Rob, there seems to be a commonality between many of your links. It's what I would loosely describe as the ethereal, a genre/look that I've admired over many years.
I was just wondering if you ever had clients who were open to and commissioned you to produce work of this ilk or perhaps it's something that you have experimented with on a personal rather than commercial level?
Keith
And here the great tease of professional life: my muse, Fiona, was as much into Moon and Bailey and all the rest of 'em as was I, and that made her stand out for me, because the remainder of the local bunch of models - with the exception of a few that I was
forced to use if only to ring the changes, was totally DOA. She wasn't the most beautiful of the local ones, but she could emote, project, and more than make up for it; it was a far more valuable quality! And she loved working, which was priceless.
The muse had the added advantage of coming from a very wealthy family and her mother always brought her stuff from their travels, stuff she knew the girl could use for modelling; her bag of tricks was overflowing with rings, necklaces, this and thats. She also had a good set of connections within the rag trade and never had problems picking up stuff to borrow for our private photography. We did all sorts of stuff, including blurred running shots in the wooded hills above Loch Lomond: Balmaha; stamper knows the place well. She could do Twiggy lower lashes better than Twiggy could! Models knew about makeup in those days, and most did their own - at least on my gigs.
So, what happened? I put together a portfolio mostly made from our mucking about shots, and it was what I used to tout around various could-be clients, but the irony was that despìte all the ooohs! and aaahs!, the work I did for them was invariably fairly straight, for obvious commercial reasons: selling is not the same as editorial, as you know.
Sarah Moon's Pirelli in France was - and remains my favourite. By pure coincidence, my second Tennent's calendar was scheduled for the South of France, and the client had been talking about doing it in "paintely" manner. One of my other clients had that Pirelli, and so I borrowed it and took it along to a meeting with my lager client. He almost had a fit on the spot. Apparently, highly-grained pictures of girls in a château is not what he had in mind at all! So, we ended up using Kodachrome... Beware people talking about painterly anything - they sometimes don't know what they mean!
I got the chance to try that kind of stuff for another client - Barbour Threads -and we did three cals together. The first was with Fiona, another with Jaleh Hadad (a beautiful Persian girl from Bobton's agency) and another with Susan Shaw, who, if memory serves, was the librarian in the Smirnoff series of posters. She looked like a very earthy Bardot, and features in my pro gallery in the website... she has a strip of six black/white pix to herself there. I have nothing from the calendar with Jaleh. The only reason I have anything with Susan is because I kept some printer's proofs which I then, decades later, had encapsulated in plastic which explains why the shots I have in the gallery (from that job) are oblique, and on a board: I couldn't kill the reflections straight on. No negatives survived, worse luck, but I know without doubt that they were not amongst the ones I sold back to clients or destroyed prior to leaving the UK. What a bloody mistake to destroy things, but then, there was no Internet and photographs were decidedly nor art - yet!
So yes, I have always loved that fin de siècle kind of woman, as well as the 20s/30s eras. I was always out of time.
Rob
