Man with His Head Full of Flowers
I shot this around midday on an overcast day in my local park. A year or two before I had come across a shop window display of dummies with their heads and hands covered in flowers. It was not until the next year I came across the work of Salvador Dali and realised the dummies were inspired by him. I shot it with my £13 Lubitel using tungsten film and an 85B filter on the flash.
Young Woman With a Glint in Her Eye Stares at Absolutely Nothing While a Plane full of Holiday-makers Passes Overhead.
I developed this slide at home in my kitchen sink and as soon as I saw the lens flare in front of her eye I knew it was an Alva Bernadine picture. At the time I was cropping or partially obscuring faces so this picture fitted in perfectly. When I took the picture I did not see the lens flare because I did not shut down the lens and this was a happy accident. That is what I like about shooting outdoors, these unplanned fortuitous accidents that make a picture. I saw the proximity of the ladder and the gasometer and set up the shot. As I was getting ready to take it, I saw the aeroplane approaching and waited. I still did not have a flashmeter by then and the original was about half a stop under exposed. The model later took up weight training and starred in the tv show, Gladiators, in the UK.
This was the first nude I ever took. I looked at it and thought there was something missing. I saw the shadow of the ladder on the wall and it eventually came to me that what it needed was the shadow of a man climbing it. Since it was impossible to get the model back I decided to incorporate the idea in my shoe picture, The Fetish IV.
Writing this post brought back the memory of what I originally wanted so I Photoshopped the image. I would have been able to do the same thing using double exposure at the time. It would have been far quicker.
Little Miss Muffet Loses her Arachnophobia
I came across this handbag in Fiorucci. I borrowed it not knowing how I would use it but it looked interesting. Back home, thinking what interesting articles I could put in it, I tried it over my head. So it was back to Battersea with a model and a flash gun.
Thr first time I attempted to take this picture there was a bang as my flash gun blew up. I went out and bought the most powerful one I could afford, a Metz 60 CT1. I have rarely used anything other format than a 35 m camera because I like the proportions of the frame, I liked the grain and that everything is the right way round when you look through them. I also hate to crop my pictures and when I have had to do so it means I have got the composition wrong. I bought a Lubitel 120 camera brand new for £13 to experiment with the larger format. It was tinny and this was the first time I used it. I subsequently discovered it worked well at small apertures but blurred significantly around the edges at large apertures.
One thing I learned from Cheyco Leidmann was the use of tungsten film particularly on overcast days. It is known in the film industry as “day for night “. The night sky is not blue but it very often is in movies. To make this work you have to put an 85B orange filter on the flash. Where the orange light falls neutralises the blue blue bias of the film because it is its complimentary colour. I added a warmup filter to the flash as well. A blue background is a nice background for a colourful picture and can make a virtue of an overcast day. With the aid of an artist’s colour wheel, I once went through a sample swatch of Rosco film gel trying to find complimentries. When you lay them on top each other the resultant colour is grey. I even used them with the tungsten film turning the background purple or turquoise. nowadays you can do it on a computer, of course, but it is still faster to do this kind of thing on the shoot.
The Fiorucci umbrella and cape said “Energy” on them so the power station seemed the appropriate place to take it. I used mirror to reflect light on her face. Somebody reported us and a young police officer found us and said we would have vacate the property. Apparently people would steal the lead from the roofs. He seemed pleased to see the model, though. We moved to an abandoned cold storage depot down the road. It proved to be a red letter day because it was the first time I ever did a topless shot.
At that time one of my chief artistic devises was to crop out faces or partially obscure them. Note the hat and trenchcoat – it reoccurred in my work at that time. I shot this in Shad Thames. Now a trendy street next to Tower Bridge, back then it was filled with disused wharehouses. I even saw painted evidence that it had been dressed as a film set. The models were fellow students I had met an evening photography course at the London College of Printing. Rafaele Trenchi at the front was an architectural photographer and the man in the shadows is Eddie Ephraums who went on to become a great black and white printer and then book photographic publisher.
I was still learning about using flash outdoors. The flash gun I had was not that powerful and needed to work at close range. The model through the coke can in the air
This is a quote from my 2001 book, Bernadinism, How to Dominate Men and Subjugate Women, from the intro entitled, I am a one man subculture.
