Annaleigh had the graceful body of a dancer, and she was also brave enough to volunteer to be my first ever figure model.
I was young and naive, and far too inexperienced to be shooting nudes. I didn’t know how much I was yet to learn, and boy – do these images show it. When I look at them now, I see missed opportunities to utilise her figure. I see someone who was out of their depth and didn’t know it. Most of all, I see barely controlled use of on-camera flash to combat rapidly advancing clouds.
But I also see someone who was reaching for the stars. Today, I wonder – if I hadn’t taken the massive leap to shoot nudes in the February of 1997, then when would I have? And how would things be different today?
It was the first step in a long road of learning how to work with the human body. Thank you Annaleigh.
This series was shot on Ilford XP2 400 – a strange, heavily purple tinted B&W film that could be developed with a colour process. I always thought it had a very fine grain for a 400 ISO.
