Six London Photographers You Should Know

Brett Lloyd

Brett Lloyd initially gained attention for his intimate documentation of urban youth subcultures. In an early series, photographing guys he met whilst travelling in Europe, he included accompanying text with the images, describing his encounters. Lloyd’s photographs play with light, sensitively recording its interaction with the human body, to create a compelling narrative.

The photographer moved to London from the comparatively isolated town of Hull, where he went to school after growing up in Yorkshire. Over the past six years, he has built and impressive résumé, shooting for Vogue, Dazed & Confused and V, as well as countless campaigns for brands like Chanel and Givenchy.

 

Ania Wawrzkowicz

Ania Wawrzkowicz is a still life photographer whose work spans interiors, food photography and art projects. Her images transform inanimate everyday objects into carefully considered compositions. Inspired by sculpture and geometry, her practice combines a modern and conceptual approach to photography with a playful emphasis on materials.

Working in collaboration with advertising agencies, design studios, magazines and book publishers, she has contributed to many publications across a broad range of topics. Her sculptural compositions are an aspirational look at what we could be eating; meticulously arranged scenes appear like futuristic Dutch still life paintings.

 

Juergen Teller

The work of London-based German photographer Juergen Teller remains remarkably distinct in the fashion world, immediately recognisable by its characteristic starkness. His photography is often over-exposed and regularly features the photographer himself in various stages of undress. Teller first gained wider recognition in 1996 with his front cover of Süddeutsche Zeitung Magazine, featuring a nude Kristen McMenamy with the word ‘Versace’ scrawled across her chest.

Teller has since collaborated with brands like Helmut Lang, Yves Saint Laurent, Vivienne Westwood and Céline, and has shot for countless eminent fashion publications. Notably, he photographed every Marc Jacobs campaign from 1998 until 2014. Unlike many of his contemporaries, he fell into the field, having started out taking photographs for album covers. Perhaps it is due to this background that his images always retain a sense of rebellion. He suggests his work sells an attitude rather than a dream.

 

Juno Calypso

Juno Calypso works through an alter-persona to probe questions of femininity, sexuality, and consumption within an abstracted place and time. Her aesthetic is riddled with a type of candy-coloured nostalgia that strikes as a cocktail of ennui, hyperbolic girlhood and consumer alienation. Meanwhile, the photographer’s invented character Joyce is perhaps something other than human herself.

Born in 1989, Calypso graduated from LCC with a bachelor’s in Photography. Her signature style is an elaborate, fantastical world that is treated so seriously it becomes stupefying in an almost Lynchian fashion, mixed with the soft stage edges and creamy pastels of Edward Scissorhands. Calypso was shortlisted for the 2013 Catlin Art Prize, where she was awarded the Visitor Vote Prize. She has since exhibited internationally with shows in London, Switzerland, Mexico and New York.

 

Stephanie Wilson

London-born photographer, artist and founder of collective Lemon People, Stephanie Wilson, explores matters surrounding the social constructs of etiquette, gender, sex and beauty. The Hackney-based creative has quickly gained an impressive following, working between art and fashion photography. Previously occupied purely with fine art image making, Wilson became motivated to find new audiences for her work.

In a recent series of images, ‘EMOJI’, Wilson challenges what she considers to be an infringement on artistic expression. The young photographer amusingly reinterprets emoji-censored images, now ubiquitous on social media channels like Instagram, with real-life snails, fruit, fried eggs, and flowers. Wilson currently shoots regularly for Dazed Digital and Vice’s feminist channel, Broadly. She has also worked on projects with Mulberry, W Magazine and Ray Ban, to name a few.

 

Tim Walker

Tim Walker’s photographs have captivated the readers of Vogue each month for over a decade. Extravagant staging and romantic motifs characterise his unmistakable style. Impressively, every fantastical scene is created with physical props. Walker strives to create his pictures within what he calls, “the parameters of the impossible.” For him, something has to be physically, rather than digitally, possible for the picture to register with the viewer.

Born in England in 1970, his interest in photography began at the Condé Nast library where he worked on the Cecil Beaton archive for a year before university. Upon graduation, Walker worked as a freelance photographic assistant in London before moving to New York City as a full time assistant to Richard Avedon. At the age of 25 he shot his first fashion story for Vogue, and has photographed for the British, Italian, and American editions, as well as W and LOVE Magazine ever since.