 How's it, how's it, guys? Today's episode is brought to you by Frames Magazine, the wonderful sponsors of your Wednesday videos. Finding style in photography was such a unusual path for me. When I started off back in the early 90s, taking photographs seriously at the photo school, I had some ideas in mind. I wanted to be like David Bailey or Robert Maples Thorpe and I was kind of vaguely aware of Anton Corbain at that time. So there were three people who were sort of influencing the way that I took photographs. And I thought, if I keep copying them, if I make work that looks specifically like them, then I will find that my own images remind me of their work and then I will have a style. My photographs will be distinctive and stand out. But I was going about all this completely the wrong way. Copying people's photography is good. It's a good exercise. It helps you break down learning about light and the way photographers approach ideas. And we did a lot of that at a photo school where we were given assignments to copy various photographers or take pictures in a certain way. And that introduced me to so many different influences and styles and approaches that unknowingly I was starting to pick up things that seemed to work for me although I wasn't aware of them at the time. I would sit there in the colour lab at photo school and I'd put through a print and as the roller machines got up and down and I remember these to take about 12 minutes. If you're familiar with the RA4 process, let me know. It's somewhere in that region, I think, or maybe I'm confusing with the process a little before but anyway, it doesn't really matter. And in that little waiting room, there were stacks of shelves full of photographic magazines, much like frames, books from the Time Life series. There's how to photograph things. The big thing of the 12 volumes. It was amazing. You can flick through these ideas and all these brochures and pamphlets from various companies trying to sell their stuff that had been accumulated over the years. And it was that process of looking at images, of digesting them and coming back to them again and again that started to influence my style. And this was before the internet. This was before you could go online and look at images and it's been great because I've been able to find loads of people whose work I enjoy. I'm gonna go, wow, that's pretty cool. But they never have the lasting impact I feel on my own style that was laid down by looking at images in print. Not just going, I quite like that idea and then filing it away in some drop box or a Pinterest thing or something. And then going, well, I'll come back to when I've got some ideas for a shoot. I'll come back to that and I'll go there. Because I never do. I was cleaning out a bunch of hard drives that I don't have and look at what's on them. And I find folders and folders of like inspiration images and ideas for shoots. And I copied and I never did anything with them. They haven't really implied to me. As some of them I'd look at and go, why, what was that? Why was I drawn to this particular photograph? But when you have magazines, printed images you can come back to, then you start, I find, to have these photos implant themselves within you. So I can, the back of frames, there is this picture of an elephant who's there every day. I think it's a sponsor or some advertiser. Oh no, it's not to read frames. So that's why it's there all the time. And that photograph is starting to embed itself in my mind because I see it quite a lot. Now one of the things that I do with frames, and we talk about this, I look at these photographs almost cold, as it were. So by cold I mean I haven't really flicked through the magazine previously. This is the first time I'm going through it in any sort of depth. And I'm looking for images that stand out. And I kind of, you know, for me to go, well okay, that's something that I like. Maybe I can not appropriate it, but like a magpie, take that idea and file it away up here, which I'll be reminded of every time I go through the book or the magazine again. So this particular image here, that's a very striking portrait by a photographer called Trevor Cole of a gentleman in South Sudan. And what I like about that, when I look at that is first of all, the angle is very interesting. It kind of looks slightly above when the guy's looking up. So what a wonderful compositional aspect that if I saw more of this, then I would kind of go, okay, that's something that if it resonates with me internally and it goes through the process of all the filters on my head and comes out through my camera, then that's helping to influence my style. And it's always a fun game too to kind of look at the photographers in this and think about who may have influenced them. Obviously in this case with Trevor Cole, a lot of this work reminds me of some Steve McCurry ideas. There's also Sebastia Solgado in here. Loads of little influences that I would hope that I'm correct in thinking that Trevor's drawing from these people and then maybe he likes the comparison. But it does go to show that when you are looking through somebody's photography and you start analyzing it like this, it gives you an insight, not only into how they are arriving at their own particular style, that you get a feel for what sort of things work for you rather than having an image just go flick, flick, flick past the screen, you get time to spend with the photograph, like this photograph here by a photographer called Dro Brunnenberg. I love this kind of stuff, very angular. I mean, you know, regular followers of the channel will know that this kind of work is absolutely what I adore and it reminds me of those two German photographers whose name totally escapes me right now who photographed water towels as well. And I'd go, you know, that's, I love doing that. So when you find somebody whose work does resonate with you, we go, ah, that's exactly what I'd like to