Form Magazine by Avenley Horner

kirsty mitchell lara jade

9780733426094

ISBN 978-0-7334-2609-4

behind the scenes

her journey to fame

May 2013 $7.95

Issue 01

w w w.for m a ga zine .com

red

showcase

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CONTENTS 05 | Welcome 11 | The Cue: Letter from the Editor 14 | Q & A: Lara Jade 18 | Conceptual Brainstorming

Photograph by Avenley Brianne

Features 46 | Behind the Scenes with Kirsty Mitchell 26 | A Study of Movement 32 | Showcase: RED 57 | The Infinity Studio

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The

Cue

From the Editors

Welcome to 2013, a new Year filled with new events that will determine the rise or fall of our civilization. Now more than ever, the scent of change is in the air, swirling, dancing, lifting us to greater heights. With that in mind we forge ahead, filled with wonder and excitement, in celebration of those who are pushing us forward. In the fashion sphere alone, a shuffling of designers has breathed new life into stately establishments. Most notable among the changes, Alexander Wang is taking the reins at Balenciaga; Hedi Slimane added some rock-and-roll edge to Saint Laurent; and Raf Simons, whose lovely, light-as-are-ready-to-wear debut at Dior is pictured here. Collectively, the figures who populate this issue—hailing from the realms of fashion, art, music, and pop culture—are making the world a more compelling place with their boundless determination and savvy. Those two adjectives describe our cover star to a T. The pretty and precocious Kristen Stewart not only oozes talent but also possesses an inherent beauty that cannot be denied—especially as captured by the incomparable Inez and Vinoodh. In talking with us, the actress reveals her tactics for surviving constant media scrutiny while establishing her young self (she is all of 22) as both a person and a professional. Her confession that she’s “stronger than ever” promises even bigger and better projects in the years to come. Indeed, youthful energy permeates these pages. Ingenues Bella Heathcote and Hailee Steingeld model spring’s newest fashions, and the wise-cracking Lena Dunham—set your DVR, she kicks off her second season of Girls on January 13—comfortably spent the day in a Calvin Klein leotard for her shoot with Terry Richardson. Elsewhere in the issue, Mario Testino flexes his photographic muscles with a shoot featuring the world’s new supermodels. The setting for such a glamorous scene? None other than Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, where the Peruvian has been enjoying his first exhibition in the United States, a commemoration of his latest tome of colorful photos, InYour Face. The idea of giving back is perhaps the greatest motivator of all. In an ode to selflessness, Inez and Vinoodh offer a portfolio of charitable stars who donated pieces of TENTHOUSANDTHINGS jewelry, all of which will be on the auction block starting February 6 on CharityBuzz.com. Proceeds will be donated to each celeb’s preferred cause. The TTT series, as it has come to be known in this office, is the brainchild of the brand’s founders, David Rees and Ron Anderson, who wanted to celebrate their twentieth anniversary in true style. Head to the website to support important initiative—and possibly snag a sparkly new addition to your own spring wardrobe.

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Lara Jade AN INTERVIEW BY LEON GREY

“I’m a fashion, portrait & advertising photographer from England and currently living in NewYork City.” How did you get interested in photography and how did you get your first paid assignment? I started photography at the age of fourteen, experimenting with self-portraiture and fine art photography to hone my skills. Being the daughter of two creatives (my mother was a make-up artist for Mary Quant back in the day, and although my dad never had a creative career, he was always building models and encouraging me to draw and paint when I was younger) it seemed only necessary that I would fit into the art world somewhere. Art seemed exciting to me, but I could never find the right medium, nothing seemed to ‘fit’, that is, until I found photography.

all photography taken by Lara Jade

Self Portrait by Lara Jade

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What equipment do you work with? Are you still using the Canon 5D? I believe that equipment is only a tool in the process of making great imagery. Photography requires a great eye and an understanding of what you want to achieve, before technical skill is taken into account. I currently use the Canon 5D mkII (previously the Canon 5d Mk I and Canon 350D) because it has the flexibility I need in creating photography. The lenses I use depend on the task at hand, but the Canon 85mm 1.2 almost never leaves my camera body. I also use the 50mm 1.4, 24-70mm 2.8 and 70-200mm 2.8 lenses.

