one page - Emma Summerton's Fashionable Portraiture

Emma Summerton's Fashionable Portraiture

To sell copies, fashion magazines regularly feature the celebrity of the moment, modeling the clothes of the moment. For fashion photographers, the challenge is to create photo stories that present the celebrities in unexpected ways, while making sure they remain recognizable to readers and fans.For photographer Emma Summerton, who moves seamlessly between shooting fashion and celebrity portraiture for publications such as i-D, Purple, Vogue and W, and commercial clients like Burberry, Miu Miu and Yves Saint Laurent, her approach is the same: All her work is based on creating an intriguing concept using an environment or location, and then letting her subjects inhabit it in ways that feel comfortable. “For me, it’s more about getting the mood and the space right, and then collaboratively running with it once the shoot starts.She frequently finds that the best images come at the end of a shoot, when everyone else feels like the workday is done. On a 2012 job for W photographing actors Nicole Kidman and Clive Owen, she recalls, publicists were rushing them through shots. The story was called “An Affair to Remember,” a nod to the film the two actors were promoting, Hemingway and Gellhorn, and to the ladylike 1950s clothes of the season in which Kidman was posing. As they were wrapping the shoot at the Beverly Wilshire hotel in Los Angeles, Summerton noticed Kidman looking in the mirror, and asked her to take one final shot. Summerton says she never guessed she would shoot commercial and editorial work when she was a student at the National Art School in Sydney during the early 1990s. Then, while out for coffee with her musician boyfriend, she met a professional photographer who was looking for an assistant. Summerton offered her services, even though her experience was limited to working in the school darkroom. “It was eye-opening,” she laughs. “I realized I had almost no technical skills.”For the next six years, she devoted herself to learning the craft by assisting fashion and lifestyle photographers in Australia. During that time, she discovered Vogue Italia. “It was a revelation for me,” she says. “I said to myself, ‘Oh my god, there’s fashion photography that can actually be put on a wall.’For a cover story on George Clooney for W’s Art Issue, released in December 2013, Summerton was told that Clooney would be wearing a black-and-white polka dot suit designed by the Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama. After brainstorming with the magazine’s design director, Johan Svensson, and photography director, Caroline Wolff, Summerton asked Kusama to design a matching backdrop to go with the images. Thomas Thurnauer, a set designer, created a table and chair covered in dots to fill out the composition. The resulting work is equal parts surrealist and retro pop—Clooney’s face practically jumps out of the textured surfaces of the images.  Although Summerton primarily shoots for fashion clients, she hasn’t ruled out the possibility of showing her work in an exhibition, marking a return to what first drew her to fashion photography when she was a young assistant. “Right now, I’m just letting go, and going along for the ride,” she says.