Androgyny

Androgyny

I could easily have titled this post with a song reference, but I refuse to quote that atrocious "Beyonce" song and the "The Who" lyrics I have in my head are probably a little too obscure to serve this purpose.

Alas, today I'm going to talk about one of my favourite trends in fashion and fashion photography. Androgyny. I love it. So visual, so visceral, so moving at times. From images of David Bowie to Agyness Deyn to the backup dancers in the video for "Addicted to Love" to the fashion photography of Paolo Roversi. I love it. The whole style, the whole movement.

As such, it is only natural that I would want to incorporate the use of androgyny into my own photography.

Thanks to a few keen models, though not entirely without trepidation, I have been able to start an ongoing body of work based solely on that single, yet enormously broad, concept.

While I am over the moon about being able to conduct this project, I've found that there are a few misconceptions out there that turn a lot of people off of the concept. In particular, male models . I seem to find people tend to believe that androgyny is the act of a girl looking like a boy or a boy looking like a girl.

At least in my vision of the concept, that could not be further from the truth. In fact, it's about being genderless. Either or. Not gender reversal, rather a convergence of both feminine and masculine traits.

Minor hindrances aside, I am now fully on my way to furthering this particular body of work and I can only assume that as the project progresses it will only get easier to justify my vision. I have seriously enjoyed creating my photographic work with androgyny so far and I can only hope to continue to do so in the future!

Thank you for taking the time to read my ramblings. Feel free to drop a comment below whether you loved the images, hated them or think I'm just completely full of it! All feedback is always appreciated!

Promotional Poster for the Barnsley Civic

Promotional Poster for the Barnsley Civic

The Civic Hall in Barnsley has recently been refurbished to an extreme and wonderful degree. Inside, one will now find a music hall, art gallery and creative workspaces all surrounded by the exquisite architecture of the building itself. It really is a wonderful place.

To bring things back to the matter of relevance: below is a promotional poster created for the Barnsley Civic incorporating one of my photographs of the lovely Monika!

A Few Personal Favourites

It is often said that we are our own worst critics. To this, I am certainly no exception; in fact, more often than not, I epitomise it. I often find myself loathing each and everything I do. I'm always finding the smallest, most insignificant of details to ensure that I am not happy with anything I produce. I, of course, am talking about my photography here, but this also applies to every aspect of my life.

My point is simply, that when I do feel I've done something right, the resulting feeling of accomplishment is indescribable. Incredibly, this is something I've felt several times over the past few weeks alone.

These past three weeks have been astronomically busy for me. On top of the day job, I've managed to squeeze in eight photoshoots and a whole lot of retouching. Add a day trip into Derbyshire for good measure and I'm feeling quite accomplished, if not a bit exhausted.

Was it worth it?

Oh yes.

I've somehow managed to make several photographs which I absolutely adore. Considering that I guesstimate my perceived success ratio to be about 1:10000, this is phenomenal to me!

Alas, enough with the words. Please allow me to share some of these images with you, whether you agree with my own impressions of them or not!!










I do hope you enjoyed viewing these as much as I did making them. Feel free to leave your thoughts as a comment below.

Inevitably, I will be talking about some of the things that went into these shoots on this blog in the near future and I'll be talking about the shoots themselves on the blog on my website before long.