ANNEMARIEKE VAN DRIMMELEN
Annemarieke van Drimmelen treasures thepot enti al fora genuine connection with her subject – something that is often absent from fashion photography. Beginning her photographic career in the mid2000s (after a successful period working as a model) when gloss and perfection were the order of the day, she was drawn to the imperfect, the intimate and the emotional – and this set her work apart. She also preferred analogue film to digital, which is true of many photographers working now but was unusual a decade ago, when image-makers were enchanted by new digital technology and what it could do. Van Drimmelen says: “it be- came very much about manipulation for a while. And for me there was a relevance to analogue because I had been shot myself when I was working as a model and I felt I didn’t get so many pictures where it had anything to do with me.”
Van Drimmelen’s commitment to naturalism and the imperfection that goes with it means her approach to tailoring for this shoot is an unusual one. She mentions that tailoring is often about everything being “quite perfect and fitted”. However working with stylist Elodie David Touboul has resulted in a different kind of interpretation – where juxtaposition and layering create a very contemporary silhouette. She describes the aesthetic of this shoot as “perfect, in an imperfect way”, with the garments “worn really loosely”. Van Drimmelen usually shoots women, and spenta lotoftimework in gonthecasting for this collection of pictures. She found an ‘ideal’ man (!) and says she “went into [the shoot] very open to what it was that he would show me.”
A quality of timelessness is important to van Drimmelen – her images often lack anything that would specifically place them in the 21st century. Sometimes they look like the late 19th century French realist paintings of Manet, Courbet and Corot. Yet with this shoot, van Drimmelen is part of a specific contemporary moment in which the gendering of the gaze, the hierarchical relationship between photographer and subject, idealism and conventional notions of beauty have all been called into question, in the knowledge that many perspectives are much better than few. Talking about beauty, she says: “there is still a lot of change that needs to be made – there are many different types of casting right now, and a new take on what beauty is. After a period of conventional beauty, now it’s a lot more interesting and relevant – and we need to see more of it!”