This short film is part of a conversation featuring photographers Chris Moore and Mitchell Sams hosted by Nilgin Yusuf. In this film they discuss the changing role of the catwalk photographer and catwalk photography, working with fashion designers and the challenges of digital capture and sharing.
This talk was part of a day of talks titled Photography A Visual language: A Day of Conversation held by us in collaboration with Van Arts: Vancouver Institute of Media Arts, Canada and the Editorial and Advertising photography course at the University of Gloucestershire, UK.
www.vanarts.com
www.glos.ac.uk/courses/undergraduate/pvp/pages/photography-editorial-and-advertising-ba-hons.aspx
Film courtesy of Reece Pickering and Tchad Findlay.
Chris Moore entered the world of fashion at the age of 20. He started his career as a photographers’ assistant at Vogue’s in-house studio on Shoe Lane, working alongside Cecil Beaton, Henry Clark and Clifford Coffin, amongst others. As early as the late sixties, he documented the Haute Couture collections of designers such as Yves Saint Laurent, Pierre Cardin and Courreges at exclusive presentations in their Paris showrooms and continued to photograph live shows and shooting at fashion weeks in London, Paris, Milan and New York as a full-time occupation. Moore has a very wide client base of publications, including The Times, Harper’s Bazaar and the International Herald Tribune. In 2007, the London College of Fashion hosted an exhibition entitled; Chis Moore: A Catwalk Retrospective, presenting his most impressive work to date. www.catwalking.com
Mitchell Sams was offered a full time job assisting Michel Arnaud, a photographer who shot lifestyle, portraits, still-life and the catwalk shows for British Vogue. The job offer was to travel the world with Arnaud creating reportage photography. Sams said yes, as long as he didn’t have to do the catwalk photography. Arnaud said all or nothing and 27 years later Sams only does catwalk shows. Today he has a team around him and he works for British Vogue, fashion designers and numerous newspapers, recently extending the international shows he covers outside of the traditional catwalk fashion centres of Paris, Milan, New York and London. www.mitchellsams.com
Nilgin Yusuf is a fashion writer based in London. She graduated with a BA in Fashion Communication & Promotion from Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design in 1988. After winning the Vogue New Talent and Guardian Fashion Writingcompetitions, she went directly to Elle as their Fashion Writer. Since then she has spent the last twenty years writing about fashion for national magazines and newspapers, notably as Fashion Writer at the Daily Telegraph and Fashion Editor at the Sunday Times. She currently runs the Post Graduate Certificate in Fashion and Lifestyle Journalism at the London College of Fashion, where she is also Director of Programmes in Media. As well as freelance journalism for the Saturday Times, she recently completed an MA in Fashion History and Culture entitled Undressing the Criminal Icon, 1959-1969. Her recent bookFashion’s Front Line was published by Bloomsbury Visual Arts and she is currently working on a book for the same publisher examining fashion film-making.