I pour my mind into everything I create, and always aim to push the envelope with consistently compelling imagery with the highest production value possible, whether I’m shooting with huge budget or with just my own body and a remote trigger. Photography is always my ‘living’ whether I am working on personal or commercial work, because it is creating that keeps me feeling alive.
I am a photographer based in London, UK. I produce work primarily as an artist, but also for fashion and commercial projects. I am internationally exhibited and the author of 2 books. I also run an event called the Fashion Shoot Experience.
My series ‘Ecology’ is about our world, and the place of humanity within it, at once a beautiful and polluting form. The images play with growth and disruption of growth, with ‘utopia’ and its opposite: dystopia. In this series I want to stir people to question and to think, intelligibly – about the problems, the beauty, and the conflict between them, in the world around us. The images are an evolution of my playful self-portraiture from 2006-2009; it is a way to express a troubled outlook on the world, through quietly sinister and even unnerving distortions.
‘The Fourth Soil’ was created in the forest near where I live, helped by my partner Matthew who took the shots of me standing at a distance between the trees. I knew at the time that the images would be black and white, but they took on a surreal organic life force of their own to make the final image. To me, the image represents re-discovering our connection to and almost complete dependence on nature, which has been muddied and often even dismissed, like a ‘tall story’, by the attitudes of modern medicine and lifestyle.
In my ‘Surreal Fashion’ series, fashion portraits become immersed into fine- art surrealism. I make bizarre interactions between models and other elements such as paintings, drawings and objects that are found in the location in which the model was shot. The surroundings of the model echo, distort and appear in unexpected ways in each situation. This is my attempt as a fine-art photographer at making fashion shoot situations more artistic, imaginative, and thought- provoking, and to take the easily-mimicked ‘in camera’ fashion shot several innovative stages further.
‘Storm Door’ was created during an event at Weston Park in the UK, with models dressed in semi-Regency period costume. The image of the model was shot with just the light from the modelling lamp, and stitched panoramically from two shots. During the event I had gazed at the paintings around this stately home, inspired by them more than anything else. I had photographed a classical painting of ships on the wall, fascinated by the drama in the ocean, and the tungsten hue which permeates a lot of my work. In post-production, I spontaneously combined my photograph of the model with the shot I’d taken of the sea painting. I saw that the dress could be manipulated to flow out into the waves as though the sailors were being thrashed upon it, by Mother Nature or a Helen of Troy-like figure, biting a string of pearls that fit the nautical imagery. I was also inspired by the C.S. Lewis story ‘The Voyage of the Dawn Treader’, with the fitting notion of a painting coming to life, through a door.
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Links
Facebook: www.facebook.com/missanielaphotography
Website: www.missaniela.com
Twitter: www.twitter.com/missaniela
Flickr: www.flickr.com/ndybisz
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