Hugh O’Malley Fashion Photographer London

I occasionally shoot menswear. This for a recent client who called me up on a Monday and we shot on the Wednesday.  I had his retouched images back to him on the Thursday afternoon (18 looks).

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I like it when a plan comes together.

Model: Harry
Grooming: Stephanie Stokkvik
Assistant: Muriel Schouten

This was one of the most powerful exhibitions I’ve been to in a long time. Massive in scale, comprehensive in its inclusions and deep in background material, this was such an enjoyable show from start to finish. I’m a massive Bacon fan to start with and I know he’s not for everyone but I thoroughly recommend.

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Further coverage on the Tate’s site.

Charles Darwent’s review on the Telegraph’s site.

While I was at the Tate i popped in to see the Turner Prize. The usual detritus designed to get up the nose of the public.

Judging by what was on show, and I’ve not been as avid an art gallery visitor since I graduated from Art college, I do feel that Marc Leckey was the deserved winner. In writing that I realise how strange it is to have a horse race for artists, ifn y’all catch ma drift…

This got me excited.

I had been moaning previously about Nikon’s low pixel count here. I think they heard my gripes and have answered them.

Now the £5k price tag is a little out of my budget but what always happens with these big releases is that they release a prosumer model a few months down the road. Don’t believe me - you can check out the likelihood yourself on this chart on DPreview.

Excited as I was about the idea of purchasing the Canon 5ds Mkii, I think i’ll hold off a few months and see what the future holds.

I’m heading off to India next week for about 2 months. I’ll post a few shots here when i get back. In the meantime it might be a little quiet…

Deborah from Vinjean kindly requested a few of my images to showcase on their site…

http://www.vinjeanstyle.com/

After waiting a few weeks for the right opportunity to see this exhibition I finally managed to find the chance to go on a Monday afternoon. I knew this would be a popular exhibition and was dreading the thought of having to go in on a weekend when I knew it would be reamed.

Even though it was Monday it was still pretty busy but not in such a way that it was unpleasant to negotiate the show. In general, I’m a big fan of Leibovitz’s work and was relishing the idea of seeing some of her more celebrated work up close and in this respect I wasn’t disappointed. Many of the iconic pieces she’s become celebrated for are in the show – among the famous – Brad Pitt lolling around in some anonymous motel, Demi Moore heavily pregnant, and among the infamous - various heads of state including the newly inaugurated George Bush in the Oval office at the beginning of his last term surrounded by Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice et. al.

I’ve always admired Leibovitz for the cinematic quality to her work – the beautifully controlled lighting, the wonderful composition and the sense of drama evoked from her compositions. She has a wonderful ability to evoke something quintessential about her subjects and to somehow dip below the usually carefully stage managed personas of her subjects. And this is why I was so underwhelmed by her personal shots. Although the narratives are profound – the death of her long time lover Susan Sontag to leukaemia, the death of her father, the birth of her daughters, the images are in my opinion banal. It’s as if there’s two very different photographers on show here – one a brilliant, creative, talented individual and another reasonably competent amateur sharing space and one drags the other down.

I visited the Araki exhibition at the Barbican a few years ago and whether you love or hate the man’s work at least you could see that his is not a completely compartmentalised artistry. Polaroids of bondage shared space with polaroids of his daily meals and each were as engrossing and visually stunning as the other. The emptiness of the photos he took after the death of his wife – shots on the roof of his apartment were testaments to the despair and loss and possibly the rudderlessness he experienced after his death. I felt no such emotion or expression from Leibovitz. More of an impassive voyeurism with little connection to the subjects which is nearly the opposite of her magnificent editorial work.

It piqued me personally to see her quote about studio photographers (caveat: I am one): “I don’t like trying to make something happen in the studio. It feels cheap to me,” as this is exactly what she does in her practice. Her work is all about making that iconic moment and whether it happens in the studio or on location is moot. And on top of that much of her work is studio based and are all her subjects not performing for the camera anyway?

Although there’s some duplication from the Vanity Fair Portraits on show at the national portrait gallery earlier in the year there’s quite an amount of work I’d never seen before and much I’d seen but only in magazines, I would strongly recommend checking it out.