do. You can also take hard that inner idea, that inner idea of your style of what you feel is natural in taking your photograph is okay. I, you know, for a long time, I thought that when I was taking images that they had to be in a certain fashion, that you weren't really able to break out and make your own style. You had to photograph in the style of, rather than, as I found out later on, just photographing how it feels natural for you. And then you've developed a style when somebody, a few years ago, we were looking some photographs and we're all portrait photography, family portrait work and people were showing some images around having a chat online. And I showed some of my work and they go, oh, well, yeah, well, that's Alex, that's your style. I go, oh, you're immediately, because that's different, we could tell that's you. Because over the years in my lighting and all that sort of stuff, I've been drawn towards a more painterly film and more naturalistic, if you wanna call it that style, which is totally at odds with where I wanted to get when I started. And that's probably because over the years, I obviously, my tastes changed, my influences changed. I built more of a library of images on which to draw inspiration from that were from physical sources. If I look at the work here of Julie McIver, I'm seeing some really wonderful abstract photographs. I love the shape and the feel and that everything is very uniform, sort of, I think uniform's like a cool word, but that uniform implies, except because I'm concerned, it feels like it's just, everything is regimented, but it's not. It has a life and a vibrancy to it. And then when you start scraping beneath the surface with these, and we play that game about what's Julie's influences, where are they coming from? We pick up people like Ernst Haas. We pick up people like Hal Eastman. There's a little bit of Pete Turner in there with the use of color, although these are more pastel colors whereas Pete Turner's color was quite bold. And you kind of go, at the moment, these are not really influenced me. They're not something I would sit and go, okay, well, I'm gonna take some of that and add it to my style bank. But if I look at them enough over time, there may be some hidden bits that come in there that will seep into my consciousness about having to do this. Because I love my style. I love the way that I photograph now. And if I had to go back and say, look, there's a process for doing this, there isn't, some people, well, I say there isn't. For me, there wasn't a specific step-by-step process. It was more, I just looked at photographs. I looked at images and I tried to keep as many that I enjoyed physically with me that I could come back to and visit. So maybe I do have a process. But that was, it worked for me. It helped me get to my point in photography that I went from being a copyist to being somebody who felt confident enough to kind of go and just take my own photographs in my own way. Although I do still occasionally so worry about what other people think about it. But that's imposter syndrome. And that's kind of, that's a whole other story. And at the end, I say at the beginning, because I'm flicking through this back to front, there is a photographer called Art Wolf. Now I'm gonna read out his statement at the beginning here, because I think it's important when, you know, when looking at these photographs, is that he says, I'm constantly trying to bridge the gap between natural history and art. Thanks to my art background, I see art everywhere, impressionism and abstract expressionism have become a part of my visual vocabulary. Pattern, texture, and line are rooted subliminally in my technique as I photograph landscape, cultures, and even wildlife. Now what I find really captivating about these particular photographs is the way that then they are portraits, but they're not portrait of somebody. And they have a slightly, let's call it, I'm gonna call it like a kind of a disquieting ethereal sort of feel to it, because they feel, to me, in regards to how I'm interpreting them, that they have something that's a little bit otherworldly about them. And that's a fantastic, I love that feeling that they're giving me. So I kind of go, well, if I like that feeling, if I wanted to take some of that feeling and maybe incorporate it into my own photography, you know, going back to this idea of a magpie, you know, taking little bits and bobs, then I would go, okay, well, what I do like is straight to the camera. You know, these people are straight to the camera. The use of great graphic lines, there's this photograph called Pigments, study 63 with those people spinning around. That, you know, wow, what a really, again, striking image. They're just, I love the ideas here. And I want to come back to these. I want to find more of art's photography to, you know, really get to grips with it. And I don't mean sort of analyzing and thinking about, you know, the compositions and stuff, but just letting it seep into my consciousness. I used to do that so much with the photographs when I was younger, that I can't remember where my photography started to end and somebody else has started to begin. I found a place where my style seemed to just naturally evolve. And that feels like it's kind of the whole point is that style will naturally evolve. If there isn't a shortcut to style, it is just what's already inside you that has then enhanced. There's aspects in my photography that have never changed, the angular nature of things. But over time, I have found little bits and bobs that have built up to the photographs that feel natural for me, that when somebody looks at them, they go, that is an Alex photograph. Now I mentioned imposter syndrome in photography earlier. And if you want to find out a little bit more about how to get to grips and deal with that, check out this video over here. Thank you ever so much for watching and I will see you again soon.