Jamie Hawkesworth : The new fashion photographer
Jamie Hawwesworth, 27 years old, studied forensic science in the northern English city of Preston: now is the author of the shooting campaigns for Miu Miu, Loewe and J.W. Anderson.
Jamie found that taking pictures was what he most enjoyed about his forensics course and then he decided to study photography. He kept an instinct do portray unnoticed characters and details.
But, then, there’s little that is conventional about Hawkesworth, who, despite being a so-called ‘digital native,’ shoots only on film and develops all of his own pictures in a tiny dark room in London’s Shoreditch (which doubles as his office) and has the courage to shoot a global ad campaign by jumping on a train with a “bag of clothes” and a camera.
He started to document teenagers he encountered on his way from the university football stadium into college. His tutors appreciated his work so he said to himself: « A switch went off… I thought to myself, ‘My work will feel relevant because they are a reflection of what’s going on this second. So I went around Preston with big flash and I’d stop people and say ‘Can I take your portrait?’”
Hawkesworth began to work for JW Anderson, shooting the brand’s campaign for autumn/winter 2013. “That was the first fashion advertising I’d done. And it was perfect because we had complete freedom.” The campaign had the same intensity of Hawkesworth’s documentary photography, where subjects simultaneously reveal and conceal themselves, conveying an off-key oddness.
The images worked so well that when Anderson was appointed creative director of Loewe as part of a deal that saw LVMH take take a minority stake in his business, he took Hawkesworth along with him to shoot the brand’s campaigns.
For all the campaigns he created, Hawkesworth decided to maintain his style not adapting to the need of the brand he was working for at that moment.
For the Miu Miu campaign he went travelling alone on the Trans-Siberian Express to take the textural pictures that would sit alongside the campaign’s more traditional images of models shot in a studio. “With Miu Miu, the night before I went to see the collection, they were shooting a lookbook and there was this elaborate setup of like six flashes and I thought, ‘I couldn’t do that. I wouldn’t even know how to create that environment — I only use daylight.”
Jamie Hawkesworth : The new fashion photographer
