work completely after just seeing it at HotShoe gallery in London. I find her work is so contemporary and different to a lot of the fashion photographers out there. Seeing her work exhibited has really helped inspire me for my current project. Having achieved great success as a fashion photographer, publishing work in avant-garde fashion magazines, she has established a unique visual vocabulary all her own. Her aesthetic combines a sense of childhood memory, where scenes are crystallized and highly saturated with color and shadow, with a photographer’s sensitivity to the body and surface.


I absolutely love her fashion work as well as her personal series and I hope you do to! Here are a few of my favourite photographs of hers but I encourage you to visit the Hotshoe gallery before the 27th November in order to see her work along with Alec Sloth and WassinkLundgren.

Simryn Gill's 'Dalam' - the inspiration for my bedroom project.

I saw Simryn Gill’s series ‘Dalam’ exhibited in the Tate Modern, where the images covered an entire room, top to bottom with brightly coloured rooms. When I researched more into what the project was about I became fascinated with the idea. She travelled around Dalam and photographed stranger’s front rooms. What I love about the images is how they really display a culture completely different from ours, especially as the country she was in is very religious. Each room was brightly coloured and full of beautiful artefacts and give a window into the lives of these unknown people. It is Gill’s project that has really inspired my idea. Unlike the area that Gill photographed, I don’t think England has a strong easily recognised culture and we aren’t very religious anymore and therefore to me these types of front rooms don’t exist anymore, many houses don’t even really have a front room. Therefore I decided to photograph bedrooms because to me bedrooms are an important space to people, very personal and private. I know that when I visit someone news’, house I always like to snoop around in their bedroom as it really shows a lot about the person. Therefore using Gill’s idea I am going to adapt it to photograph different bedrooms. I really like how she uses the same format for every picture which is something I need to experiment with and decide how to photograph the bedrooms as I would like them to all be the same format as well. I love how vibrant her images are and hope my images have the same bright, homely feel to them. She used natural lighting to create her images which I too will be focusing on, or possibly include a camera flash as well, just to get an even light for the whole bedroom, again this is something to experiment with in my first shoot. Although Gill’s work is mainly about culture whereas mine will be about the individual it still does relate to what I feel is a lack of culture here in England. Gill focuses on capturing a space that even though is private, as it is someone’s home, it is one of the most public rooms, that guests will see and therefore it is clear that these people have put a lot of time into making a room they can show off with pride whilst still keeping it personal to themselves. I was really amazed by the hundreds of rooms pictured in the one exhibition room and feel that a similar idea would work well in book format.

'In five years time where will you be....' - Well hopefully making images like Carlos Arroyo Galaxia

With two new projects beginning and a New Years Resolution not to leave work to the last minute, I have gained the excitement back for my course that I lost thanks to the 'Contemporary Technologies' project... finally I get to photograph my own images again and this time decide my own brief, be in control of EXACTLY what I want to do. However, the daunting thing is, what is it that I exactly want to do? At 20 I feel that life is still an open book and I am young enough to not know, but in reality I finish university in just over a year and then am thrown into the big bad world. With my 'Negotiated Practices' project, my tutor has asked us all to fill in a form all about where we see ourselves in 5 years time. Well for me, hopefully as a successful band reportage or editorial photographer but in the current climate it's more likely I'll be alone, jobless and penniless with a very nice camera to keep me company.

Therefore in light of this what am I doing, where am I going melltdown, I decided to actually do something about what I want to do and really start researching into well, photography, so that my next two projects will be all about me, my style, what I like and what I want to create. I have started to think about doing more work experience (the last couple of days I have spent with fashion photographer Victor de Mello, assisting his shoot for the Sunday Times Style Magazine) as well as really researching into photographers and I happened to stumble across the beautiful work of Carlos Arroyo Galaxia in 'Dazed and Confused'. He is a Spanish born photographer who captures his subjects with 35mm film focusing on the space of others, both happy and melancholy. His new project 'I Wish You Were Me' shows almost an obsession with bedrooms and how they relate to people, something that I have been looking into doing for my 'Photographic Bookwork' project as people's bedrooms have always been an interest to me and therefore his work really fascinated me.

For now I leave you with some of my favourite shots from his new project and hope you love them as much as I do!

Nicholas Hughes

I am just in awe of Nicholas Hughes's work! Like me with my current project, Hughes is working with the art of camera-less photography, however he works with light pollution exposing the paper and his images are much less abstract than mine. His photographs are mysterious, often dark and eerie landscapes that one would be excused for mistaking as a painting and I just absolutely adore them. I hope you agree!