Photographer Jackie Nickerson: ‘It is amazing how Irish fashion designers are now punching above their weight’ – The Irish Times

Growing up in Nottingham, Jackie Nickerson at 13 was given a Kodak Instamatic by her mom, “and that was it – I Ioved that sound of the click, click”, the acclaimed photographer recollects with a smile once we meet at her dwelling overlooking the ocean in Co Louth, the place she lives together with her husband, the graphic artist Kevin Gurry.

A conceptual documentary photographer, Nickerson is understood for portraiture, and her curiosity in atmosphere, identification and materiality. Her work has been exhibited internationally together with on the National Portrait Gallery in London, the Vatican Museums in Rome and the National Gallery of Ireland.

She has additionally printed many books of images. They embody ones documenting panorama and farm labourers in Africa (Farm, 2002; Terrain, 2013), non secular communities in Ireland (Faith, 2007), fashionable consumerism and commodification (Field Test, 2020), salvaged content material from studio portraiture (Salvage, 2021) and a visible diary of a decade residing and dealing throughout the US (Stateside, 2026).

Most of her coaching got here when she moved to New York on the age of 18. Her father was American and she or he was born in Boston, so she holds a US passport. In New York she spent 5 years working with still-life photographers, snapping all the pieces from washing machines to jewelry. “That was my education. Technically it was a dream.” Having solid a profitable profession doing catalogues for high-profile shoppers equivalent to Macy’s and J Crew, she returned to London within the early Nineteen Nineties “because my heart wasn’t in it”. She left style for 10 years, hung out in Africa and, after her marriage, moved to Ireland. The success of Farm and its affect reignited her profession in style images.

Some influences have been formative. Time journal despatched her to Liberia throughout an Ebola disaster, when individuals had been fully lined in protecting clothes, which received her interested by the character of plague, isolation and when supplies defend but additionally obscure identification.

Her newest e book, Clad, is the primary wholly devoted to her style images and distinctive, feminist imaginative and prescient, anti-commercial stance and conviction that dressing and dressing up are much less about garments and extra in regards to the selves they assist us to find. She has labored with lots of the world’s main celebrities and luxurious manufacturers and magazines, together with Louis Vuitton, Hermès, Dior, Vogue, Vanity Fair and W. Her many purchasers embody Kanye West – she collaborated for eight years on his Jeezy model – and West’s former spouse, Kim Kardashian, with whom she nonetheless likes to work on numerous tasks, most lately in Chile.

Nickerson is heat and welcoming, and she or he says modestly that her success is “a kind of accident, a kind of fluke”. “Somebody showed Farm to Dries Van Noten, and so many people responded to that book,” she says, together with the celebrated British designer Kim Jones, who was then working at Louis Vuitton as head of menswear. He advised her that he used her e book for his diploma at Central St Martins, so it had an actual impression on his creativity.

Clad incorporates some 400 photos, many from editorial style shoots, some portraits, some conceptual, many displaying Nickerson’s distinctive compositional abilities and curiosity in clothes, textures and areas. They vary from a wonderful mannequin with waist-length white hair unfold throughout a white horse, to one in every of actor Cate Blanchett laughing, fully enveloped in brown paper. There are a number of highly effective photos of Kim Kardashian trying majestic, together with a well-known portrait of Anok Yai, then an unknown US mannequin (who now has 4 million followers) shot in Morocco for a canopy of AnOther journal. There’s Olivia Colman dressed effortlessly in oversize menswear, and a few startling footage of feathered heads.

The photos converse for themselves, as none are captioned. The again of the e book incorporates an inventory of because of nearly 2,000 individuals, displaying the breadth and scale of her work and associations. She is evident in regards to the distinction between industrial and editorial work and dealing with celebrities. Dealing with the latter, she says merely that “you keep your head down and just go and do your job. You become an invisible presence,” although she provides that Kanye West was a “brilliant producer and director – he chooses people and then lets them get on with it. As a creative person, it was a dream.”

She can be stuffed with reward for Paris-based French stylist Charlotte Collet, “who comes with her own ideas and vision of what fashion should look like. I love designers and creative people who have found their own vision in their own way.” When it involves fashions, she seems to be for star energy. “It is something you either have or you don’t have. It manifests itself by being able to capture your attention, and someone who is not afraid of the camera.”

Often people who find themselves photographed rather a lot are open to doing uncommon, “crazy” stuff, she says. “If you are doing a commercial job that has a specific end use, what the brand is trying to project, then it’s my job to work with the client and a team of people to realise that. Sometimes you have a brief where you don’t have a lot of leeway; then there is editorial that is perhaps about sustainable fashion and you can do whatever you want and think about environment, so you can do something exciting and forward-thinking. My job is to inspire and to start a conversation about things.”

She loves portraits. “I love the challenge because it is a difficult process. Fashion work has an end use, whereas with artwork, which takes time, you have to do something true to yourself and that is difficult and emotional,” she says. “Creative people push themselves, push boundaries, and you are testing yourself all the time.”

One picture in Clad incorporates a face obscured by a yellow circle. Dating from 2020, it was a homage to the late conceptual American artist John Baldessari, who utilized vibrant dots to appropriated pictures. As one in every of greater than 30 well-known creatives requested by Vogue for his or her response to the Covid pandemic – Creativity in a Time of Crisis – this was her response.

Her working instruments are a Mammiya 67 digicam and a Canon, having began with second-hand Rolleiflex and Hasselblads. “But I don’t get caught up in technique. You have to be free and find the equipment that works for you and that helps you tell the story of what you see.” Downstairs in the home is a big archive of her work, together with a group of plastics, backyard mesh and different accoutrements for her work.

She is stuffed with reward for the brand new technology of Irish style designers. “It is amazing how they are now punching above their weight.” Her photos for Simone Rocha are significantly memorable. Clad “is my vision of fashion. This is a huge, happy memory and here are all the brilliant people I have worked with.” She is a agency believer within the energy of books, and is finishing one other private mission, Assembly, three books in a field that marks 20 years of superb artwork work. Another style e book is within the offing.

Clad is printed by Steidl, e book design by Jackie Nickerson and Kevin Gurry, Matthias Langer and Gerhard Steidl, €40, Photo Museum Ireland and steidl.de