On the phone with Jamie Morgan
At Hayward Hall, Jamie, Eden, Tavi’s Dad and Tavi in the reflection in action
I met Buffalo photographer Jamie Morgan on the first day at the POP offices in London. Tavi, Eden and I had just flown from all over and now we were all there like magic (Elizabeth joined us the next day). The next day while we were running around the city shooting one of our editorials for the poster zine, he was photographing us in action (I’d LOVE to see some of those). Three days later he was taking our proper portrait in a studio. The whole thing was so surreal, and it still seems totally crazy that it happened. A few weeks later I was back in New York City and we arranged a little phone chat for POP. He was at the photo studio waiting for some prints and I was sitting on my stoop on a beautiful Brooklyn day. We talked about blogs, magazines and even the Wizard of Oz.
Laia: Hi Jamie, how are you? it’s Laia
Jamie: Hi Laia. I’m good. Hold on let me find a quiet spot here. Ok.
L: Alright, let’s start at the top and see where this takes us. So what did you first think when Ashley (Heath) contacted you about this project? Had you heard about the blogs before? Is that something you’re into?
J: No, it’s not actually. (laughs) I’m not a fashion business conoisseur. I kinda just do my thing, but I get interested when I hear somebody doing something new or fresh or something different, so he told me about you guys and I went on and I looked and I thought “yeah, this is exciting!”. You know what I liked about it was (that it was) young people doing their own thing without waiting for approval from the fashion industry, creating their own platform. Which I kind of associated with, because I think I did the same.
L: Yeah, that’s kind of where I see our similarities, that it was sort of just-let’s-do-this-and-then-whatever-happens-happens. So, how did you get involved with Buffalo, were you interested in fashion photography or was it just like a group of cool kids doing their own thing that evolved into this…
J: …I was doing photography and portraiture and it was always about the people for me and the actual clothing items were more about the style of the person than the labels. My inspiration wasn’t designers at all, so my concept was to not use models and not use designers as the main thrust of the visuals but to start with characters and interesting people and then to mix it up. Throw in a nice jacket from Armani and use that in a shot but mix it up with all kinds of other things, I mean it’s a long complicated story that one… (laughs) It all started with The Face magazine, really. When I first started there was nowhere really to work, there weren’t any cool magazines. The Face and ID had just started but they weren’t fashion magazines they were more music and street, kinda fanzine-type-thing, and I decided to mix all of that together. I persuaded them to do fashion pages, whereas really they hadn’t done that before, but we didn’t want to call them fashion, because it wasn’t about the fashion and the designers it was about the style with which all the stuff was worn. The guys at The Face called it Style Pages, therefore Ray Petri became the stylist, and that’s kind of how it all worked out. I persuaded them to put many pages like a fashion magazine. So (you have this) this street style in a fashion context, like they did in Vogue, 10 pages on a white background. It was breaking the mold of what was out there and trying to find a new format of exposure, which I guess is what you guys are all about.
L: Yeah, Tavi especially, because her blog is about her dressing up and it’s never about whatever labels. She just gets dressed and takes pictures, which I think is very much kinda the same spirit.
J: Yeah, that’s how it all started for me. But you know, the industry’s changed, it’s not like that, it all became a lot more corporate. The magazines have a very strong link with their advertisers and therefore their editorials are kind of controlled by the advertising that they have in their magazine, which it never was before. It’s not as open as it was before, there’s a lot more restrictions.
L: Do you think that maybe, now, with the recession everything that’s happening it could start swinging the other way? That at some point people want to see more stuff that’s real and not the same dress photographed in like 10 different magazines because that’s THE dress of the season?
J: Yeah, I think it really is, which is why I’m excited to kind of come back. There wasn’t such a place for me in the last ten years, because it’s quite hard for me to be part of “the machine”.. But in a way, the recession has brought that up and people have had as much of that formulaic fashion as they can take, and there’s definitely the doors open for creativity and the budgets aren’t there so people are going to have to think on their feet a bit more and be creative. I think most people,fairly young people are a bit sick of seeing the same thing. What I try to do with my pictures in the POP is to make every shoot, every couple of pages, especially the stuff I did with Tavi, a different style, a different look photographically or emotion behind it or a different attitude. There’s much more within it so when you’re looking over 10-15 pages you’re giving the person who’s watching it a lot more.