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n regards to lighting – I try and go natural as much as possible and reference back to the older masters with their own lighting skills. In the studio, I try and manipulate daylight by using soft lighting by the use of soft boxes and continuous lighting. On location, I rarely use accessories unless required on a job. Now you’re shooting for magazines such as ELLE and big clients like Lavazza, Sony Music and the BBC, but I read that earlier in your career you sometimes missed out on jobs because the clients thought you were too young even though you had the talent. What tips do you have for young photographers who have a hard time breaking into the industry? It’s only natural for clients to be wary of a teenager shooting campaigns and being trusted with large budgets – so I can fully understand why some of my original meetings during my teenage years didn’t lead to anything. However, I realized that time is a great thing – and with time I became a better photographer and developed a better understanding of how to work with other professionals; looking back, I am glad that I wasn’t put in such a respected position that early on.

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If you’re a photographer just starting out, then my biggest piece of advice to you is not to rush, there’s plenty of time in the world to get work. The first few years of your career are incredibly important – focus on building your portfolio, finding your style and finding yourself. Once you have a portfolio you’re (half) happy with and you’re confident in your technique, then this will be the time to start approaching photography as a business and reaching out to clients you want to work for.Your confidence will show in the connection (whether on e-mail or in person) and will be a big help in the client deciding whether you are right for the job! You have over 60,000 fans on Facebook and over 18,000 followers on Twitter. What are the secrets to your massive success on the social networks? A lot of people ask me how I managed to get such a strong following online and all I can say is that there is no secret. I’ve spent over six years advertising my work and raising my profile within the online photography communities and I’ve managed to achieve a recognizable style by constantly keeping myself inspired

and by keeping an open mind to new work, new opportunities and jobs. Deviantart and Flickr have played an important part in getting your work recognized. Do you feel those sites still have the impact they used to or have you shifted focus to other sites? In the early days, I used social media partly because I had no other way of getting my work out into the industry

laura jade

and partly because I enjoyed being part of online communities! Since DeviantART and Flickr were very community-driven, it helped me understand my style very early on and what I wanted to achieve. Today, I still use social media because I feel like it’s part of my journey; although I don’t rely on it solely to share my portfolio or to get work, I still enjoy sharing and browsing through the online photography communities. It’s just hard to keep track of all of the different communities!

What balance between promotion and personality have you found works best online? It’s important to show your personality (without sharing your whole life online!) and how that inspires your work and how you approach your career. Clients love seeing what goes on behind-the-scenes and how you relate to your work – online and in person – because it gives a whole new light to your work.

things up once you get to the location? My shoot processes are all dependent on the task at hand. If I’m shooting a job, then obviously there will be a lot of prep work involved (more so than usual), which could be anything from 2 weeks to 2 months in advance. For a personal shoot, this could be 2-3 weeks in advance because I don’t require detailed meetings or castings. In both cases, things are likely to change last minute so you

Have you gotten any jobs as a direct result of being visible on social networks like Facebook and Twitter? I’m going to be honest – clients don’t necessarily browse through photography communities trying to find the right photographer for a job, especially in the current economy. However, I have received several opportunities that have led to meetings and then jobs further on down the line. Social media is a fantastic way of keeping everything in a loop – you need to put as much effort in offline as you do online – networking, meetings, phone calls etc.

always need to be prepared if the opportunity arises – make a plan B or be in close contact with your client and team.

Your shots often have really amazing styling and lighting. Any tips for aspiring fashion photographers? I try and work closely with my styling team and model – they know exactly what theme I am working towards on the day and I am with them – every step of the way on the styling process. A fashion shoot is a collaboration; we are all there to achieve the same goal. My advice would be to find a creative team that you enjoy working with and get familiar with your contacts – great agency and styling contacts are really going to bring your work to the next level.

If you could go back in time and tell yourself something that would have made the start of your career as a photographer easier, what would it be? To listen to the best and to shoot more!

Do you work with a large team? When I first started photography, I preferred shooting with just me and the model; I still do today. However, fashion photography requires a team and hands on deck from all sides of the industry – I always work with a make-up artist, hair stylist, wardrobe stylist and an assistant – and often more people depending on the shoot. Whenever I shoot personal work, I like to reference back to my roots and limit the amount of people on set to get the best out of the shoot.

Are you still doing self portraits? I enjoyed the process of self-portraits early on my career because it enabled me to share my ideas and hone my skills. Unfortunately I rarely have the chance to do them with my current schedule, but, I’d like to do something incredibly unique, which would take some planning, however, with that said, I would love to do create a few more this year!

