ARIELLE BOBB–WILLIS
At only 24, photographer Arielle BobbWillis has developed an original and sophisticated visual language. In gloriously colourful photographs, her models wear clothes that Bobb-Willis has chosen herself, and strike angular poses against urban backdrops.The focus is on abstract formal qualities, not the narration of a story or the personalities of those in the pictures. She works more like an abstract painter than a photographer, combining colours, poses and shapes to suggest psychological states (in many of her pictures, for example, models are intertwined or supporting each other physically - and this suggests a parallel psychological dependency). Bobb-Willis began making her work during a period of depression she experienced as a teenager; she describes photography as a kind of therapy that helps her to create the world in which she’d like to live. Her inspiration comes mainly from African-American artists including Sister Gertrude Morgan, Jacob Lawrence, Benny Andrews and William H. Johnson.
In 1978, curator John Szarkowski opened a landmark exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York called Mirrors and Windows: American Photography since 1960. Here, he suggested that photography could either act as a mirror (the photographer could make work that was subjective, expressive, psychic and revelatory) or as a window (the work would then be realistic, objective, rational or indexical). Four decades later, Szarkowski’s dichotomy still feels relevant, and Bobb-Willis falls clearly into the ‘mirror’ category.
Unlike many photographers who aspire to move from fashion into ‘personal’ work, Bobb-Willis is moving in the opposite direction (without leaving her art practice behind) - her shoot for L’Uomo
Vogue is particularly special because it’s only the second time she’s worked with a full production team. She sees it as a logical step, given her interest in styling and her experience growing up with a mother who owned a fashion store. She also loves fashion because “there’s no right or wrong”.
These pictures were shot in her hometown of Union City, New Jersey, where the architecture is painted in vibrant colours and the absence of tall buildings means there’s a lot of available light (beautifully, Bobb-Willis says she uses only the sun as her light source). She’s too young to re- member the 1980’s (although she does remember the True Religion jeans and Juicy Couture she got from her mother’s shop in the early 2000s) but she loves the pop colours of that decade. And sportswear is something she wears herself, and which feels very natural to her. She’s interested in how it allows the body to move freely and isn’t gender specific.
When I ask her about shooting men, she points out that it is often hard to tell what gender her models are in her photographs. She’s interested in removing the barriers of gender from her work:“it doesn’t matter if a guy is wearing a dress.” She is part of a new generation that understands how problematic strict categories of race, class and gender can be. She’s also an incredible new image maker - a bright young star.