SNAPPING THE CITY


In association with


London facade


None of that is the actual building, it’s all a facade. I was walking back from Bayswater from a photo shoot and I thought this just looked bonkers. There is nothing real about this picture - it’s all completely fake - and yet it is so detailed, from the folds of the curtain to the grain on the pencils. I included this photo to try and show what a good crop can bring to a photo shot in a built-up city. I was trying to eliminate everything else so the viewer focuses in on everything about the image that is not real. It’s almost treating the city as a stage set in a way. It’s what I did with the Paul Smith photo (right), it’s all about focusing people’s attention on where you want it to go and cutting out anything that might get in the way of that.


Berlin pavement


I don’t know if it’s because I’m a photographer but I’m just one of those people who tend to look everywhere around them. I don’t just look ahead, I look at the walls, at the sky, and perhaps unusually for a photographer - at the ground. I remember a photographer saying to me very early on ‘don’t forget to look behind you!’ I actually stepped over this and only noticed it when I turned around to look at something else.


10 COMPANION


This is part of a fashion portfolio I’ve shot for the forthcoming book London Uprising: Fifty Fashion Designers, One City. I’d photographed Sir Paul three or four times before - just as other photographers have done - in this same room at his Covent Garden HQ. When I saw him appear at the window one time, and wave at me outside I couldn’t get that image out of my head. So when it came to the photoshoot I asked him to stand on the other side of the window outside


the room. He has got such a recognisable face that even with the glass distorting it a bit you know it’s him. The photo plays on the fact that he’s very famous and, as everyone knows from his designs, very playful too. With someone as famous as Paul you don’t have to see him clearly to know it’s him. It’s not always a close up portrait of a face that makes for an iconic image, very often it can be seeing a different side of a familiar face.


SPRING 2017


With something static like this, if you know you have a lot of time to compose a photo – it’s not a scene that’ll be gone in a few seconds – take your time to compose it. A lot of people never use


Sir Paul Smith


half of what their phones are capable of, even in terms of pressing the correct bit of the screen to actually get the picture sharp. I do like very graphic images. I can’t help, even with a snap, straightening the top, bottom and sides up. For me, it makes it visually stronger if it’s more graphic.


London Uprising: Fifty Fashion Designers, One City is published by Phaidon


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