Australian Fashion Photographer

Someone showed me a photo of a camera and a cocktail resting on a guitar case the other day.
That same person also asked me to describe what I think it is that i do which struck me as simultaneously impossible and undesirable to approach from my perspective. Taking photos has to be a reflex to some degree, I think if I were to fully grasp at where or why things made me react I would be less open to the reactions themselves. The hand that holds the hammer only sees nails. Not knowing is most intimate.
For that reason I guess my career highlights will always be things that surprised me or things I went into inexplicably. I shot a story for an exhibition across Siberia a while ago, that was consistently surprising. People often surprise me as well. For good or bad. 

Your greatest inspirations or influences?
It used to be all the old greats. Then all the current greats.

Then I realised that looking for inspiration within the medium can often lead to an echo chamber if you’re not careful. Now i go for a drive and see what I can come up with myself. Might be a bad idea but here we are. All bad ideas are open for examination. 

Tell us a bit about your creative process? Work you are most proud of, things you are looking forward to in 2021?

I like to think that I don’t give a fuck about gear but I also own and use about every camera under the sun. My current process for editorial (or campaigns if the client is cool enough) is shooting options for everything on a 35mm Leica system, a 6x7 mamiya system and a 6x6/6x4.5 Hasselblad. I then scan all the negatives with a medium format phase one camera. It’s more involved than I admit to myself.

I have quite a few amazing things in the pipe line at the moment. I think I’ve crept into another epoch of the kind of work I’m doing recently. Im excited to see where that goes and also for it to dissolve into the next thing. I often think that thinking you know something creative is probably the furthest you’ll ever be from it. If I think I’ve gotten to a point where I know what I’m doing i’m very close to that falling away.  

How has this year changed your creativity or how you see the world changing moving forward?

I think 2020 helped me disengage with the anxiety over the ladder climbing of it all. I left my exclusive contract with vogue which i’d been under for 7 or so years. I signed that when i was 23 or 24 so it’s been the vast majority of my career (bringing me now to 30). I’m a lot more interested in the work itself than the politics - which turns out to be the machinations of the awful people in the industry who don’t get to create anything themselves so they have to create drama. 

Anything else you'd like to share? 

I think a lot about what Camus said about the greek god who was sentenced to push a boulder up a hill just to see it roll down the other side for all eternity - “One must imagine Sisyphus as happy”. For all the nonsense and false horizons involved in shooting fashion professionally, the crux of it all has to be that you enjoy the work itself. There’s nothing else. The only thing worse than not getting what you want is getting it. Enjoy the process. 

Thank you for sharing with us today Jake.