Come as you are, or wear a corset

It’s always nerve racking to contact complete strangers just because you’re interested in them and want to photograph them. It’s difficult to explain what you want from them. It’s hard enough to know for yourself, especially if your subject is famous for not liking clothes, and you’re not really one to strip back past your Victorian bathing suit. Why am I here? How should I play this? What do I want from them? The naked gardeners. Naked in their garden. Again. Is it a cliché? Running circles in my head, like a pea in a colander, I can’t decide my own mind. I hide behind my camera
I don’t know what I want so I just hope to capture them that day, with me, in that garden, in what ever they are wearing. It goes ok.
In the end though, the photo I liked was different from the others.

The naked gardeners. Formal, serious, clothed and indoors

In the same week, a fashion shoot, and a bossy web designer who wants everything cropped square. I could almost hear the neural fibres snapping under the pressure. To my credit, I stayed calmer than the field trip of schoolboys passing by on the towpath, veering wildly from embarrassment to not believing their luck and back again. Nobody drowned though, and my brain has gone up a hat size, so on balance, a success.

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