The Images That Made Me

How much does imagery help shape the person we become? Which photographs are the ones we remember as changing us in some way––creatively, personally, professionally––or simply as marking the passage of time?

We ask industry leaders, artists and experts in visual culture to talk us through the five photographs that have brought them to where they are now. Think Desert Island Discs, but make it art.

‘Neck’ [Lee Miller], Man Ray & Lee Miller [1930]

My most favourite photographers; when I first discovered the collaborative work of Man Ray and Lee Miller I think I truly discovered myself. It sparked an enduring fascination with relationships that incorporate both art and sex, and where and why romantic and creative lives intersect and diverge. [Plus I grew up on Tumblr so just want bae to take cute pics of me, à la Man and Lee.]

As an image that made me, this one here represents the great passion of my life, which, as sad as it may read, is the twentieth century avant-garde. All of the surrealists and modernists and bohemians whose stories and creations occupy a disproportionate amount of space in my mind.

Ray’s a Laugh, Richard Billingham [2000]

I think you can smell these photographs. Feel the textures. Their depiction of poverty is atmospheric and evocative, due in part to Billingham’s technical and compositional choices, but what I think makes them most powerful is the lack of separation between the photographer and the subject. Billingham isn’t a voyeur, he doesn’t look down, he’s not intruding on their space or exploiting their hardship – he’s capturing his own reality and because of his intimate familiarity with the photographic subject the level of honesty and truth in these portraits is disarming. Again I think they speak to my preoccupation with relationships. When I first saw this series at The Saatchi Gallery it was the longest I have ever spent standing in front of a picture.

Untitled, my dad Paul [c. 1999]

In almost every photograph of my little sister Sasha and I as children, I am holding her hand, or have a hand on her shoulder, or have an arm wrapped around her, or, like here, my head resting against her. The photos capture total adoration and protection; two people who would be incomplete without each other. My role as sister is of the most crucial, most defining of my life, and Sasha is my greatest love, so the photographs which tell that story are everything to me. The fact that my mum and dad were the other side of the camera imbues them with another layer of tenderness.

Untitled, Patrick Demarchelier [2008]

My late father used to bring home for me the last months’ Vogues, Tatlers and Harper’s Bazaars from the hotel he worked in when I was growing up. You couldn’t easily get the really cool magazines in the New Forest where I lived, so my gateway to fashion was through second hand glossies from a hotel lobby, but there are some editorials from those pages that I think of fondly, having spent immeasurable hours poring over them.

This story with Jessica Stam was one of them. I think they made me want to go and study fashion, which I did, so their effect in that sense was profound.

Orgasmic Man, Peter Hujar [1969]

Honestly it’s hard to choose which Peter Hujar photograph is the most special, but there is a framed print of Orgasmic Man in the studio where I work, so I see it with great regularity and never get bored of looking. Its unbelievable crispness and the perfection of every shadow are matched only by the intensity of the moment it depicts. Hujar is the master to me.

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