Through A Glass Darkly

Zara Carpenter stepped nervously onto the catwalk for the very first time. What was she doing here? She was a poet, not a model! Her friend Fanny Kellerman had insisted, “I absolutely want you to. You’re perfect!” A few steps later, Zara spotted a handsome photographer at the end of the runway. Nerves vanished, and the die was cast. She had seen her future husband.

Zara was mostly writing poetry at the time, a lot of which was autobiographical, and that is where Rikard’s interest lies in photography. She had published two books by then and had also been in several anthologies. When she was 15, Zara went to a youth club in Sittingbourne, where she was living at the time, and a youth worker there was Bill Lewis, one of the Medway Poets. “I eventually showed him some of my work, and he introduced me to the work of the Beat poets and showed me stuff that school never did!”

Rikard joined a media program to study photography, “The darkroom was a key feature to how I got into photography, but I was very into music, which at that time was grunge, so it was that and also Edvard Munch.” Photography gradually became more important to Rikard as he became interested in portraiture and shooting bands, so he went to a junior college to study media, photography, graphic design, video film-making, exhibition curation, and radio. He began spending most of his spare time in the darkroom. In 2001, Rikard moved to the UK to do a degree in Editorial and Advertising photography at The Kent Institute of Art and Design (K.I.A.D.), now part of UCA (University for the Creative Arts in Rochester). Sweden, at that time, only had two photography degree courses.

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