The Style Cave: Pictures of You

I was four years old and mum said it was a Monday. Fuzzy, confused and scared, dad was dragging me into nursery in my best black denim church dress. It was itchy and warm and i was sleepy and didn't get to see the end of Postman Pat, goddamnit. And nursery wasn't even pleasant at the best of times. I never liked the other children there, especially Julie who took my favourite telephone toy and hid under the slide with it, laughing with her chubby little brother. I hated the group games, hated the soggy smell and hated the adults who would bend down and ask questions in a stupid squeaky voice. But mostly, i didn't mind Mondays; we had toast and milk on Mondays.

(Diane Arbus- Twins)

That day was unusual. Instead of leaving me at the door to scramble for the toast and milk, my dad walked me right into the play room, holding onto my sweaty little palm. He sat me on a wooden seat covered in hay and took my beloved blanky. In the same moment, a fat bald greasy man approached from behind a bright light and, with that squeaky adult voice, he said "Say cheese" and before i could register the combined atrocity of the itchy dress, my missing blanky and the creepy man, a blinding flash scared the living shite clean out of my tiny body to capture the horror forever.

20 years on, the unease lingers on my mum's living room wall. That pissed off, four year old girl, seething with anger, cripples the camera with distress that screams "I'm missing my toast for THIS?!!" It was my first photo memory, which has poisoned every one since, documenting my existence with the same harassed expression. I'll never fucking forget it.

(Malcom Browne - Thích Quàng Đức)

Regardless of my own tarnished reflection, i LOVE photographs and how they can unfold the intimate memoirs of our lineage. Worth a thousand words, they inspirit wonder and incite emotion by simply being still; it's compelling. However, the greatest photographers of our time, not only do this with minimal effort, but they also conjure a sort of iridescent magic, that wasn't even there in real life. They are wizards with a click and a flash, transforming a moment in time and capturing the poignancy that we struggle to see in the clearest of days.

David LaChapelle is one such master of this wizardry, seizing curiosity and contorting our reality with his wand. His photographic and directorial third eye, scowers through the bizarre and creates an imaginative vision of surrealism that manipulates known truths.

Discovered by Andy Warhol, LaChapelle’s work has been cultivated to ground-breaking status. His pictures confuse futuristic innovation with retro cool, breeding his own style of kick-ass conceptual energy. Looked upon as “pop culture satire”, LaChapelle’s retrospective guides us towards a prophecy of our own ugly fixations and human mutations. His intense portraits of modern icons such as Madonna, Michael Jackson and Leonardo DiCaprio have an inherent darkness locked away inside the imagination, saying more than we might care to know.

"I want to communicate, without my work needing a paragraph on the wall next to it,"

(david lachapelle- Angelina Jolie)

(david lachapelle- cameron diaz)

Diane Arbus is yet another prophet of the unseen. Her simple black and white square portraits intertwine some horrific and ironic complexities. Within the images, her fascination with nonconformity and repulsion agonised for a notion of wider acceptance that might numb her own misery. Although Arbus committed suicide at the hands of depression in 1971, her eccentricity is immortal. The influential portraits of her “freaks” possess a charming vulnerability and nakedness unmasked to help her capture a sense of disability, thus striking a chord of harrowing sorrow.

"Freaks was a thing I photographed a lot," said Arbus. "It was one of the first things I photographed and it had a terrific kind of excitement for me. They made me feel a mixture of shame and awe. There's a quality of legend about freaks. Most people go through life dreading they'll have a traumatic experience. Freaks were born with their trauma. They've already passed their test in life. They're aristocrats."

(Diane Arbus- Transvestite)

Good photography frames our lives beyond human control. Those begrudged school pictures, family portraits, holiday snaps and the god-awful drunken flash-backs hang on our wall and lurk in our computer hard-drive. Somewhat honestly deceitful, they stand eerily still in time and place, imprisoning a memory, a story or a message that tells the truth, but in a different way.