L: I think so, I mean looking at the pictures in the (Buffalo) book, the best part of it, or at least the part that inspires me the most, is the attitude. Imagining who this person is and seeing how they wear everything and their personality. I think it’s something that needs to come back
J: Yeah, that’s what’s exciting to me, like doing this stuff with Tavi was great because it was a chance to do high fashion in a different context. Like you say, a character, a personality as opposed to just kinda faceless model.
L: Even these days it seems like everybody is just putting celebrities on the cover and that’s really even worse, because it’s not even a model who might bring something, it’s just, here is this person who has this movie coming out so she’s wearing some dresses, it’s so boring, really.
J: Yeah, I think the kind of culture of celebrity is an easy option. Back in the day, The Face magazine, they got people JUST as they were turning, now magazines are all the same and they’re just following a trend and they’re just going “oh everybody knows these people, it’s going to sell”, whereas to be courageous in fashion and in art you gotta put yourself out there before everyone else.
L: I think British magazines always seem to be on that edgier side. Magazines like ID and POP, even if they feature a celebrity, it’s not just for the sake of being a celebrity. Do you think there is some kind of British spirit that’s always wanting to see what’s new and what’s from the street and not so much what everyone else is doing? I always feel like London fashion is always the more experimental, you know like the kids from Central St. Martins and stuff, do you think that it’s something that comes from growing up there or it’s something that’s just sort of happened?
J: I definitely consider myself British and from London in terms of my attitude towards everything and I love the kind of creativity of all the kids that come out of St Martins. I think, for me, one thing its the weather. Much of my youth was spent inside studios, and it’s not like living in LA where you can hang out on the street or go out surfing. So young people congregate in studios, being quite creative and that has definitely something to do with it and the fact that we like to change up. Every ten years, something new happens in this country. Punk, New Romantics, Grunge, whatever it is it always seems to change and there’s not much going on now but I think that it will.
L: Yeah, I think it’s starting now, like maybe these past few years have been a transition period. The crazy celebrity pop explosion that happened at the end of the 90’s is kind of dying out and something new is starting.
J: Hold up one second, I’m going to have a look at these prints here…
L: Sure, no problem
J: Ah it’s great, you know I do all my stuff on film, so I’m in the old black and white printers here. I love to shoot digital because I love the quality, I love the immediacy of it and I like to embrace all technology and formats but the trouble is that everyone gathers around and makes their comments straight away and the client knows what you’re doing. I love the idea of “is it going to come out?”, “did I get it?” and then you look to the contacts and see “Oh that shot is brilliant!” and there is that element of surprise and excitement and that’s gone in the digital game, you know exactly what you’re getting and everyone knows and you walk away at the end of the day and its done but to me there’s no romance in that.
L: Yeah, it’s really something cool. I took photography in college and we developed our own film and its probably one of the coolest things I’ve ever done because it feels so personal, like you’re really a part of the entire process.
J: Yeah, I agree, it’s something that is lovely, to still have that. But to me, every situation is different and sometimes I love to use big digital cameras and sometimes I use a throwaway camera that you buy in a garage. It doesn’t matter. it’s all about the attitude behind it and the people you’re shooting and conceptualizing it in the way you want it, that’s the joy of it, really.
But you know, I look at the blog stuff and I think it’s great, but I’m not going to be going back to it, everyday and checking out whats going on. In a way i think its great that there is the immediacy and that there is stuff like that and you don’t need to be in the good books or the magazines to get work and you don’t need to be a part of the industry. Blogging and the whole way that young people, and this is true of digital photography, CAN just do it, and it can’t be controlled by a number of elite people, and that to me is exciting, so we’ll see what happens and hopefully, we’ll shake it up a bit.
L: Yeah, I’m really excited to see how this whole issue is going to turn out, its going to be hard to wait for two more months to see the result.
