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This newsletter is a hub for all things film photography. Every week we’ll provide resources, stories, and profiles that educate and inspire film-loving individuals just like you!
The subject of this week’s newsletter is…
Film and Fantasy
What role can analog photography play in fantasy world-building? How can photography function as escapism?
Since the very emergence of photography in popular culture, it has been utilized to embody the fantasies of the photographer. Evident in early victorian photographers like Julia Margaret Cameron, who employed the help of costumes, lighting, and composition to mimic religious iconography. She gave an image to her imaginative world through photography, a practice that continues to be identifiable in various modern-day photographers.
Titus Poplawski is a Polish photographer who specializes in narrative photography. He focuses on the lighting and details of his photographs to convey metaphors and social commentary with his work. His main subject is the human, placing them in different scenes and positions while maintaining a certain emptiness in his images, created by the light and shadow that is meticulously composed by Poplawski. This attention to detail and precision has won him many photography awards, establishing Poplawski in the world of images as a notable point of view.
Poplawski’s images resemble stills from a movie as if every photo of his was taken during the rather infrequent moments of stillness offered in life. Different themes such as solitude, relationships, division, and environment are prominent in Poplawski’s compositions, with an overarching sense of mystery that ties each image back into the artist’s “unreal dream world,”. Poplawski draws inspiration from popular media and the art world, explaining that “throughout our lives, we absorb the world and art around us,” and utilizes the medium of photography to comment on this truth.
While the artist shoots both digital and analog photography, Poplawski enjoys shooting film because “film gives you much more satisfaction from your work. It’s not about the advanced technical challenges. It’s more about letting the film influence the final artistic result of the picture.” He has also described his process of using film as one that “is like working with a partner.” Poplawski sees the difference that the method of film makes on an image, and revels in the endless variations and possibilities that film allows. He explains that film has its “own character” and a “real impact” on the final photo, and that “the film paints with light and can surprise the photographer.”
There is no doubt that Petra Collins has shaped the visual language of today with her distinct cultural and aesthetic contributions. I remember as a young girl witnessing a cultural shift in the year 2016, in which Collins played a huge part; she teamed up with the creators of the indie brand Me and You Julia Baylis and Mayan Toledano to promote their collaboration with Bing Bang NYC. It was in these promo images that aimed to depict “girlishness” as something “incredibly powerful” that a fresh aesthetic avenue was unveiled. Collins’ 35mm images for Me and You were undoubtedly inspired by iconic teen movies like The Virgin Suicides with their airy demeanor and pink-tinted color palette.
While the energy of her photos is familiar, it was presented in a way that felt brand new. The campaign, shot exclusively on film, uplifts the women’s rights movement as well as body positivity, inadvertently reshaping the image of girlhood into one that hopes to transcend unrealistic beauty standards, the male gaze, and other forms of subjugation that women face on the daily.
That is the beauty of Collins’ work; it reclaims the perceived “naivete” of girlhood and turns it into something otherworldly, depicting the elements of femininity that are often equated with weakness and highlighting their beauty.
Today, Collins continues to create otherworldly images with femininity and sexuality as the subject. She has recently released a book in collaboration with Alexa Demie titled Fairy Tales that reimagines classical folklore through an erotic and fantastical lens. Collins and Demie elaborated on their work together in an interview with Vogue, detailing the construction of their fantasy world. They wanted to pay homage to the fairytale stories of their childhood, a space in which both Demie and Collins found solace during their upbringing. As a result, they imagined a crossroad between the fantasy of adolescence and the influence of that era on their current perspectives.
Photographer David LaChapelle has historically taken reality into his own hands when it comes to his photography. His images are characterized by bold color palettes, ornate set design, religious references, and celebrity subjects. After getting his start as a teenager at Interview Magazine, under the direction of Andy Warhol LaChapelle rose to prominence and has since become one of the most notable pop culture photographers. While LaChapelle does not exclusively shoot film photography, he utilizes both analog and digital technologies to depict his fantasy world.
With features and covers in GQ, Vogue, Vanity Fair, Rolling Stone, and i-D, LaChapelle has undoubtedly made a name for himself. He has also shot album covers for artists such as Doja Cat, Travis Scott, and Mariah Carey, while also having released several books of his photographs.
Film photography creates a world separate from the one we witness with our eyes or our phone cameras. As we learned from Poplawski, analog technology alters light and shadow to depict reality in an alternative way. Fantasy film photography is an investigation of the world we face through the manufacturing of a world, where certain elements are emphasized or exaggerated in order to convey some kind of message.