Photographer & Visual Artist Steph Wilson On the Art of Interrogating the Norm

For Steph Wilson, photography is a  portal to the world of personal feeling and physicality, and a means of challenging initial impressions of sex, women, desire and anger.  Using her position behind the lens to subvert stereotypes, she creates work that, regardless of how shocking or uncomfortable it might appear, conveys a feeling we can all easily understand. Presenting her position as the artist in parallel with  the viewer, Steph seeks the intimacy rendered by the pressing of a shutter. For Steph, a photo should be intentional; a reflection of the culture as it is, rather than perceived standards of beauty. Whether shooting for Gucci, Mugler, Margiela or AnOther Magazine, she possesses a rare gift for creating work that never fails to feel bold and authentic; a world unto its own.

James Wright: How do you feel about interviews?

Steph Wilson: I really enjoy them. They’re a great way to flesh out an idea in real time, as well as hearing yourself say things aloud that perhaps before only existed as thought. It’s like that thing when you’re telling a friend about an insecurity that eats you from the inside and then saying it aloud, you realise how ridiculous it is. It can be the same with an idea as a response to an interview question. It can really help refine or build on preexisting ideas. I’m not sure if I prefer talking about photography as a practice or as a personal endeavour more. They’re so mixed up in each other, and I am particularly open as a person, often a little crass, so I think I need to practise keeping some things more guarded and to be less totally unabashed when talking about things that aren’t actually relevant to my practise at all or being so opinionated that, when seen in text - made permanent - don’t freak me out (laughing). 

JW: We previously collaborated for So It Goes magazine on a shoot with a Mercury prize-winning musician (Benjamin Clementine), a Chanel couture story and a cover with the actress Jessie Buckley. Can you speak to how your feelings towards photography have shifted since that time?

SW: I was much more awe-stricken back then - by the literal bright lights and the people that, I think, I enjoyed seeing on a pedestal. And then, after the years go by, you look to remove the pedestal and capture them as just another person. I think that’s actually way more interesting — seeing the devolution of an idol, or a magician, or something. It’s the same with the set-up of a fashion shoot, be it commercial or editorial. I really now look for the authentic mishaps, or the surprise lighting of the sun bouncing a certain way, or the models being street-cast and bringing their lives into the work. I think in a time that feels more and more artificial, finding the real and the raw is more vital than ever. Otherwise it just feels like a kind of cheesy lie. 

The super polished stuff, the bigger, high budget campaigns, I see as a different beast - you’re selling a product, so I get you want that product to be shiny. But if you’re also selling an idea, a real idea that you want to be captivating, it has to feel authentically real, like it actually lives in the world. And that doesn’t mean solely shooting in the street with street-cast models (I’m not going to use the term “real” for models that don’t conform to skinny white girls as I find the term so odd and reductive) but even in a studio setting with professional models - the second they’re not “modelling”, but they’ve just remembered they haven’t paid their parking metre, or something, that’s the real moment. Sometimes it’s enough. And it’s what I want to do more of going forward as I feel, looking over my work, it is too self-aware and composed. That level of composure, like a painting sometimes – which makes sense as I am also a painter – feels too contained and “made” when really, we need less perfection in a world that obsessively strives for it. 

JW: Tell me a little about your photo book on pregnancy and motherhood.

SW: I began the project when shooting pregnant women for a magazine cover, and upon the casting calls, I received the thinnest slice of a demographic I was hoping to come forward. It made me realise that by only photographing that tiny slice, it is ultimately perpetuating the problem: giving further confidence to the societal “ideal” - women in their early-mid thirties, white, slim, middle class - and denying that self confidence to those that don’t “adhere”. It was as if those that didn’t look a certain way didn’t think they were worthy of putting themselves forward, and that broke my heart a little. Then I looked into the politics of childbirth, into home birth, into the millennia of mistruths and misinformation, all devised and cemented by men, and it became this rabbit hole that I realised not only did I find it maddeningly backwards, but that this all affected me as a woman hoping to have children one day, too. 

