01.06.11
Profile: Chris Craymer
From shooting 1980s pop sensation Wham! to devising major ad campaigns, feshion photographer Chris Craymer has always created aspirational images that match his own personal ambition and outlook. Julia Molony finds out more.
Wearing a crisp shirt, hipster glasses and five o’clock shadow, Chris Craymer strolls down to the lobby of the super-stylish Sanderson London hotel with the ease of a man in his natural habitat.
Fresh from New York, where he moved with his wife, son and daughter in 2008, there’s no mistaking the fact that he embodies a certain kind of urbane, transatlantic lifestyle.
“I have an office in Manhattan and we live in a town called Westport in Connecticut,” he says, before listing the key selling points of his adopted home. “By the beach, very child friendly, beautiful, big difference between the seasons.”
And though he’s a decidedly down-to-earth sort of fella (due, he later suggests, to the rough-edged northern roots he inherited from his father) high style is his currency. So too is the vibrant, joyful, youthful energy which has become something of a signature of his work. It makes sense then that a photographer who captures fashion in a manner that makes the viewer ache with aspiration, would nod to those lifestyle values in his bearing. Though his hair is now a distinguished grey, there’s something boyish about Craymer. “You can be an eternal teenager in a way,” he says of the photographer’s lifestyle. “But it’s a very hard life. It’s very taxing. You kind of have to live it.”
Craymer first made his name in the 1980s by attaching himself, thanks to a bit of luck and a lot of perseverance, to a then little known pop outfit called Wham! Savvy from the start about the value of nurturing key professional relationships, Craymer carefully fostered links with media figures, celebrities and people in the BBC – which is how he found himself taking pictures on Top of the Pops.
“They had this new band on. They just sounded amazing and they looked great. I thought, ‘They’re going to be huge’. I phoned the record company and said, ‘I’d like to do some test shots.’” He offered picture approval in exchange for free creative rein, got together with the band and something clicked.
“One of the pictures became an album cover,” he remembers. Wham! took him on as their official photographer and he spent 18 months charting their meteoric rise “from nothing to huge superstars.”
Though still pretty much a cup snapper, a combination of ‘right place, right time’ brilliance and hard graft won him the first big break of his career. But the newly famous Wham! quickly took to heart the values of the fashion scene that had embraced them. They promptly dropped Craymer in favour of bigger industry names and he found himself back at the drawing board.
“I was called in to their manager one rainy Thursday morning and was basically told that they wanted to get some more arty pictures. This was a big catalyst for me to sit back and think, ‘Well, how have I lost that account?’ And I thought, ‘Well, you know, it’s because I don’t know about fashion and that side of the industry.’
Undaunted, Craymer decided to get himself to a global fashion centre forthwith. He packed up his life and went to live in Milan because, he says, it was “a great place for young photographers. You could go there with some test shots and get a job.” In Milan, while working for enlightened editors and experimental, risk-taking fashion publications, he began to really hone his craft. It was here that he discovered the value of thinking conceptually about representations of fashion, and he returned home with a portfolio full of tear sheets, having seriously upped his game.
After working in fashion in London, the opportunity for his next change of direction fell in his lap when he started shooting interiors with Lesley Dilcock, a former fashion editor for Marie Claire. Working with a new subject, Craymer quickly discovered that “sometimes the brave option is a good one. We did some tests and we found that if we got Agfa film that was a 400 ASA negative film, and we overexposed it by two stops, then pushed it by two stops – so we were almost four stops overexposed – that the colours and the grain would be amazing. The colour became very intense. I used that technique to do my interiors with Lesley. It created a look for me that was a bit different. It was the start of that intense colour that I’ve kept. It was a very important moment because that intense colour was mine then. Other people have done it, did do it, had done it, but it felt like me. It didn’t look good on people but it looked very good on products. So later on we had to find something that looked good on people as well. But it was a very important period for me, doing interiors.”
In interiors and still lives, however, there was, for Craymer, one crucial dimension missing: the human one. The potential of a picture to hold emotional weight has always been key to what he aims to express in his work.
Ever restless, he soon began casting around for the right kind of marriage of style, form and subject that would reflect the essence of his interests as a photographer. This, he says, finally reaches its apotheosis in Romance, a book he published in 2009. In a nod to his high-fashion connections the book was sponsored by Mulberry. But its aim was about more than just achieving an attractive aesthetic. It features a collection of tender pictures of real-life couples in staged scenarios. “Everybody in the book is a real couple,” Craymer says. “They’ve just been taken from where they live, often into a slight fantasy environment, and asked to play and be themselves.
“It’s not meant to be total reality. It’s meant to be the fantasy of what new young love is, which is a very intense emotion, and one which everybody understands.” The result is a sort of hyper-reality, manipulated by means of the set’s costumes and props to convey a heightened, theatrical, but ultimately authentic representation of romantic love.
“They’re not really portraits. They’re not really those couples; they are elements of those couples. But they are in some stately home, or some squat in Brixton. That mixture of environment, still life and emotion in the people is mixed with quite strong colour and grain. That book represents me, my work. That’s the pure me.” This printed version of the ‘Pure Chris’, has it turns out, proved to a nice little earner. With Romance as his calling card, he’s drawn in a slew of new clients, including Macy’s, Target and Dove’s ‘Campaign for Real Beauty’; all of whom have been attracted by different elements of the style that Romance showcases. Emotional content, sentiment even, is at the core of what he does. It’s why, he believes, that his work often finds its most receptive audience among women. Perhaps it’s significant, in light of this, that his interest in photography was sparked by a desire to connect, in a very personal way, with someone in his own life. Craymer was a 17-year-old radical headed for a degree in politics at Newcastle University when he met his father properly for the first time.
“There had been some dealings with him when I was a child, but I couldn’t really remember them,” he says. “He turned out to be a photographer. I was on a different course, I was doing A-levels and going to university. But I got an inkling about photography from my father. I started taking pictures of everything. I did a lot of pictures of streets, bridges, my girlfriend. I joined my local branch of The Camera Club. There was me at 19, and then the next youngest person was about 61. We’d have Rich Tea biscuits and slideshows about Trevor’s trip to Croatia. And they’d ask all these questions about f-stops and things like that.
But The Camera Club ultimately left him cold. “It didn’t interest me. It was too technical.” Instead, he studied his father’s Time-Life photography guides and taught himself; then, as soon as he finished his degree, started a sustained assault on the industry, looking for a break. It didn’t come easily, exactly. At one stage, while working as an assistant in a photo lab, he applied for two jobs a day, every day, five days a week. It took, he remembers, nine months before he eventually got his first proper gig as a darkroom assistant and junior photographer at a picture agency.
He sees now that the spur for taking pictures came from a desire to establish some kind of a bond with his father. From the moment he first picked up a camera, he felt an instant affinity with the process of creating an image. “My dad gave me a camera,” he remembers. “A tiny little point and shoot thing. And when I looked through it I thought, ‘I can do this’. Almost immediately, I could see pictures.”
www.chriscraymer.com
- Average Article Rating 0 Stars
-
Your Rating
Login Required!
Sorry - You must be a registered user & logged in to rate this.
Login | Register
Back to Categories