For Piers Atkinson's lookbook, reviled at fashion week 17th-21st.
Styling Kim Howells, Hair by Kenna, Make up by Martina Luisetti.
Of late I have been thinking about something an old photography teacher told me, something about outlines, something of which has never left me. This was before my long trudge of formal education and long before I became a professional Photographer.
The twist is, I can’t tell if this information was ever even told to me at all or if it is the work of my perverted mind like so many other things I remember.
I remember being told, that before photography was here, in its vernacular sense, loved ones might remember their other loved ones by drawing their outlines on a wall. As though you might go from house to house and see outlines everywhere, like ghosts on the walls. Thousands of them.
I’m so used to the idea of seeing outlines as a mark of death in crime scenes but these are scenes of intense love and romance but involve (in a sense) the same imagination. I suppose the two have always been so closely linked for me aesthetically.
I imagine this scene as a white outline on a blackened wall. This seems much more tangible to me than a photograph, obviously I can’t carry this around, but I might trace around it and remember the form, stance, shape and mass of my loved one.
This may or may not have been something that happened regularly, but I want an outline of someone I love.
I want evidence that she existed, photography affirms this but to remember her as a nebulous with mass, with weight, something I can hold this is the one thing photography can never give me, so, as a work of documentation it fails me.