A Jackson Pollock patterned shoe is suspended on a wall of weathered boards, the shadowy orange evening light projects the shadow of a man in a hat and raincoat reaching for the shoe. In a flash this picture throws up a story that the viewer is coaxed to resolve. I have supplied you with the narrative elements please finish it off for me. There is something attracting and repelling about the picture at the same time. Maybe it will help if you know that the title of the picture is The Fetish III: The Dream of the Masturbator, or even it is a self-portrait. What if anything does it say about me? I had conjured the “unresolved picture”, something that has stayed with me even to this day. It is the summer of 1984 and eighteen months after taking up photography I have found my real style as a photographer.
The work is as dark and as troubled as I am at the time. I am trying to resolve some inner turmoil by putting ideas down on film but it is not a cathartic, quite the opposite, in fact, it forces me to turn inward, a place where I am unhappy to be. I like the pictures though, I like being on the imaginative edge, I like photographing outdoors, I like these derelict buildings next to Battersea Power Station which I use as an open air studio, I like the warm evening light and have determined to use the long shadows thrown by a westering sun, I like the view of the river Thames from the rooftops – as a result there are plenty of blue skies in my work, I like the fact that nearly all the pictures I set out to take, work. I generally take three frames of each set-up which I bracket and develop the slides at home in the kitchen sink. The first glimpse of the wet milky slides is exciting, it is also surprising. The camera sometimes picks up things I did not know were there. Unlike painting, which you have to abandon because you reach a point where the next stroke will be too much, the transparency hits you with direct surprise. Voilà! There it is. It either works or fails.
Before I take the first pictures of my new style, I have already created it in my head and sketched it on paper. I create a world in my own image. In cityscapes of oblique lighting, dark shadows, acid Technicolor and surrealist elements, strange people enact curious events. I become a fabulist, concocting a series of wilfully inconclusive and unsettling narratives or what I term ‘events’. I have kept the plausible topographical faithfulness of the photograph and have imbued it with an oneirocal dimension filled with a sense of unease. The work is rendered with slickness, but it is only to set up the audience for the ambush – the menace of the shadow, or the knife, or the couple who in their passionate abandon may fall from the edge of the roof to their ruin. (Again a self-portrait). There is an alienating sense of tension and a pervading unhealthiness in these early pictures. I deliberately turn people into objects, usually sex objects. I crop out faces or mask them or use shadows to create menace. I want to become an object myself and I appear in many of these early pictures.
What you do not like can be as much an influence on you as what you do like. Although I am not a fashion photographer, I was influenced by fashion photography. When I started out the prevailing style, after the excesses of the seventies, was for a natural look in style and make-up. Photographers would take a girl to a tropical island and shoot with a 400mm lens wide open. You could just about make out a fuzzy palm tree in the background. This was anathema to me. I could not see the point of wasting such great settings. My reaction to that was to start using a 28mm lens as standard and trying to get as close to f22 as possible. It was studied artificiality that I wanted. I would put the subject close to the camera and have everything in focus. I wanted the eye of the viewer to range from the foreground to the background and back again, picking up little details deliberately strewn about the frame on subsequent viewings.
The Molestation
I befriended a guy at frame making class. He was a geologist for petroleum locating company. I did my first ever job for his company. Anyhow, he had a 15 year old step-daughter, Psyche. In search of a model, I asked her to pose for me. We turned up at Battersea just as a storm was clearing, with her and her mum.
I had borrowed clothes as usual from Fiorucci. The first shot was taken just as the sun was coming out. I got her mum to act as my assistant to throw in the fish. This was the first adumbration of my Trained Fish picture I did three or four years later for GQ.
The Imperial Embrace of the Male: Alva and Psyche on the Tickle Point
As the sky cleared further I took this one. I went there with the idea of a woman and man dancing i got from a Bruce Weber photo but did not know where I was going to take it until I saw the wall. Although it might look dangerous, there was only about a 13 foot drop to the next level of the roof. I set up the the camera and her mum took the picture.
By the third shot the sky had cleared and I had her mum throw a bunch of flowers in front of her face. The sun by then was so low it threw my shadow into the picture so I used it. You can see Vauxhall Bridge in the background. I used to have my work printed up on Cibachrome (long discontinued), and some art directors used ask which country I had shot, not believing you could get that sort of light in London.
I had the idea of a role reversal picture of a person carrying a newspaper in their mouth back from the newsagent instead of the dog. I have never seen that in real life but I have seen a mother walking along with a pushchair and a dummy in her mouth on a couple of occasions. I got a friend to borrow a dog a pose for the picture. You can see the Brixton Academy in the background. As I was lying on the ground, to get another shot, I waved my leg to attract it’s attention and it started to bite at my shoe