As a caveat, I am aware that I am within that thin slice of the “ideal”, and I don’t pretend otherwise, and yet still, if I chose to deviate from the normal practice of pregnancy (what I choose to wear, my lifestyle, my birthing techniques), even as a middle class white woman, where the backlash would me marginal compared to if I wasn’t—I would still be met with this same bullshit of having my experiences contained within this archaic structure. I then focused on identity: where do we “go” when we birth, and become mothers? Where does that person we’ve spent our whole lives curating and developing go when faced with putting ourselves automatically second to our child? Should we wholeheartedly be second? For how long? To what degree? How much sacrifice is too much or not enough, and, regardless of what we choose, undoubtedly we’ll be demonised or patronised regardless (because our pregnancy is everyone’s business). It’s a minefield of identity, sacrifice, joy, sexuality, gender stereotypes, projection, limitation, control and fear via misinformation.

Motherhood is the broadest, oldest topic out there, yet why do I feel like it has barely been explored and challenged, especially in the mainstream? I’ve spent the past almost three years photographing people who’ve come forward to be platformed the way they want to be, in their own homes mostly, laying bare (some literally) their own world of motherhood. It’s been the most gratifying and beautiful project I’ve ever done. To take the mother as the key subject, almost bypassing the pregnancy or the newborn, and putting sole focus on them, I think was quite important for them to feel seen, a sort of veil lifted temporarily.

JW: I remember loving your story for New York Magazine / The Cut and being so taken by the colour matching, the light, the humour. How have you evolved stylistically since then?

SW: I’m actually wanting to go back - to devolve (laughing). I do love that shoot, but I’d have made some changes if I shot it now, years later. I’d have wanted to add a little more humour into it, or push the model a little more to weird-it-up...but that’s on me, I didn’t give her that direction at the time. I think what’s evolved the most is my confidence in my own practice. I don’t have a million references to refer back to on set or get stressed over not having every shot fixed in my mind as to what I want to achieve. Now it’s just down to allowing for things to play out, keeping the mood quite light (we’re not saving lives, we’re selling clothes). And if it is an editorial with more of a message attached to it – say, climate change or women’s rights etc. – then yes, to hold it with the grace and respect that that topic deserves, but also hold in the other hand the fact that it is, ultimately, still a fashion shoot. 

Gone are the days of justifying (or trying to justify) dressing a model up as a patient at a psychiatric ward, all under the premise of “art”. No, go and make art in an arena that gives the adequate respect to the subject – one where its ultimate purpose isn’t to sell a £1200 skirt - but not on a runway, or in a fashion magazine where the story will sit alongside a De Beers ad. I mean, are you kidding me? It’s too silly to even get angry about. So, to answer the question, what has evolved stylistically for me is the confidence to take risks within the aesthetic world I have honed, but with the understanding that some risks need to be left out of fashion photography. That’s fine for me as I see my non-fashion work as just as prevalent in my life; my motherhood book is an example. Never would I want photography to be “tame”, I’m just referring to fashion and this awkward area of is-it-fashion-or-is-it-art? that can just be a big bowl of wrong (laughing).

JW: Do you feel it is important to actively work on re-defining the boundaries of what photography is and isn’t to you?

SW: Yes, to me certainly. But I think if you don’t constantly assess what boundaries your practice is up against, you’re not doing it right. I think, what with AI floating around, that is a topic of conversation that a lot of people are having at the moment. It doesn’t concern me, by the way, in response to the frequent questions I get of “are you worried about AI taking your job?” As the answer is no, I’m not. As mentioned before, I think we’re craving authenticity and the “real” more than ever, and I’m seeing more and more revulsion to anything made by AI the more it develops. For a fashion shoot, to AI generate the images, you are also artificially generating the product. You’re only showing it as a reference. People don’t want to buy a reference of something, they want to buy the actual item in the image. Even - as you can argue photoshop takes away a lot of an image's “realness” - a polished fashion image stems from an event that actually happened, in clothes that actually existed at that point on an actual body. People are very sensitive to that, I think. People know when they’re being fooled.

JW: Does financial success change an artist’s practice?

SW: I mean, I don’t really need to answer that - you just need to look at any historical case of the rising fame of mega-photographers...Something in the work goes a little awry...(laughing). I think we’re in a different epoch of photography, though. Photographers don’t earn the hundreds of thousands that they used to. Campaigns with budgets of millions have now had to be diluted into 300 shoots for weekly posts on social media. It’s a very different animal now. And honestly, good. It’s far less exclusive - to be a photographer in the past (talking pre 2000s) you needed to come from money to fund your craft. That’s still the case now, but not to the same extent with the option of digital photography available. Back then, photographers were seen as magicians, magically making images from tubes and slides made with potions in a lab. 

