It took me a long time to call myself ‘A Photographer’. I wanted a broader term. Like a ‘Visual Artist’, ‘Visual Designer’ or ‘Visual Composer’. My skill is to steal, borrow and ‘liberate’ scenes from Cult Films, visual cue’s from my favourite Russian Constructivists, mood-boards from street blogs and textures and trends from The Glossies’ gutters. The photographers process of choosing, arranging and composing elements on a shoot has closer correlations to editing, directing, project managing and sometimes even cheerleading. In many ways photography is also a type of design. Alan Fletcher, one of my favourite graphic designers and founding member of Pentagram Design in London, said “Designing is what happens between conceiving an idea and fashioning the means to carry it out. Whether big stuff like painting a picture, making a movie, creating a commercial enterprise, or small stuff like rearranging the living room furniture. In short, designing is what goes on in order to arrive at an intelligent equation between purpose and construction, thus converting a problem into an opportunity”.

John Szarkowski said that “Photography is a system of visual editing. At bottom, it is a matter of surrounding with a frame a portion of one’s cone of vision, while standing in the right place at the right time. Like chess, or writing, it is a matter of choosing from among given possibilities, but in the case of photography the number of possibilities is not finite but infinite.”

Fashion photographer Steven Meisel is a typical postmodern visualist. Like a chameleon borrowing the hue and colour of his surroundings, he has been praised for translating contemporary themes into compelling campaigns. His latest twitpic inspired shoot for Vogue Italia is an interesting example.

Christy Turlington for Vogue Italia's Meisel Pic shoot

Viktoriya Sasonkina for Meisel Pic

One of my Favourite Russian Constructivists Wassily Kandinsky