2001: Anouck Lepere by Miles Aldridge for The Face - Dead on Arrival

2001: Amy Wesson

I've always had my favourite models from time to time, Kate Moss being an all time favourite, as I believe models are just as crucial as the photographer in producing pieces of art. However, unlike Kate Moss, who is a very good and diverse model, Amy Wesson wasn't generally all that fantastic, but I became fascinated with her after reading her story in one of the first issues of Teen Vogue nearly 10 years ago when I was in Florida. She was part of the breed of supermodel that mixed with the supers and the super-waifs, and was on the team that ushered in the heroin chic aesthetic during the mid 1990s. Ironically, Amy Wesson, a small town girl in her teens, developed a severe drug addiction and suffered a steep downward spiral which drastically effected her career. I sometimes felt, that in some of her pictures, I could see the spiral.

To me she was one of the first, influential models of the turn of the century, alongside the Angela's, Maria Carla's and An Oost and Anouck Lepere, and the ones I'd hope to see on the catwalk and in new editorials when the seasons changed.

Since then, her face has popped up here and there, and surprisingly has fronted the odd big campaign (MaxMara perfume was her most recent), but what touched me the most was an editorial for hipster-wank rag Vice Magazine, called 'The Bitter Tears of Amy Wesson'. Now 33, the editorial summed up to me the painful journey this woman endured, and the history she was infamous for within the fashion industry.

 

Despite not being a household name, she worked some high profile campaigns and was photogrpahed by famous photographers such as Mario Testino, Bruce Weber and David LaChapelle, so her diversity was there. But some people will recongise her purely as the odd looking girl on the cover of the album and singles from Adore by Smashing Pumpkins.

Merry Christmas

disgarded / regarded: Larry Clark

The film director and photographer Larry Clark, best known for 'Kids' is also well known for his collective of photographs taken of teenage runaways in the late 60s and into the 1970s. The best known ones, 'Tulsa' and 'Teenage Lust' have gone onto influence other photographers such as Venetia Scott, Juergen Teller and Terry Richardson.

Some of my favourite images by him are generally on my list of all time favourite photographs.

The last image I only find shocking because although the central point of this photo is the heroin, the first thing I noticed was the guy's penis resting across his thigh, like a banana. I also wonder what Clark's involvement was during these sessions. It's hard to get people to accept having their photo taken generally, or even during special occasions, yet these photos are so candid that you almost think they've been staged to look like they were alone all along.

Sheffield

 

Sheffield from Crookes

photo by Paolo Margari

http://paolomargari.it

 

Deathbed by David

Kim Jones 'See Through' Cap

Kim Jones now designs for Dunhill.

Asia Argento - Bruce LaBruce - François Sagat

Film Porn Art

 

 

(above) François is wearing a Vivienne Westwood wool t-shirt. I love the links between taboo, sex, porn, film and the art world. Their ideas at first glance can ordinarily seem wrong but at closer inspection to the links, it feels very right, and Argento and Sagat are perfect examples in their own right.

Kate Moss Italian Vogue

I think these look very much like the old, glammed up 90s photos of Kate, and sort of remind me at the same time of Versace adverts of the 90s that she occassionally cropped up in. It also surprises me how much that French, Italian and Spanish Vogue use Kate, yet you hardly see her in American Vogue.

Gianni Versace (seems so dated with his name).

Candy Cigarette (1989)

This is probably the most famous photograph by Sally Mann. It's called. Candy Cigarette.

Sally Mann is an American photographer, famous for her black and white photos she took of her children during the 80s and early 90s and then onto landscapes and rural scenes of her home in Virginia.

At home with Kate Moss

From Self Service

Lovers Lost and Found

I forget his name, but he graduated the day this was taken, and this was our mock-up graduation picture.

the Sartorialist: London Now

The week off

The jacket I'm wearing is a silk Evisu Jacket. The bathbomb i'm using is called Twilight.