If you could set up a photo shoot with anyone you wanted anywhere in the world, who would you choose and why would you choose them? I’d love to be able to visit some iconic landscapes and shoot new projects. I have Iceland, India and Australia on the cards for next year, so we’ll see how that one pans out! In regards to who I’d love to have the opportunity to photograph, that would have to be fashion models Sasha Pivovarova, Lily Cole, Abbey Lee Kershaw or Jessica Stam. I also would not pass up the opportunity to photograph the amazing Andrej Pejic again!

What is your process for a new shoot? Do you plan a lot in advance or make

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Panoramic Shooting with Available Light Follow the light Find the light and you’ll probably find the picture. There can be great light, even if there wasn’t a lot of it. (A tripod can fix that.) The same goes for photographing an Irish pub (find one with nice light) or the streets of New York (Times Square is actually very bright). Balance the light Contrast is your enemy. The big problem is not necessarily that it is dark but that the scene is so bright in some places and dark in others. The range from light to dark is simply more than the camera can handle well. So start training your eye to recognize where the light from all the sources is fairly well balanced. Suddenly your pictures will start looking rich and colorful. Go with a faster lens “Fast” means a big f-stop, like f/2 or f/1.4. Big f-stops deliver more light. The truth is that really good f/1.4 lenses are rare. The shallow depth of field combined with the low light of the scene means that getting a sharp focus is exceedingly tough. Better: f/2 lenses. When you get to f/2.8, most lenses deliver decent optical quality along with sufficient depth of field to generate real working images. Note: Most affordable zoom lenses may start out at f/2.8 at the wide-angle position and end up at f4.5, or slower, at the telephoto end of the zoom range. However, f/4.5 won’t cut it for available light.

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Photograph by Molly Strohl

Consider using a prime lens If that phrase isn’t familiar to you, it just means a non-zoom lens. A 24mm f/2.8 lens is a good example. A 50mm f/1.8 is another. They almost always have a faster f-stop and, hence, will do better in low light. There are two other reasons why prime lenses are the available-light photographers’ friends. First, they are smaller and easier to handle, making working in tight situations more natural. Second, they generally have less flare. They work better “against” the light. Maximize your ISO When a camera can really crank up the ISO, there is real payoff—and it is a digital-age wonder. Today’s cameras routinely go up to ISO 3200 and deliver great image quality. I regularly pay a premium for cameras that deliver good images at ISO 6400 and higher. P.S. If you get noise in your pictures with the higher ISO, get over it. A good picture will trump a little noise every time. Wait to shoot until people look into the light If you’re trying to photograph people in miserably low light, simply wait until your subject looks up into the light. When they do, be ready.You may have only an instant when their faces are fully lit. Suddenly a “bad” light situation will become tolerable. Calm down Camera shake is your greatest enemy. Take a moment to calm down, breathe easy, concentrate, let your heartbeat slow, and

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get in the zone. Learn to lean on things to gain support. Squeeze off the shutter, smoothly and without jerking. Wait for motionless moments Pay attention to your subjects; they often have moments when they stop moving for a second or two. Often they will do it again. Learn their tells and you can be ready when the next moment of stillness happens. Use your motor drive The motor drive is also known as “the poor man’s tripod.” True enough. If you fire off five shots with the motor drive, at least one of them should be sharper than the rest, for lots of reasons. The motion of pushing the shutter often blurs the first frame but the second and third frames are much sharper. With a subject that is moving, your camera’s motor drive gives you better odds of capturing a sharp shot.

Photograph by Morey Spellman

Gain a Fresh View

Photograph by Molly Strohl

Finding the right point of view is often the key to making fresh pictures. So let me get to the point: If you had the choice of buying two new pieces of gear to improve your photography, which two would you choose: a new lens, a stepladder, or kneepads? Easy! Buy the stepladder and the kneepads. Nothing will improve your photography faster or make you look more “creative” than a fresh viewpoint. And getting that fresh viewpoint is often rather mechanical. It doesn’t involve reading novels by Tolstoy

or deep meditation leading to mystical revelations. It involves putting your camera in some unique location that will give you a new, novel, useful, or intriguing viewpoint. No other gadget you can carry in your bag is as valuable. And no other photographic technique is as neglected by the vast hordes of photographers producing pictures. Put even more simply it comes down to this: rely more on legwork, less on Photoshop.

