AS lovers of fashion, we – and probably you – have seen a few
photography books devoted to Alexander McQueen in recent times, but
we’ve never seen one like Working Process, published by
Damiani.
When photographer Nick Waplington – known, but not what you’d
call famous, for his gritty reportage depicting life from Israel’s
West Bank to a Nottingham housing estate – was approached by Lee
Alexander McQueen to document the making of his
Horn of Plenty collection, he was flattered – but the
timing was wrong.
“I got a call saying, ‘Lee wants to see you’ – we knew each
other, and he knew my work – so I thought I’d go and see what he
wanted,” the photographer explained. “He knew I specialised in
photo books and that I shot working class families, industrial
landscapes; I was living in Israel at the time – and he told me
that he wanted me to document the making of a collection. I said
sure, in a couple of years I would, but he said no, that it had to
be me and it had to be now; this collection. He saw it as a turning
point.”
“He explained the idea behind the Horn of Plenty
collection, and why he wanted to document this collection
particularly,” Waplington went on. “He said he saw it as closing
the door on his first 15 years; he saw it as his last collection as
a young man. The set was a pile of garbage made up of his old sets,
he used models who he’d used before, even the jewellery; everything
was about recycling, renewal. It was a comment on the economy at
the time, I think, as well as the industry generally.”
Waplington’s work is self-generated – he’s not, he admitted, “a
commercial animal” – and McQueen liked this, the photographer says.
He liked, too, a photograph of Waplington’s that he saw at an
exhibition at Whitechapel Gallery, telling the photographer that
pictures like that one – an image of a landfill site near where
McQueen grew up – would add something important to the book. So
Waplington brought his aesthetic, seemingly so far from McQueen’s,
to the designer’s studio and began documenting every element of the
collection, from the inception to the show.
“As an outsider, what really struck me were the hours involved;
the dedication of people in the industry at this level to make
something happen – many of them for fairly little reward, as far as
I could see,” he said. “I came to the project with fresh eyes, as
someone who doesn’t often work in fashion, and saw how Lee was
worshipped. People kept telling me how stressful it was, to be
careful at the fashion show, but I found it really easy. I was
living on the West Bank at the time, so any job where there wasn’t
a chance of getting hurt felt pretty relaxing!”
Sitting quietly in the corner (“I’d say yes or no if someone
asked if I wanted a drink, but that’s it”), Waplington’s approach
to documenting McQueen and his team at work bore more resemblance
to nature photography than to the accepted notion of fashion
photography. The practice enabled him to capture everyday moments
between the designer and collaborators including milliner Philip
Treacy, who prompted Waplington’s only disagreement with McQueen as
they edited the book together.
“He edited the book himself,” he revealed. “He didn’t want to
look at the pictures on a screen so I printed out probably seven or
eight hundred prints and then we edited them down to about 300. I
put them all in a book and he edited and rearranged them until he
was happy with the final edit. The pictures of him – mostly smiling
and happy – is how he wanted to be seen, but also that’s how he was
a lot of the time. We only disagreed about a few edits; he wanted
to remove the pictures of Philip Treacy entirely. He said, ‘this is
my book Nick, not Philip’s!’ He actually removed them, but I called
him and said, ‘Lee, you need to put them back!’ and he did -
they’re in there.”
So why, after working so hard to finish the book whilst Lee was
still alive, did Waplington wait more than three years to publish
it?
“There’s two reasons really,” he admitted. “We finished the book
and Lee and I went together to sign the contract with the
publisher, but Lee wanted a leather cover and when we got there,
that had been taken out of the contract. Lee said, ‘We’ll forget
that then will we?’ and we left. It was late in the year, so we
agreed to wait until after Christmas to try to find a new
publisher. Then, in February, obviously, history took its course.
After Lee died, I had a lot of offers to publish it quickly – but
the McQueen company asked me to wait. I own the pictures – Lee said
as soon as he proposed the idea that he was the subject but the
work had to be mine – but I didn’t want to do it without their
blessing. It’s been good in a way, I’m glad we waited, it’s a nice
pause; to reflect after three years.”
“It was a wonder to watch him work, of course,” Waplington
reflected. “He was an old-school craftsman. You hear about other
labels designing almost by committee, but he was the antithesis of
that. He’d sit quietly, and then there would be these Svengali-like
moments where someone would bring him a roll of fabric and he’d
jump up and grab the rolls of cloth and drape them over the model
and pin them and move them, and then someone would run off and sew
them – and come back with them later. And it’s these ‘creation
moments’ after period of inaction – just like a painter or a
photographer; these are the little things that take you forward.
His work was almost performance art – the grand gesture. He was a
very theatrically-inspired guy.”
Beginning To End: The Real McQueen
No comments:
Post a Comment