The 2008 winner of the Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait prize is happiest when she can work on a combination of travel photography and editorial projects, with some commercial work thrown in alongside her own art projects. “I really like doing the crazy stuff, but that’s what costs more money than people usually have available,” she says. One of her current ongoing projects is the Love Stories series.
What do you most like about what you do?
It’s never the same. Every single shoot is 100% different to the shoot before. Being a photographer gives you access to things you might not do otherwise — you meet people you might not meet and you get to go to places that you probably wouldn’t go to.
Who is your greatest influence?
Stephen Shore and Joel Sternfeld are American photographers who both did big road trips in the 1970s. They have made large-format inspiring work, which speaks to the culture. I am particularly fond of one by Sternfeld called On this site. He went to places where something big had happened in the past and photographed it. So you have the photo of the site, as it is now and then the story of what happened there. That is really interesting and has influenced a lot of my more recent work about places.
Perhaps unusually for a photographer, I am also inspired by writers and I am a big Paul Auster fan. He has incredible characters who go on journeys and learn things throughout journeys. I try to have my pictures do a similar thing. A project I am working on now called Quinn is named after a couple of Paul Auster characters in a non-specific way; it is the name of a character who is on a journey.
I try to achieve the way something makes me feel, be it a film or a photo or a book or an art show. I like when I have been made to think and I try very hard to produce that when I do my work – to give people a new thought. When you come out and you feel like you have expanded your experience in some way. It is a big aspiration.
What’s the best piece of advice you ever had?
That people enjoy being asked to do things that they don’t think they want to do. If you are taking a picture and you want the subject to do something quite difficult or you think “can I really ask them to do that?” I used to be very reluctant to push people, but you need to push people to do your best work.
I did a shoot recently where I asked an actor to lie down in a freezing cold river in winter. I really wanted the shot and a few years ago I wouldn’t have asked because I was too chicken. It was very painful but afterwards he said that was the best thing ever. I pushed him to do something that he wouldn’t have done otherwise.
What’s the one piece of kit you could not do with out?
My LaCie rugged external hard drives. You can’t do without them; I have three back-ups. If you can’t find your hard drive you’re in trouble.
What is the most unusual job you’ve ever done?
The strangest place I have been to is Longyearbyen in the Svalbard islands, between Norway and the North Pole, where we went to film a Mazda promotion. We went even further to a place called Pyramiden, which is an abandoned Russian mining town. It has the most northern bust of Lenin in the world. It was bizarre. You had to go on a boat through ice to get there and you had an entire abandoned town.
Other than it is probably snowing down the door of Number 10 Downing Street for Gordon Brown’s 2008 Christmas card. That has got to be the most peculiar thing I have done. It involved a lot of people and an enormous black cloth – the door is very reflective so we had a massive black cloth held up by five people behind me. We snowed it down several times – snow doesn’t really settle on Downing Street because it is so enclosed, so it will never look very snowy. The step up to No 10 is heated underneath to stop people from falling on ice.
How do you relax?
Watching Netflix with my cat Friday.
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