ALICE NEALE
Samuel, Dancing, 2018
London-based photographer Alice Neale’s photographs have a sassy naturalism and celebrate the individuality of her models (whom she finds by street casting and asking friends, as well as the traditional route of model agencies). The people in her pictures often appear as if they’re actors in a film from the 1960s taking a rest between takes. And it’s not by chance: Neale describes how she often watches a film the night before one of her shoots, so she can “go into a different world.” This anecdote reflects the way her process as a whole is founded on feeling, mood and atmosphere, rather than technical complexity, high-stakes production or intricate digital retouching – in other words, it’s elegant. She has a deep knowledge of European post-war cinema, including the work of Pier Paolo Pasolini, whose approach, aesthetic and personal style are consistently described as elegant, too (he was acknowledged in this very magazine in 2010 for his perspicacious appreciation of the dandyism exhibited by Teddy boys and girls in 1950s Europe). The elegance of the self-styled outlaw in Pasolini’s films derives from this archetype’s lack of concern for work, timetables or anxiety-inducing rules of any kind. Sometimes elegance runs in very close parallel with nonchalance!
It was French critic Charles Baudelaire who in the late 19th century defined the dandy as a “new kind of aristocracy”, not founded upon wealth or birth but instead upon a self-made elegance. Elegance is modest in means – simple – but also precise and sophisticated. In Neale’s photograph, the British artist Samuel Fouracre dances alone, dressed in his own clothes, holding a netted silver bra to his chest – a metonymic stand-in for a woman. The shadow cast by Neale’s lighting has the dramatic effect of making him appear as if he’s in a film. And his hands are held in gestures redolent of those adopted by David Bowie in the photograph taken by Masayoshi Sukita for the cover of his 1977 album Heroes. And of course Bowie was elegance par excellence. The anti-hierarchical impulse signified by the use of inverted commas around the title Heroes (which imply a questioning of the very idea of heroes) is itself connected to Baudelaire’s notion that anyone could be a dandy, and anyone could be elegant. Neale talks of elegance as being about movement and manners, not clothing: “It’s how we move, and talk to one another. How we deal with the world, our everyday.” Like Max Farago, she sees elegance as a virtue of conduct, not style.