ENTRY DESCRIPTION
Part of my ongoing series The Forest, this photo depicts Rose McKenzie, an American photographer, model and writer who I've been friends with online for many years. When we met in person at last she'd been living in Europe for a few months and wasn't sure whether she was going to stay or what she wanted to do with her life and career. She was the first person to use the word 'alchemy' to describe analogue photography to me and the word continues to remind me of her and the weird week we spent tinkering in the darkroom in 2017.
The Forest is a conscious departure from masculinity & modernity, in medium & in subject matter. My subjects are my contemporaries, from a global community of young artists using their bodies in art, uniquely connected in the digital age through social media. Recent puritanical legislation around the globe has inhibited how we connect & share our work, but we continue to create.
Being from the same community we have immediate familiarity that others aren’t privy to. We are nude, but it is an unselfconscious & primordial nudity, reclaimed from the male gaze & with a softness & intimacy rarely captured in a male lens. We are in nature & a part of it; we aren’t conquerors of the natural world, we are skyclad witches & exultant earth goddesses in communion with nature, vulnerable yet unafraid. We remain people, as unique & individual as the forest itself, not anonymous figures bereft of identity. We are willing collaborators & active participants, captured with the ritual alchemy of analogue photography.
The images of The Forest are an expression of freedom, defiance, community & of liberation of spirit, continuing a tradition stretching back generations.
AUTHOR
I am a British LGBTQ+ visual artist working primarily with analogue photography, specialising in nude portraiture. I studied Fine Art at Central St Martins and continue to live and work in London.
In 2020 I received a Gold Award in the San Francisco Bay International Photo Award, an Honourable Mention in Photos Des Femmes’ seeingWOMEN Awards and in the 15th Julia Margaret Cameron Award. In 2019 I was awarded an Artist Residency prize and a Special Mention of the Jury Award in photography from the Mediterranean Contemporary Art Prize. Also in 2019 I was a semi-finalist in the Head On Portrait Prize, obtained 3rd place in Nudes from the Monochrome Photography Awards, received an Honourable Mention at the Tokyo International Foto Awards, and was an official selection for the Imago Lisboa Meeting Point portfolio reviews. In 2018 I was a nominee for the PhotogrVphy Grant. In 2017 I was the subject of the award-winning short documentary A Film On Film by David McNulty. In 2014 I received the Silverprint/Photofusion Black and White Photography Award.
The first nude body I photographed was my own. My self-portraiture is a way for me to explore my own vulnerabilities, and I did this by removing my clothing, my armour. Later, others responded to this vulnerability and began allowing me past their own armour.
By shooting on film my photos become tactile objects, a counterpoint to the incorporeal and ephemeral digital photography that surrounds us every day.
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