Sisley's autumn-winter campaign for Benetton with photographer Terry Richardson
09 Jul '05
5 min read
It was his mother who gave him his first small camera. He snapped everything about him in the brashest, freest way possible. Among his subjects were his rocker friends in Ojai, California, where he was still living; together they formed a band whose initials “SSA” (Signal Street Alcoholics) are still tattooed on his chest. He photographed himself and others with a natural, impromptu, shameless manual dexterity.
The seeds of his style had already been sown: bold, aggressive, uninhibited, sometimes verging on pulp, imbued with explicit eroticism with no metaphors but with a good dose of self-irony that takes off the edge. Sometimes the rawness of his style can be disturbing but it leaps out at you from the glossy pages of fashion magazines and from street hoardings, and it fascinates and allures those who frequent Richardson.
Some consider him a modern Newton. Using a play on words which mixes his love for rock and photography he describes himself as a rockographer. His technique is to have no technique: the lens is his eyes, his charisma, his ability to elicit flashes of truth – of any kind – from himself and anyone else. There's no trickery or trappings: there's just him and his two tourist cameras - one in each hand – with his unquenchable thirst for life's emotions and a craving to get them on film.
He has created and continues to create advertising campaigns for the biggest fashion brands. He works for the leading fashion magazines: Vogue France, Vogue UK, Harper's Bazaar, Allure. He has photographed some of the most beautiful and envied women in the world: Faye Dunaway, Catherine Deneuve, Sharon Stone.
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