ART DIRECTION

Hi everyone, I’m excited to introduce a new monthly topic to my Substack for paid subscribers. I trace every image I love back to the thing that made it. That habit is most of my practice, so it makes sense to start doing it in public. This is the first of a monthly edit. Once a month I will share what I have been looking at, reading, and circling. Artists, brands, films, books. The references sitting under whatever I am making at the time.

Irving Penn In Studio Portraits Taste is the thing people think they need, and it is the thing that, on its own, will quietly let you down. I have watched truly gifted people stall for years, not because their eye was weak but because their eye was the only part of them doing any work. Instinct gets you to the edge of a practice and all the ideas. It is structure that takes you across, and structure is the part almost nobody finds attractive enough to talk about.

Toteme 2024 Fall Campaign, a brand that has restraint at its core (not in a trendy way) The signature image of luxury image-making between roughly 2020 and 2025 was a beige cashmere coat on an unbranded silhouette in a soft-lit domestic interior. Pale palette. Hair pulled back and ofcourse no logo. The model might look like she might have inherited the coat. The campaign is shot at low contrast. The grade is kinda cold or all colours are stripped away.

At some point most people who work across more than one discipline are told to pick one. Narrow down, specialise, decide what you are. It is presented as maturity, the moment you stop scattering yourself and commit. I have come to believe this advice is wrong for a specific kind of person, and that the inability to choose is not indecision to be cured. It is, very often, the exact thing the work is supposed to be made of. Now, don’t get me wrong.

Richard Avedon, Nastassja Kinski and the Serpent, Vogue, October 1981. Shot in Los Angeles. A Burmese python draped across the nude Kinski on a cement floor, with a snake trainer crouching out of frame trying to position it. The shoot took two hours of waiting until the snake flicked its tongue toward her ear at exactly the right moment. Polly Mellen styled it. Two million posters sold. It is the textbook "you cannot fake this" image.

Richard Avedon for US Vogue, October 1966. In one of the scenes of The Devil Wears Prada 2, Nigel is talking to Andy during lunch. He pauses for a second and says something close to this: we used to camp for four weeks in Africa with Avedon, and now we’re lucky if we get two days in Milk Studios. The audience laughed and so did I because it genuinely just felt so accurate, but it was somehow bittersweet.

45% filled during the waitlist. Doors close June 10th or when capacity is full There is no bachelor degree in art direction. Nobody tells you this when you start. You figure it out slowly, usually after you have already been working for a while and realise that the gap between you and the people getting the opportunities you want has nothing to do with talent. I figured it out the hard way. I was an intern at a big corporate fashion brand, in a role that was completely wrong for me.

Why the image-makers you admire almost all climbed with a long-term creative partner, and how to find yours now Martin Margiela and Inge Grognard The strongest creative partnerships in fashion image-making almost always start the same way. Two people who are nobody yet recognise something in each other's eye, and they decide to keep working together from there. Years pass. Both careers grow. The partnership grows with them.

Hi everyone, I hope you’re all well. I’ve been very busy the past few weeks, many shoots and a few in post, lots of pitches and a few more coming up that I’m excited about. I’ve been pushing myself outside what I usually go for this year, working with different photographers, different styling registers, and different types of subjects, partly to find what I get excited about visually again.

Hi everyone, This is a bit of a different post that I’ve been considering writing for a super long time, probably three years to be exact, which is how long this Substack exists. I had a few meetings recently where the same observation came back to me at different moments. The phrase that came up was wondering who I actually was, the person writing this Substack. People mentioned I felt mysterious and anonymous and I realised I never intended this to be.