Annie Leibovitz at the National Portrait Gallery until 1st February 2009

Things that have made me go wow! recently.

1. Katie Grand is leaving POP to work on a new magazine for Condé Nast - ‘Love‘. I loved POP, and always found it very inspirational. Seems it will be continuing on with a new editor, but will it be the same without Katie?

2. The video collaboration between Nick Knight and Gareth Pugh

More here

a few images from a recent shoot published in Cache…

check them out…

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I recently shot for London Designer Emma Bell for Vauxhall for a night she is putting on. Emma is getting a lot of media attention with her designs made of food and other mental visions. The shoot involved a car covered in pick and mix with models Rael and Rosie (whose image i stumbled across in the national portrait gallery yesterday).

You can see coverage on Dazed here and further coverage on Planet Notion.

it’s always such a thorny loaded debate and one i’ve been struggling over recently.  I’ve always had Nikon kit but recently i’ve been intrigued by the Canon 5ds Mark ii.  A beautiful full frame camera that also shoots video at a pretty high quality.

This is the video that intrigued me - Reverie - by Vincent LaForet.  Ok the actual mood is a little bit cheesy but the quality blew me away.  The shot of the city at night in the helicopter… the reflection in the guys’ mirrored shades while he’s in the helicopter.  And that’s from an SLR.

I know Nikon have produced something similar with the Nikon D700 but the quality isn’t as high and the megapixel count is so much lower.

I never worried about pixel count too much until a jewellery client told me, half way through the shoot, that he wanted to use one of the shots on a billboard.  I made a tiny little *gulp* and wondered if my D200 could handle that kind of magnification.  Not something i would have even thought about if I had been on the 5d Mark ii.    But hey, it’s not even out yet.  Let’s see what happens when it hits the market.

Close Up at the V&A Friday 26th September 2008

I’ve always been greatly inspired by Nick Thornton-Jones and Warren du Preez. Their approach is frequently to eschew the well-trodden commercial line and to play on the borders of art, fashion, technology and science.  When I heard that they were giving a talk at the V&A about their work, I nearly wet myself with excitement and I made sure I got down there pretty early to get in line, not dreaming that I’d manage to get a chance to see them.  I couldn’t believe my luck when I got to the front of the queue and was told that there were seats available.

The talk was on in the National Art Library and before the talk started we were invited by Warren and Nick to browse around various images from the archives.  There were prints by Julia Margaret-Cameron, Man Ray,  Moholy Nagy,  Eadweard Muybridge and others.  It was amazing to see these images from the archives up close and personal.

During the talk, Nick and Warren described their working methods while showing a slideshow of their work.  They admitted they were a little nervous about talking about their work as they had never done so in such a context before.  I felt especially privileged to be there when I heard this.  They described their method as ‘trying to recreate in camera, what used to be done in the dark room’.  And although there is often a lot of post production in some of their work – they mentioned ‘render farms’ processing their work for weeks – they aim to capture the bulk of what they do in camera.  The work that they had lain out for us was all relevant to their practice too – solarisation was a favourite technique of Man Ray’s and the creation of pictograms was a favourite method of Lazlo Moholy-Nagy.  Coincidentally there was a Hungarian sat beside me.

The slideshow was really mind blowing – what has mostly stuck in my mind was the work they did with Alexander McQueen. And I shit you not when I said the hairs stood up on the back of my neck.  There was something chthonic, elemental, raw and occult-like about this series.  They admitted themselves that the shoot had been something of a happening whereby they were in the grip of forces  beyond themselves, of an energy that was more than the sum of the players in the shoot.

Ultimately I think it was very brave of them to reveal so much of their practice in public.  There were a few moments where Warren interrupted Nick with phrases like ‘without revealing too much of our methods’ and would turn the talk in another direction.  Nonetheless I was quite inspired.  To see more of their work, have a look here: Warren Du Preez, Nick Thornton-Jones

and I’ve borrowed a few of their images from their UK Agent’s website Artist Representation/Management

I hope they don’t sue my ass for it.

Hugh O’Malley Fashion Photographer London