I have shot a lot of fashion for the past 5 years and it was losing its glow for me. I began using the images to make continuous line drawings as a way of keeping my interest going to continue to shoot fashion. I found a way to connect the shapes I admired in the photos with a continuous line. I have now created over 500 drawings and a repurposed clothing line featuring those drawings along with prints, 3D printed sculptures, wall vinyl featuring those drawings. Included are images of my antique camera collection and vintage cars two things I also have a passion for.
You can see the what I have made here www.freeadmission.ca/shop
Or here on Etsy
I have had several editorials published in fashion magazines and this time I thought I would combine my fashion images with my illustrations for submission to SKYE Magazine
Finding my way to documentary photography came after a lot of thought and rumination. I have always used my camera to see the world since I was 12. Part of what I enjoyed about fashion photography was the connection I made with every model I shot. Some I still shoot for creative projects many years later.
The connection is key for me and also I feel the root of documentary photography. The photos that stir show a connection in the frame that invokes emotion. An emotion I have been chasing so I choose to turn towards it and make it my pursuit.
Then the world stopped with a pandemic so I have had to once again seek out how to portray the passion I have for my camera (permanent callous on my right thumb I spent decades sucking). I have an award-winning photojournalist as a mentor and have been soaking myself in images that tell stories. The ones that move the most stand-alone and keep you looking, they are the ones where you see something different each time you look at it.
I have taken courses with Jennifer Moher, Kristen Lewis, and am following the current Black Lives Matter feeds with so many incredibly evocative images that are pushing this movement forward.
I am giving a lot of thought about how to move forward and know that the answer won’t come easy because I want the next step to show a connection-an authentic connection for the viewer to see. For me, connection, the only real element of life that sustains us and is something I found out recently is also a basic human need. I am still baffled at how I didn’t know it was a need. In finding that out though I realize how denying that need gave me a depression I lived with for the past couple of decades.
Until I am more confident about how to move forward as we figure out our new normal I will give myself time to think and keep soaking up the images I find that inspire this next chapter on Instagram. The only thing I am sure about is I want to create clean images, minimal composition. How that fits into the next state I am going to figure out. The key is to ‘see’ when looking through the viewfinder instead of just ‘looking’.
I know that I want to take portraits and draw those faces. The connection between the line and the shape of a face is one that I find very interesting. Especially the continuous line and how it connects both the photo and the shapes of the face in the photo together with one line.
I appreciate you ‘seeing’ along with me and would love to hear how your creative process may be evolving during this strange and unprecedented time.
