SOCIAL MEDIA LINKS

Follow me on FACEBOOK Follow me on TWITTER Follow me on 500PX Follow me on GOOGLE+ Follow me on INSTAGRAM Follow me on PINTEREST

Some people you photograph to make aesthetically pleasing images, some people you photograph because of the emotional story that comes through. In the images I take of Katie, she always appears troubled, thoughtful. That is nothing like the true person she is now, but it is how she comes across in the images we take. She she goes off into her own world when we are working together, thinking about whatever invades her mind and this comes through in every image. She is emotionally transparent when captured in an image, showing whatever emotions she is currently experiencing. But that is nothing like the person she actually is. In real life, she is a happy, unaffected person who has pulled herself through a tough start in life to become someone who epitomises strength and integrity. But she wasn't always like that. I am sure, in her not too recent past, that the person she is now nearly disappeared completely.

In all honesty, she is one of those people I find most frustrating to photograph. This is not due to her being difficult to photography or because she is hard to work with. No, thats not it at all. It is because no matter how good I become, how technically proficient or gifted artistically, no matter how lucky I am with light or with timing the decisive moment, I will never do her justice. She when you see Katie in real life, you see just how pretty she is. This is something I have never been able to capture in an image. I really like the images I take of her, but they are not true representations of how attractive she is. The fail her. I fail her.

But when I work with Katie, I am always thinking in shadow. When you photograph someone, you are usually thinking just about what you want to show in the image, where the light falls and and what it creates as the dominant part of the image. But that is not how I think when I work with her. For in these moments, I am always thinking in shadow and what should be hidden from view. Somehow, Katie looks most interesting when appearing from darkness, nudging her way into the frame but not completely. In most of my images of her, she is desaturated and lurking in the corners, blending into a textured and pale background that she seamlessly disappears into.

For this shoot, we, and a bunch of other photographers, rented Studland House; an 18th century mansion in on the edge of the sea. Working only with natural light, we made our way from room to room, seeing how the light invaded the space and what shadows it created. The rest was down to pure emotion and trying our best to capture it. And this is what she does best, making you believe that you actually are part of a moment, and not just looking at an image. If depth is the third dimension in photography, then emotion is surely the fourth. It is also the most illusive and hardest to capture, for it requires a suspension of belief. We all know we are looking at a two-dimensional photograph and it requires a lot of faith to believe we are actually part of a moment. I am not sure if that has been captured in the following series of images, but I do like them.