Rangefinder Magazine
November 2005

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Sean Ellis by Judith Bell
The New Face of European Fashion

Ask an American art director where he scouts for fresh photographic talent and the odds are the answer, recited with the conviction and reverence of a communicant, will include a string of English magazines— Tattler, Arena Homme Plus, Vogue, The Face. And the credit line that continues to have them all swooning belongs to Sean Ellis, a 34-year-old London-based fashion photographer whose psychologically complex and masterfully lit stories reveal the mind and hand of a unique talent. European magazines like The Face give photographers more independence to do what they want. Assignments for The Face, self-described as a modern subversive fashion magazine, have launched the careers of other photographers who take risks with casting, lighting and sensuality, such as Prada campaign shooter Norbert Schoerner and Luis Sanchis, whose fashion campaigns include Gucci and Cesare Paciotti.

Recently named one of the top 10 British photographers by the Independent on Sunday, Ellis’ editorial clients include magazines such as I.D., The Face, Arena, Arena Homme Plus, Visionaire, Dazed and Confused, Numero, French, British, Japanese and American Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, and Big Magazine. Ellis produces images that feel new, that simply look modern. There’s something there: It’s not safe, and it’s not anything you’ve seen before.

Ellis first began photographing out of frustration. “I was creative, but I couldn’t draw. By the age of 12, I realized that the camera would allow me to put what I saw in my head down on paper.”

Dyslexic, he found it difficult to fit into an academic environment at college. “Art classes were boring. I just wanted to do what I did. I’d been black-and-white printing since I was 13, I wasn’t interested in apertures, shutter speeds and correct exposures. For me the camera is just a tool that lets me make an image.”

The movie video rental boom however, was something else altogether. Ellis grew up in the 1980s and watched movies constantly. “Horror films were my major influence. I kept looking for something that was stylistically different. I found it when I saw Ridley Scott’s Alien. That you can get something so powerful that you don’t want to address looking so beautiful is what did it for me. Art can be almost therapeutic, a way of working things through. Why does Scorsese make gangster films? I became fixated on that moment before something was going to happen—that element of danger when you are pitted against overwhelming odds and you might not come through. I photograph things that reflect that moment.”

Ellis left college and landed a job assisting a still life photographer. He found the discipline of the specialty too tedious and spent the next two years traveling around the States. When he returned to England he took a job as an in-house photographer at TBS, a design agency in Brighton, doing tabletop photography. “In two years I taught myself how to light a box beautifully. That’s really how I learned to light things.”

At age 21 Ellis decided to go out on his own. “I was earning very good money, this went on for two years. I was 23. It was four in morning, and I was taking pictures of vaginal swabs for the hospital that had to be ready at nine. And I’m thinking, ‘What am I doing?’”

Impressed by the Jil Sander campaign Nick Knight did with model Christy Turlington, Ellis tracked down Knight’s telephone number and sent him his CV. Ellis was called in for a few days of assisting and began doing freelance work with Knight. “I made the decision to use the money I’d made as a still life photographer to set myself up as a fashion photographer.” Before going out on his own, several more months assisting Knight followed, along with flying off at a day’s notice to work with photographers like Steven Meisel.

The magazine Dazed and Confused gave Ellis his first fashion assignment, based on a test that had begun at a party where he’d shot his camera up girls’ skirts. “They thought it was an ingenious idea and gave me a four-page fashion story on underwear. But after that knicker shoot, people would ask me to shoot like David Sims or Juergen Teller—the post-grunge element, I hated it. I could have got pages and pages for my portfolio that were a knockoff of that kind of photography. I held out. It took almost a whole year before I shot anything else.”

That chance came when he approached The Face with “A Taste of Arsenic,” a story concept that involved child models that made even The Face nervous. “It was politically incorrect to take pictures of children at the time,” says Ellis. “I’d read about a prolific photographer who’d been arrested after a photo lab reported these pictures he’d taken of his child in the bath. I thought this was an incredible amount of pressure to put on photographers. I wanted to do a story that would give children back a personality, their confidence.” Other influences began to surface, including Z for Zachariah, a novel Ellis had read as a child about two children who are the sole survivors of a bomb blast. Additional references came from Irving Penn’s Worlds in Small Rooms, Penn’s studio study of indigenous peoples. “I wanted these children to have that kind of power, to look as though no adult had interfered with them.”

The resulting story portrayed a futuristic world peopled with a strange female family posed in portrait fashion. The young girls, ages seven to 14, are dressed in corsets, their only frame of reference for their civilization’s past life found in Victorian photographs of their ancestors. Blink, and they just might cut your throat. Here, as in all of Ellis’ work, is something dangerous and hidden, something uncertain, a tension that is at the same time very beautiful.

