My Visual Logbook

For my first shoot I wanted to photograph my friend Hannah in an editorial fashion. I styled her outfit myself and took inspiration from Juergan Teller's marc jacobs and celine advertising campaigns in regards to composition and location; simplicity and a certain edginess was key for me here.





this shot actually resulted in the lift being called down and Hannah disappearing and being rather mortified at the *why do you have a plant in your bag* looks she was given.

I really like the red and green contrasting to each other and the green of the stairs as it links the foreground and the background together and this sense of fluidity and engagement between the two aspects really ties the image together as one finished image.

At the beginning of this brief I knew I wanted to shoot a form of fashion editorial, but I was unsure of the extent an editorial can be considered a narrative; whether it was possible for a studio shot editorial to be of a narrative nature as there wouldn't be much of a setting or location to carry the story and for a story to progress.

I turned to google and spent ages looking for examples as nothing coming up was quite explaining it in a way I understood or could relate to.

I stumbled across Grant Scott, a senior lecturer of photography at the university of Gloucestershire, and this article titled 'That's not a fashion photograph'. I found it incredible helpful in eliminating any brain fog I had surrounding the purpose of fashion imagery, and explained to me that a narrative can be as simple as all images in a series were about a jumper, and therefore this is a narrative about said jumper. 

This stood out to me most from the article:

"A fashion narrative may be constructed by a particular color or combination of colors, a type of clothing, a fabric, an attitude or an aesthetic, a lifestyle or an activity—in fact the fashion narrative has no boundaries. However, it will always be about the clothes. In rare cases, the narrative is about the model, but in most cases, she or he is there to show the clothes to their best effect and to play the role the narrative dictates."

'A narrative is an account of connected events. To think about narrative, however, involves more than reflecting on how a series of events become connected. We also need to think about how something is constituted as an event in the first place. Events are not found objects waiting to be discovered. As Allen Feldman has stated “the event is not what happens. The event is that which can be narrated”'

Juergan Teller is a german fashion and fine art photographer. His work is ordinarily in colour, in a overexposed, raw style, shot with a Contax G2 camera with an onboard flash. His style is marked by his refusal to separate commercial fashion images with personal images, and his work is quite often controversial. He has long standing ties with Marc Jacobs and Celine in advertising, these campaigns in particular are what first drew me towards his work as I love the over exposed, neutral finish which his images have. 

"When I became famous for doing fashion photography, I felt a bit tired of doing that. I felt emotionally drained by the vanity. I just thought I might as well just photograph myself. It is incredibly liberating. There's nobody to tell me I can't show this double chin. I was able to push the limit to my own pleasing. I wanted to literally see how it looks like and feels to be photographed by me, the sense of knowing when a good picture is happening, and that helps me to photograph other people. And it helps me also when other people are looking at my self-portraits — they enter into a totally different level of understanding of who I am and what I want to achieve within my work."