Lenses for Travel Cultural Travel You are exploring Europe’s rich cultural heritage—lots of museums, cathedrals and architecture, rides on canal boats through Amsterdam, and generally gawking at impressive castles and towers. First of all, take the kit lens that came with your digital SLR. Usually this is something like an 1855mm, and it covers from a moderate wide angle to a short telephoto view. If you want to upgrade, then consider something like an 18-105mm or the ideal “vacation lens,” an 18-200mm. If you are going to carry just one lens, that would be it. If you are able to carry another lens, then seriously consider a really wide-angle lens, like a 10-22mm or a 12-24mm lens. These super-wides make eye-popping images out of cramped interiors. And they aren’t big and heavy.

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Wildlife Expedition You are going on an African safari-style trip. How far away will the animals be? No one knows for sure. Leopards may be hidden in a distant tree while lions are sleeping in the shade of your Land Rover. We do know:You’ll be shooting from the vehicle with little chance to move closer. So you will need a long-range zoom lens. This is where the 100-400mm comes into its own. It is sizable but you won’t need to carry it long distances. A lighter alternative is the 70-300mm lens, which will often be long enough. Anything less is inviting disappointment. Take a beanbag or something soft you can steady the lens with as you stand up to shoot out of the Land Rover’s sunroof. Take along that shorter kit lens, too; you’ll want camp photos and you’ll be close enough to animals occasionally.

Nature Trek This is different than a wildlife expedition. Whether you are hiking the rain forest or the Canadian Rockies, you will want a wide-angle zoom.You might also carry something that will get out to medium telephoto—about 200mm. In the rain forest, using the really long zoom will be difficult, since rain forests tend to be dark. And in the mountains, long telephoto shots are not very satisfying. It’s the juxtaposition of the nearby meadow flowers or turquoise lake that sets off the mountains’ grandeur. Consider adding to this kit a true macro lens (not just a zoom that has a macro range). Examples of these would be a 60mm f/2.8 or a 100mm f/2.8. No other lens is as useful when you want to get to the heart of wildflowers, tiny mushrooms, and insects.

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MOVE a study of

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MENT Written by Jem Carstairs Photography by Molly Strohl

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veryone loves an architecture show about houses because all that is required of someone looking at a house is, as Gaston Bachelard writes in The Poetics of Space, “the ability to transcend our memories of all the houses in which we have found shelter [and] all the houses we have dreamed we live in” — beginning, of course, with the house we first lived in. Although visitors may appreciate the solo exhibition of a major architect, they are not usually as intimately involved in the thought processes behind the design of a concert hall, for example, and are likely to give up on reading detailed drawings. But presented with the plan of a house, people immediately walk through it in their imaginations. And architects’ models of houses spark, as dollhouses do, a level of fantasy

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that makes it possible to experience the physical sensation of being in a new and yet familiar space. Also, house exhibitions are more about the future than they are about the past. When Barbara Jakobson (using the name B.J. Archer) staged “Houses for Sale” at the Leo Castelli Gallery in New York in 1980, she invited eight international architects to design private dwellings, showing the form to be fertile ground for architectural invention — “a geometric object of balanced voids and solids to be analyzed rationally,” as she wrote in the catalogue. Isozaki’s House of Nine Squares foretold his Palladian classicism, and Emilio Ambasz’s Arcadian Berm House spoke of that architect’s concern for the interest in solar energy. In 1985, the winning designs on view at the Boston Architectural Center, from a Minneapolis College of Art and Design competition called “A New American House,” dealt with community life and the need for cluster housing that could provide work spaces at home as well as conve-

nient child care. These houses, with backyards and gabled roofs, lent an aura of traditional reassurance to new social trends. This year, with “The Un-Private House,” the Museum of Modern Art is displaying 26 houses designed since 1988 — all but six of which have been or are being built. The show deals with new social patterns that call for fresh architectural solutions, in particular ones that combine working spaces with living spaces and that find a place for the virtual world in the home. Like a computer, the contemporary house concentrates, according to the museum, on transmitting signals to the outside world at the cost of intimacy and privacy. Also, in a reversal of the norms of the “family room” era, children are frequently banished to separate quarters, and clients are just as likely to live alone or in same-sex relationships as in traditional

