Modelling

I have spent most of my working life looking at faces — a decade of charcoal portraits, and then years spent deciding where the light lands in a room. Modelling turned that around. In front of a camera I am not arranging anything; I am the thing being arranged, and the only work left is to stand still and mean it. It is stranger than it sounds, and slower. What I bring with me is what the drawing taught me: that a face is a structure before it is an expression, and that the light is doing half the talking. Fashion and editorial, commercial and campaign, runway, and now and then film.

In the pictures below I am the subject and not the author. Every decision I would usually be making — where the light falls, when the shutter goes, which angle is telling the truth — belongs to someone else, and all that is left to me is to hold still and let it happen. Being looked at is slower work than looking, and quieter, and it teaches you what a photograph actually costs the person standing inside it. I think it has made me better on both sides of the lens.