The execution of Ellis’ photographic stories requires a tremendous amount of planning, sometimes as much as eight months before he actually begins shooting. His idea for “Excalibur,” a medieval fashion/battle passion play that appeared in The Face was inspired by the study of Pre-Raphaelite paintings. “This was the story that would be my last definitive word in Gothic, a label that had been with me since ‘A Taste of Arsenic.’”

While permission was secured to use the armor from the movie Excalibur, finding medieval- inspired fashion proved more difficult. Ellis and collaborator/ stylist Isabella Blow began talking to the press and designers to try and get chain mail back into fashion. “No one was making chain mail,” says Ellis. “We began to spread the rumor that we were doing this huge story about medieval fashion and chain mail. Six months later when the shows came, a lot of designers, including Christian Dior and Paco Rabanne, had actually done chain mail. We were then able to pick the pieces we wanted to feature in the story.”

Complicated shoots like “Excalibur” carry a hefty price tag in the range of $25,000, and, Ellis insists, there’s no way to go in unprepared and simply let things unfold. He spends two days in pre-light alone.

“With lighting, photographers fall into two categories,” says Ellis. “There are those that light enabling them to get what they want, and there are the others who light with the latest things and are focused on what everyone else is using at that moment. If you’re wrapped up in the latter, you’re not thinking about your image. You are thinking of a lighting technique and then thinking of an image to go with it.

“That’s the main problem you see in fashion, think of the ringflash craze, it becomes the recording of clothes with the latest lighting technique. It’s a trap I try to avoid.”

Using standard flash, Ellis tends to light very similarly in all his work. “It’s knowing what the light is doing on your subject. I don’t use a light meter; I just have this rough idea of what I’m getting from my flash units. As a result, I create something a little different each time. I Polaroid a lot: Is it too light? Too dark? Does it need fill? Does it need a color? Should the light be softer? Harsher? At the end of the day, it’s about the image not the lighting itself.

“I don’t work with HMI, I think catalogue when I see it. It’s the lazy person’s light. You don’t get the control. I like to light selectively—the head, an arm. With flash you have to be able to visualize what the lighting will look like. I position the lights in my mind before I put them on the subject.”

Ellis credits his continued editorial exposure for his commercial success. His commercial client list includes Levi’s, Pirelli, Hugo Boss, Dior, Land Rover, Kodak and John Galliano.

“It’s difficult to break into advertising unless you’re known in editorial circles for producing a certain level of work,” says Ellis. “It’s only after a number of years of constantly putting the editorial work out that art directors click with who you are and what you’re doing. It’s important to have a magazine behind you that highlights your work on a regular basis. I’m very grateful to The Face for supporting me and giving me a platform to show my work. You can take the most amazing shots in the world but without a magazine behind you, no one will ever see them. In London we say ‘New York’s calling.’ New York is where you go when you’ve made it elsewhere. The Face has helped establish who I am and what I do.”

Despite his success with fashion, Ellis remains uncomfortable with the label. “People like to be able to pigeonhole you. It’s uncomfortable for them if they can’t. My images happen to be fashionable because of the genre I’m working with. I look at clothes and think, if I was going to make a film and this was the wardrobe, what would the story be about? I like to think of my photography as film stills for a film that hasn’t been made yet.”

In the past eight years, Sean has photographed personalities such as Elton John, “Beat” Takeshi Kitano, Trent Reznor, Kylie Minogue, Eric Bana, Stella McCartney, Air, Kosheen and Richard Ashcroft, and has collaborated with David Lynch on a series of fashion images that were published in Harper’s Bazaar.

Ellis’ cinematic style led to a crossover with moving film, starting with his 1998 Brit Award-winning All Saints video “Never Ever” and commercials for Jean Paul Gaultier, Land Rover, Rimmel and 02. He has written and directed two short films that were produced through Ridley Scott’s company RSA. Left Turn (2001), a dark psychological horror film, and the recent Cashback (2004), a visually rich black comedy short-listed for a British Academy Award (BAFTA). He is currently in pre-production on his debut feature film, Broken, and starts shooting later this year.

“I don’t want to get too comfortable being a fashion photographer or a pop director or whatever. I want people to go on being surprised by my work. I want them to go, ‘Wow, who did that? Oh, it’s him.’”

Sean’s book 365: A Year in Fashion came out last year; find out more at his web site:www.sean-ellis.com/.