nuclear families. Terence Riley, who organized the show as chief curator of the museum’s department of architecture and design, poses the main question in his catalogue essay: “If the private house no longer has a domestic character, what sort of character will it have?” The answers come from a diverse group of architects, some better known than others, representing Europe, South America, Japan, and the United States. One curious aspect of the exhibition design is the selection of the old-fashioned William Morris Larkspur pattern as the wallpaper backdrop for the show’s large-format photographs and drawings. The Arts and Crafts movement as defined by Morris took inspiration from a romanticized past — but perhaps the contrast is the point. The wallpaper does suit the heavy worktables, beds, bookshelves, and other comfortable objects provided by the Furniture Company that

serve as ready-made pedestals for the models and that give a workmanlike quality to the galleries, as if these rooms were part of an architect’s studio and home combined. On the whole, the houses and loft apartments on view are anything but cozy. Rather, the architects are committed to design whose appeal lies in its response to and integration of advanced technologies and new materials. Sleekness here runs more than skin deep. After years of the decorative pastiche associated with Post-Modernism, it came as both a surprise and a relief that the reigning influence in this exhibition was Mies van der Rohe and, in particular, the Farnsworth House, which the architect designed some 50 years ago in Plano, Illinois, as a weekend retreat for his close friend,

Dr. Edith Farnsworth. A glass box with a flat roof and evenly spaced structural steel I-beams painted white, the house dematerializes at night (even with the draperies closed) into a cube of light. There have been many copies since, but the architects in the museum show are creating radical variations on the theme, skewing the form by selecting and developing only certain aspects of Mies’s design to advance new ideas about the configuration of rooms and the requirements of the electronic age. Two houses in Tokyo by Japanese architects are among the most exciting. On one of Tokyo’s eclectic and densely packed streets, Shigeru Ban’s billboard for Modernism. In reversing the fundamental order — by hanging glass inside and curtains outside — the architect explores the formal possibilities offered by the traditional Japanese shoji-screen house, where translucency is valued over transparency. The glass sits inside sliding panels and retracts into corners of the house, and once drawn, the sailcloth curtain (besides making an obvious but witty allusion to non-load-bearing

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walls) provides shade during the day and privacy for the evening. More in keeping with Mies’s courtyard houses, the M House by Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa is separated from its residential street by a wall of perforated metal, behind which translucent polycarbonate windows filter light into a two-story central courtyard that is sunk, along with the dining, work, and living areas, below ground level. This courtyard and two other light courts are open to the sky, so that in passing through them, one is exposed to the weather as in a traditional Japanese house. The rectangular rooms, upstairs and down, run between the light courts in a configuration that limits privacy within the house — although the streetscape is effectively screened out. Now under construction in Napa Valley, California, the Kramlich Residence and Media Collection, designed by Herzog & de Meuron, features an angular, flat-roofed Miesian glass pavilion over a series of subterranean galleries, including one in an underground garage, for the couple’s collection of electronic art. Even the curved inner walls of the pavilion function as screens for video, films, and digital art, which compete with the view of nature beyond the structure’s glass walls. In the same vein, Diller + Scofidio’s half-crescent-shaped Slow House, an unbuilt project for a site on Long Island, features a video camera that records the view through the house’s immense atelier-style picture window and allows for instant replay on a monitor inside. And the main walls of Hariri & Hariri’s project for a Digital House feature liquid-crystal displays that allow for videoconferencing with virtual guests in the living room as well as cooking lessons from a televised chef in the kitchen.

Two row houses on Borneo Sporenburg in Amsterdam by MVRDV, meanwhile, play with transparency and opacity on a large scale: one presents a glass facade to the street, behind which most of its rooms are boxed off by inner walls; the other hides behind a traditional masonry facade but reveals much of its interior through a glass wall running along one side. (The pattern of boxed-off and exposed rooms recalls the vertical grid of Gerrit Rietveld’s Schröder House in Utrecht, a model of which is conveniently on view, along with one of Mies’s Tugendhat House, in the top-floor architecture galleries.) Whether Riley has proved his theory about the loss of privacy is questionable. Despite the intrusions of the outside world through glass walls and electronic hookups, people still retain the option of turning off their computers or otherwise retreating — and many of the architects represented in the show have proven adept at helping them do just that. Perhaps it is the incursion of professional work spaces into private homes and the concomitant loss of the “study” as an arena for contemplation. Perhaps it is the incursion of professional work spaces into private homes and the concomitant loss of the “study” as an arena for contemplation (Riley calls it a nineteenth-century room) that is more indicative of the loss of privacy than the other. But even some of the houses in the show offer this kind of refuge: The T House by Simon Ungers with Thomas Kinslow, for example, has a separate library tower of weathering-steel plates that can fit 10,000 books as well as a wonderful reading area. And there is also Rem Koolhaas’s Maison à Bor-deaux, where the wheelchair-bound owner can sit at his desk on an open elevator platform while it moves along a threestory wall of bookshelves —

“An expanded notion of the study, perhaps, but still a solitary place to think and to dream.”