Nowadays the process has been demystified by the sheer excess of imagery as a result of the sheer ease of it. We’re all photographers now. There are too many professional photographers for the amount of jobs requiring them. I like that it is now very accessible, and I think you still do have varying echelons of different levels of photographers defined by their talent. I shoot on film for many reasons but a big part of it is its process. It forces concentration and slowness. You physically take longer to shoot (it’s heavy!) but also you get ten shots per roll, not an endless SD card of thousands.

I’d probably have a lot more money had I chosen to shoot entirely digitally, but, and this sounds like the most privileged thing to say ever, I don’t care that much about money. I obviously depend on it to create my personal work and live a lifestyle that enables that, but when it comes to the desire to earn millions a year, it just sort of icks me out. Nobody needs that much money. And fuck trying to earn it all! What does that life look like? How stressful. I’d rather enjoy my time here, earn what I’m very grateful to earn doing what I actually really love to do, at my own pace, with clients I respect, and for magazines that allow me to flesh out my ideas with freedom.

JW: How do you feel about the phrase “the female gaze”?

SW: I really don’t like it. I was at a photography talk recently and one of the speakers was Alona Pardo, who I hugely admire. She shrugged off the phrase “the female gaze” as if it was this gross, patronising yet seedy thing - a bit like a slightly suspect old uncle telling you what a “good girl” you are. The “female gaze’ feels not only outdated, but counterproductive. What is the “male gaze”? Just...the status quo, the norm? It’s the same irking bullshit as someone referring to me, or another woman as a “female photographer.” It’s the same as someone in their 60s - it always is - saying “I went to the garage and spoke to a female mechanic” or “I went to my appointment and the Indian doctor was lovely”. It just shines a very harsh, ugly light on our subconscious misogyny (or racism), blurting out what we see as abnormal or, at best, novel. I don’t think of my viewpoint as novel, I see it as vital and one that needs to be normalised. I want the gaze of non-male photographers to be so normal there needn’t be a catchy label for it. 

JW: Do you think then that the internet has changed our collective gaze?

SW: I think it’s made everyone a little dumb. Our attention span isn’t there any more. We can't wait for anything to build, or really read into anything beyond its brightness or loudness; it has to come at you and shout and dance around long enough to desperately hold your attention. Because that’s what it all is, it’s all so desperate. It’s a sad state of affairs. I really hope people take a more active approach to viewing art away from the internet. I hope they go to see big beautiful prints in galleries and enjoy the jolting stillness of it all. See it as a respite from their feeds, as a kind of therapy.

JW: You’ve spoken about the pursuit of control. Presumably you like structures? In some ways, your work seems to lean into messy concepts that you effectively shoot in a rather constructed form...

SW: Yes, I dislike how controlling I am in so many aspects of my life. I also would like to dismantle that constructed aesthetic and find something a little looser. But then again, I feel like everyone always wants to do the opposite of what they’re used to doing, often due to insecurity. Maybe it’s more interesting to embrace it and have a conversation with it. How can this constructed aesthetic in my work that supposedly annoys me, serve me? Perhaps it’s too obvious to just want to now shoot very loosely. It wouldn’t be entirely truthful, anyway. It would be an enactment of a state I don’t necessarily suit, and that would be wrong, and probably come through in the work. I think we’re all so hard on ourselves, we “compare and despair”. We want to constantly reinvent ourselves because we see fresh new creatives being brandished around all of the time. But the truth is, we can't constantly be new and shiny, just as we can’t reverse ageing. Why not absolutely cherish that honed experience, in work and in life? Why not be proud of the fact you’re able to know what that style of work that you make is, so much so that you’re able to deconstruct it? It’s actually a great place to be in, really knowing yourself and your practice.

JW: What would be the topic of the next book – after motherhood – that you’d devote so much time and energy to?

SW: I honestly don’t even want to think about it before this one is complete. It would feel unfair and mean to the project to start thinking of its successor. Like having a kid and then starting to openly fantasise about a new baby...But I think I’ll want to focus on my editorial work a little after the book is launched, as that has taken a backseat. And, like it or not (I’m lucky that I do actually really enjoy shooting editorial), editorials do correlate with work commissions. It’s all part of the job. At least if I can shoot editorials on the basis of not just adding more shit to the pile, but create work that holds meaning and relevance within its appropriate arena, and in some small way, help the progression of an industry that is still in great need of it, then I’m pretty up for it.

Follow Steph @stephwilsonshoots