Spencer Tunick, Published, Sunday Times, 29/08/2010.

Posted: December 1st, 2010

He is the artist who persuades hundreds, in fact thousands to strip naked in the name of art. In Mexico he had the pleasure of 18 000 muses ( beat that Picasso). The brief was to photograph Spencer in situ with his naked people and think about a possible cover shot. Fat Chance! Despite much wrangling with PRs and Spencer himself, the fact was he simply didn’t want to be photographed in a way that had him manipulating his own volunteers for publicity. Fair enough really. I knew nothing I could say was going to make him change his mind, he was a nice guy and I respected his views so I relaxed and got on with the other part of the assignment which was to photograph some of the volunteers. We did them in situ (and later at home) to find out what motivated them. There was this amazing, buoyant euphoric atmosphere that comes I guess when you have 850 people stripping naked and painting themselves bright colours. Anyway, as I photographed the group I thought if I could get them to call out Spencer’s name he might just take part. One very loud “SPENCER”! later and he, much to my amazement, strolls over and joins us, all be it for only a couple of minutes.

The lesson here I guess, is to relax. I realised he felt ok because he had been invited but this was a relatively rare event and I cannot find him anywhere else, online, doing this kind of shot. Anyway after all that the Pope got the cover. Typical! But here are some shots:

Link to Sunday Times Article By Katie Glass

 

A rare shot of Spencer with his naked people.

Painted naked people

Yes this is me with a close personal friend! I'm the one on the right!

 

 

 

The mum’s the star – I’m a celebrity ads for Iceland.

Posted: November 30th, 2010

Sometimes the ingredients come together either by design or chance to make a good set of images or at least pictures that seem to happen easily. Recently I was commissioned by Iceland to photograph backstage on the set of one of their TV commercials, for a mini Ad campaign. In the campaign they used real mums, cast through a competition.

It worked well. They had so much energy and spirit and were genuinely loving their experience; not just pretending to love it because they were being paid. They were also beautiful in a way that comes from people who actually eat 3 square meals a day and are happy in themselves. Put those mums in Can Can dresses in the very photogenic Rivoli ballrooms in South London and you have the ingredients for some really lively pictures. Anyway the TV ads are out now anyone who watches ‘I’m a Celebrity Get me Out of Here” will be seeing them on a very regular basis and maybe my press ads somewhere as well.

Jamie Chau for the Sunday Times

Posted: November 19th, 2010


So continuing the pattern of random posting here’s a portrait taken over the summer. He has an audience of 20 million and is broadcast in over 20 countries in his role as an anchor man on Chinese TV, but was very down to earth and if you excuse the cliche a very nice chap. I photographed him with his parents and also a Chinese ex-pat club in Tower Hamlets for a feature on the British Chinese returning to the birthplace of their parents- reverse immigration. There were also some great characters in the club that didn’t make it to the magazine so feel free to have an exclusive peek.

Link to The Sunday Times Article by Clio Williams