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Photography by Avenley Brianne

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a showcase of submissions by photographers globally Photograph by Kelly Steffy

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Photography by Kelly Steffy

Photograph by Molly Strohl 36 | Form Magazine Issue 3

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Photograph by Valerie Kasinski

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Photograph by Kelly Steffy

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Photography by Avenley Brianne

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Photography by Morey Spellman

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Photograph by Molly Strohl

ift w S host tumn itc hell G e T h r o f Au r s t y M f o oo r Ki ing M a k L a s t D a p h y by a S k e e t e Rit The t og r

P h o i t t e n by Wr

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ld r o w a look into the

sty mitchell r i k of

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nce again, it feels like such a relief to finally be sitting here writing a new Wonderland entry. My progress with the series has been completely taken over by the recent exhibitions and the writing of endless letters to people about the future of the project. Getting back to my heart and soul, is where I am my most comfortable and happiest, and I’m determined to catch up on the backlog that’s been hanging over me. I have a further four finished pictures waiting to be shared with one tiny shoot to complete, before I can (at last) release the big scenes I have been sitting on for over 18 months. Progress is so slow some days I find it agonizing, but there’s no way to create these images quickly, it is a labor of love and I just have to keep working until I make it to the end. In recent weeks at the exhibitions so many people asked me why I do this, why I insist on making it all by hand and spend months on just a couple of pictures. I found my only explanation was simply that my mother did the same for me and her pupils – except in her case it was years devoted to helping us grow and develop. I simply want to produce works that are truly precious, and reflect her investment of time and love, and I suppose without me even realizing, this parallel between our relationship and my work is the ultimate one. So anyway, now at long last I can finally introduce you to ‘The Ghost Swift’ whose close up portrait has become my new favorite image. She has been locked away in my head for over 20 months, and her costume has been under very slow construction since 2011. She has been a character I have constantly returned to over time, adding a little piece here and a little piece there, whilst her scene in my head has evolved from

being relatively small to something much bigger. Her character represents a creature born from the essence of stories – a body of books and forgotten ripped pages, created by the natural elements and insects that surround her. I wanted her half human form to be the marriage of the earth and printed words; spun together by the moths and butterflies that shared the hollow she would spend her lifeguarding. I named her lair ‘The Last Door of Autumn’ an impassable place without the heavy iron keys in her hands. This farthest outreach of Wonderland is home to her, and a sister with a second key who will be coming soon. Both ruled by the White Queen, both instrumental in the ending of the series. For these scenes I wanted to create an image based on the trickery of tales, and so my choice to use paper was a direct link to the true story of the Cottingley Fairies , which my mother told me about when I was young. I have been mildly obsessed with the history of the Cottingley photographs for most of my life, and the fact it was all a lie that the girls maintained till their old age both inspires and intrigues me. Personally I have never liked sickly sweet stories, it is the underlying darkness of folklore, the roses thorn, broken promises, and moonlit curses that make my skin prickle. I loved the idea of creating a vision in the woods from paper – to indulge my own elaborate illusion for a photograph, and so I began collecting books of moths and butterflies from the same period as the original hoax. Once I had the illustrations I began building the costume from hundreds of paper cuts. I also designed embroideries based on scientific etchings of butterflies from the early 1900’s, which were sewn onto sheets of silk, and then cut and layered with

