I once won the Vogue/Sotheby’s Cecil Beaton Award, a competition for young photographers with a series I shot of a shoe. They were among the first pictures I took in what was to become my new style.
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Alva Bernadine
Alva Bernadine makes photographs and films. By using themes such as surrealism, sexuality and violence, Bernadine touches various overlapping topics and strategies. Several reoccurring subject matters can be recognised, such as mirrors, shadows, optical effects and representations of the female form. The work is filled with invented surreal scenarios, witty events, troubling scenes from movies that were never made and almost hallucinatory images that invoke narrative, prompting you to imagine what came before or what is about to happen. They are not only about desire but the problems that go with it.
Bernadine was born in Grenada, West Indies and grew up on the outskirts of London. He won the Vogue/Sotheby’s Cecil Beaton Award as a young photographer and has since worked for many prestigious magazines and became Erotic Photographer of the Year for his first book, Bernadinism: How to Dominate Men and Subjugate Women.
Epic is an overused word these days but if anything is epic the sky is. A few years ago, I started a project photographing clouds mostly from my third floor balcony and sometimes my kitchen windows.
In my first year as a photographer, I took impressionistic photographs of London using Cokin filters and various techniques to try to achieve that.
I was once asked by a fashion magazine to shoot a men’s fashion story. It was going to feature suits. Before the words even left their mouths, I knew exactly where I wanted to shoot it.
When I started as a photographer, my knowledge of the photographic landscape was rather limited in terms of the history of photography and the movements within it.
Famous artists and photographers can be recognised by their style. Style is a combination of subject matter, technique, compositional components, the use of colour and other, sometimes very subtle, elements.
Back in the middle/late 90s, I made an attempt to get into fashion photography. To that end I started working for new fashion and music magazines which were popping up in London at the time in order to get a fashion portfolio together.
