Katherine at Work

Most of the portraits in this gallery are from a 2005 exhibition called “Work Aesthetic” in Hampstead, and show the influence of Hollywood studio photography with its dramatic chiaroscuro lighting. In many of these photographs I began experimenting with the use of objects from the subjects’ lives, resulting in a combination of portrait and still life. This is of course an approach that many portrait artists have used, and it not only adds visual interest to the image but also incorporates another dimension of the subject’s personality. Katherine has been the subject of many of my portraits over the years, and this is the most complex of them, showing two different sides of her life. Like all my serious portraits, I used theatrical spotlights, focussed and filtered in various ways to obtain the right quality of illumination. The kitchen utensil shadows were obtained by threading the spoons on a cotton line in front of a relatively hard-edged beam. 2005.