glue to make 3D pieces. It took weeks to hand cut everything I needed – especially as almost all of the butterflies were double faced, so they could be viewed from all angles. The tiny prayer books were donated by a family whose grandmother had received them as gifts in memory of her husband after he had passed away. This mix of beauty and sadness felt right for the costume, so I embedded them into the bodice and varnished the handwritten messages to the front page where they would remain preserved and not forgotten. My intention with the pictures was to create an encounter for us the viewer to happen upon ‘The Ghost Swift’, silent and asleep after years of being left undisturbed in the forest alone. I wanted her close up portrait to be hypnotic, a swirling blur of dark beauty and anticipation her awakening, and our apprehension. I feel the slight curl of her fingers and the parting of her lips leave us arrested, and for me, that is what I love the most. I actually discovered the name ‘ghost swift’ after coming across its description in one of the books I cut the illustrations from. The name is given to a small British moth due to it having a white top wing with a dark underside, so when it hovers at twilight it seems to appear and disappear with each beat of its wing. It was perfect and magical, and instantly brought the character to life in my head. Moments like this give me goose-bumps, sitting on my kitchen floor reading the old book and discovering the Ghost Swift amongst the pages felt like it had been waiting for me all those years. I know I’m a hopeless dreamer and to most these are all just coincidences, but it’s these fine threads of belief and wonder that will always keep me excited, and drive me to follow my imagination to the

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er character represents a creature born from the essence of stories â&#x20AC;&#x201C; a body of books and forgotten ripped pages, created by the natural elements and insects that surround her. Her half human form represents the marriage of the earth and printed words; spun together by the moths and butterflies that shared the hollow she would spend her lifeguarding. Her lair is named â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;The Last Door of Autumnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; an impassable place without the heavy iron keys in her hands.This farthest outreach of Wonderland is home to her and a sister with a second key.

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next picture, and the next, and consequently the story it will eventually unfold. With the arrival of Gaia, we are now entering the penultimate stages of Wonderland. The name Gaia is taken from the ancient Greek goddess who was seen as the personification of Earth, – basically our modern day ‘Mother Nature’. For so long

Gaia through Katie’s eyes, as we move from her arrival to ‘The Promise’ and finally ‘The spell’. The original pictures I took of ‘The Queen’s Centurion’ were beautiful, but I felt weren’t purposeful enough to communicate her part in the tale. I had shot her on the same day as ‘The Ghost Swift’ in the woods, and had been so excited about

us through the scenes which is known to me, but left to the viewer to interpret. Its true to say my personal emotions will always heavily rein over the pictures as I produce them, and for me the centurion is torn about her purpose: she is positioned in a waxen shrine of twisted tree roots and magical keys, designed to distract the viewer from

Wonderland has been in heavy emotional darkness, as we have moved through the swamps of The White Queen, the dark woods of King Gammelyn, the twisted tree roots of The Ghost Swift and The Queen’s Centurion, to pass under the Autumn trees at the start of Katie’s journey towards home. Underneath it all there has been a turmoil, until Katie’s final awakening in ‘Let your heart be the map’. The reason for the powerful light on Katie’s face, and the breeze in her hair was to link it to the moment she witnesses Gaia for the first time. Gaia is her salvation, and the one who has come to take Katie (and us) home. She arrives in a blast of sunlight to lead Katie and the key onto the right path. As I always said the color yellow was significant, because for me is has always meant home, both in the story of the Wizard Of OZ, but also in my real childhood growing up in the fields of Kent, where rape seed was always a part of the landscape. In these new scenes we are viewing

the results, but upon reflection and after all the work I had put into the costume, I decided they weren’t enough. ‘The Queen’s Centurion’ is the second of the key holders we experience in Wonderland, and is the guardian of The White Queen’s key. Like so many of the characters from this years darker side of the series, her initial picture is almost devoid of human expression. I always imagined her as more of an automaton controlled by the queen, banished to the outer reaches of Wonderland, in order to hide and protect the precious key embedded into her chest. I guess I feel a great sadness for her, there is an overwhelming loneliness to the point of her existence, which is why I decided to add a single tear in my post production – this is also linked to the phenomena of weeping holy statues (which I’ll come to later). As I have always said there is not a direct fictional narrative to Wonderland, but an underlying story that guides

selecting the one belonging to the queen. The key will ultimately lead the main character Katie (who represents us) away from Wonderland, taking her light and warmth with her, and so the centurion is aware that only darkness will follow once her key is taken from her. But for now this is all I can write, your imagination should be guided in the right direction, until the next scenes are ready to continue the story, and lead us all to the end of the series. And maybe if you have a moment, for the first time since I started the series I now feel I can look back over the entire project so far with a genuine satisfaction I have covered the goals I set out with. All the colors, all the seasons, the good and evil, everything stands out with a new clarity. I finally feel as though this project can stand on it’s own. I hope you all feel the same. Keep a look out for ‘The Ghost Swift’s’ sister and her missing key in later shoots to come.

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