Kate Moss, Worcestershire 2003

by Mary McCartney

Kate Moss

Christina's World

Christina's World, by Andrew Wyeth, is by far, my favourite work of art. Others come close, which I hope to write about in the future, but for me, Christina's World has always been my favourite ever since I laid eyes on it doing research for an art project at school, learning about American art. I learnt a lot about Edward Hopper, Grant Wood and an obscure naive artist known as Grandma Moses, but Wyeth's Christina's World stood out to me, at first only aesthetically, but then, like with most loved stuff, its meaning and my personal interpretations have been specified, making it extremely special. It is in the book '1001 Paintings to see before you die', and when I saw it there last week, it brought all those meaning back again.

A little about the painting: it was painted in 1948, and the scene is of a real farmhouse in a town called Cushing, in Maine. Around 1999, I was crazy about anything New England, and even had my bedroom decorated to what I thought represented that sort of country interior style. I was reading a lot about the witch hunts also, and loved collecting pictures of the houses and the autumnal scenes of that part of America. The farmhouse in the picture, is now an art centre.

The painting depicts on first look a scene, a field, asymetrically perfect, with the woman or girl in the foreground looking up, ahead, on the grass. Closer inspection shows this woman is struggling and her limbs are thin. The painting technique gives an eery realism to every tiny detail, every blade of grass and every strand of hair, a technique of painting Wyeth mastered which involved controlling the mixing of paints to create very specific colours, giving Christina's World an almost muted tone, which I feel works with not only the theme of struggle, but my feelings towards it.

How did it and how does it still make me feel? Well, it's a self pitying feeling, it represents struggle, and sympathy. It's a beautiful scene but there is woman is crawling towards a house. The juxtaposition of a scene where nothing could go wrong is forcfully confronted with a personal and physical struggle. Wyeth was inspired to paint this because he saw from the farmhouse one day the woman crawling across the field. She had suffered an illness in childhood which had effected her muscle growth and couldn't walk. It must of been a weird thing to see this woman in a dress crawling across the grass, but that's apparently how she got about.

I used to have a print of it and it was stuck on the wall as a poster during uni. Unfortunately for me, it got torn down during a drunken stupor one night when we rolled in and fell against it. I will get it again, and frame it next time, and I will put it in the living room of the next place I move to. It will be to me in my living room as what Monet's 'Poppies Blooming' is to my parent's living room.

Corrine Day

Corrine Day, a well known semi fashion photographer who died only a month ago at age 45 from a brain tumour (a problem with brain cancer that she had dealt with for around 10 years) was the first, and only fashion photographer that made me realise that I wanted to take photos. It was around my age that she started taking photos, and it was around when she was 25, that she 'discovered' Kate Moss, and took those famous photo's for The Face magazine 20 years ago. I was about 17, and had bought a now very rare book called 'Kate: The Story', a photographic retrospect of Kate Moss' work from the beginning to around 1998/9. The book at the time was still relatively new I suppose, but is almost impossible to get. Unfortunately for me, I tore the book up in a rage, but kept my favourite picture, as seen below, which travelled with me and donned many walls of the houses I inhabited during my time at university.

My dream of photography and fashion photography has since been put on hold, and it wasn't really till the event of Day's death that I fully realised that to make a dream come true and to start creating something that I agree that I'm good at, you have to really do it. When I lay in the bath on the day I read the news of Corrine's death, I felt very sad, but unusually, inspired to be someone and try something, and to interpret my ideas, and to start creating something that I will love and will be my own vision, whilst at the same time involving my knowledge of fashion.


I studied her while I worked on my photography A-Level those years ago. Alongside with photographers like Hellen Van Meene and the work of Tracy Emin, I created 'self confessional' gritty, black and white photos that echoed the fashion trends of the early 90s that were deemed controversial for their promotion of heroin and anorexia. Below are a couple of photos of some of the photos I did about 8 years ago. The girl is an old friend I have lost touch with called Lizzy. She was perfect because she was very tall and very thin and very pretty and naturally photogenic and willing to pose anywhere and wear anything. We were running round Selly Oak and I was just taking photos. The other photo is a self portrait. I think I was about 18. I remember it being very hard to take, as the wire I had to take the photo wasn't very long. Now everything is digital, it is much easier, but do you sometimes think that has taken the fun out of photography?

Early October under the sky

                                        When the temperature dropped, the sky looked like this.