J: Yeah, well that’s the thing with non-digital (laughs), you don’t have it immediately, and that will probably make it more precious.
L: Absolutely, so I was wondering how you got involved with music. I know that you put out records, and directed music videos, how did that come about?
J: Well, to me, it’s all part of the creative process. I hate this thing of being specialized. It’s like, you need to be a photographer, and not only do you need to be a photographer but you need to take a particular picture, so a client can go “oh he takes those pictures, I want that picture” and its so specialized now that its very restrictive and to me the creative process is much more of an open thing. In all my shoots, the music I play in the room is the atmosphere, its the whole thing, and when I used to work with Ray Petri, he used to put perfume on the model and it sounds like a ridiculous thing, but its all about the ambiance. Music was always in my blood so I wanted to make music as part of my creative process, and film is a very natural progress from photography and a lot of photographers do have that relationship. I don’t like shooting the same picture over and over again for twenty years, some people do, but to me the whole journey is the creative process and over my years its moved into different formats and even into a whole other creative genres but photography has always been my main thing.
L: Yeah, I think if you’re really, truly creative then you will need to explore all available mediums to express a different feeling
J: Yeah I think before money and corporate ideals took over, that was allowed, and now, like i said, it’s become people really pigeonholing you into… the whole kind of agency thing and agents and it’s all “this photographer does this” and “this photographer does this” and I can tell that that’s very frustrating for photographers, and I think that people like David (Lynch) have fought that and gone on reinventing themselves and that’s really wonderful, so to me, hopefully its going to open up and people will allow me to be more creative and not be stuck in this box
So what about you, what was it like for you being photographed and what was it like shooting your first story?
L: It was really incredible. I don’t think that it will really hit me until I see everything done because I was trying not to think about everything that was happening. Otherwise I’d get overwhelmed.
J: Was that your first fashion shoot that you shot?
L: Yeah, officially yes, I did some stuff in school, but that doesn’t really count (laughs).
J: That to me was a really interesting creative process because I photographed you guys on your shoot and that was the first time I’d ever seen four photographers taking the same picture (laughs) and that was kind of wonderful and bizarre at the same time. Wonderful because there’s no egos and also kind of a bit bizarre because no one really knew what they were doing (laughs), and I mean that complete innocence, is in fact very Andy Warhol in a way, his Polaroids weren’t the most incredible photographic things but the immediacy and the innocence of that approach is quite a powerful artistic statement. So that’s what it felt like.
L: It was really good and then when we went through all of them and started editing them it was really fun to see all of our different styles. It was really cool to see how at all came together. Having my photograph taken was really really weird, I don’t feel like I’m so photogenic so it was weird to stand there and be at a professional setting and have you take my picture it was really surreal, for sure.
J: And did you like the results?
L: Oh yeah! Absolutely, I love it. I probably look cooler than I’ll ever be in real life (laughs).
J: (laughs) Well, there you go. You’ve pinpointed one of the great things about photography, you capture a moment that is in a way truer than the reality.
L: I mean, I still felt it was me, just a better version
J: (laughs) Good, oh that’s very good. I really loved that there was no ego between you guys and you just got along with it, i just cant imagine it in any other situation where that happens. So one of the pictures that we’re going to use of the four of you at Hayward Gallery is very Wizard of Oz (laughs). You know I saw Tavi as Dorothy and the four of you as… as, well I don’t know exactly who was which (laughs) but it was very much like that, the four of you on a great adventure to meet the Wizard of Oz in fashion and that’s kind of what was going on inside me. It was like the four of you coming to London and going on this fashion journey and when you get behind, the Wizard of Oz is just a guy playing a machine and really its just all an illusion and the whole fashion blogger story was about just deconstructing the myth and that its just how you make it and that there is no higher power telling you what to wear and what it should all be about and that if you follow your own instincts you’re gonna get it right
L: Yeah it’s the whole DIY spirit.
J: I think that’s what this blog issue hopefully is about. Its about getting back to that spirit of do-it-yourself, take a chance, don’t wait for someone to let you, and if you really follow your creative path people will notice and you’ll get a shot.
