Why Brands Hire My Eye
An artist's note on working inside someone else's frame
Most of my photographs are made on my own terms. In my own studio. With frames I set myself, not frames someone else hands me. I am an artist before I am anything else, and the pictures I am known for came from days when nobody was telling me what to make.
Every so often, though, a brief lands on my desk that I did not write. A list of things that have to be visible. A product, a model, a magazine, a logo. Constraints I would never have chosen on my own. And the work that comes out of those days, more often than I expected when I started saying yes to it, ends up sharper than I thought it could be.
The clearest example I can give comes from the first time I shot for Dior Magazine.
On paper, the brief should have made the work impossible. Photograph the models in my own recognisable style. Black and white, silhouettes, anonymity, light and shadow, the work I had built my name on. But the jewellery had to be visible. In colour. The difference between gold and silver had to read clearly. The reflections had to behave. The light had to flatter the stones. And inside the same frames, the model still had to belong to Dior. Recognisable enough to be theirs. Anonymous enough to be mine.
I had never worked like that before.
But the work itself was never going to be anything other than mine. I am an artist. That is the first line of my biography and the last note of every shoot. The pictures I am known for, the ones that hang in galleries and live in books, come from a particular way of seeing. Black and white. Silhouette. A figure half lost in shadow. Dior knew that when they called. They did not hire me to make jewellery photography. They hired me to make my photography, and they trusted that the jewellery would find its place inside it.
The image you see is the image we shot. The portraits were made the way I always make them. The extra layer was the jewellery: photographed separately as well, lit from every side, so the reflections could land correctly and the stones could be brought to their best in post. Technically demanding photography on top of the work I usually do.
I left that shoot with images I am proud of. Not despite the constraints. Because of them.
I have been thinking about why for a long time. Why the cleanest work, more often than not, comes from the most defined conditions. Why a brief I did not write often takes me further than a day in the studio with no agenda at all. And why, after years of working both ways, I have stopped treating the two as opposites.
There is something specific I learned on that first Dior set, and on every set since, that I want to leave with you in this essay. How to keep your own eye intact inside someone else’s frame. What a client is actually buying when they hire an artist. The exact place where most makers lose themselves on commission, and the small refusal that prevents it. That last part is what I would tell a younger photographer if they asked me how to do this work without disappearing into it.
