In the Garden, 2017 @Miles Aldridge.
The lens of a camera works just like the human eye, capturing light and reflecting it to depict reality. Miles Aldridge’s photographs seem surreal, yet they still reveal a truth. Using psychedelic visuals and cinematic compositions, Aldridge’s style is firmly rooted in the Sixties, when his artist father served as his first role model during his childhood. The topic of domestic life remains a recurring theme in his photographs, which dissect the turmoil of his parents’ marriage and, eventually, their divorce. In the centre of his images stands a woman navigating a world that oppresses her. Each picture is filled with colour and sharp details, but looking closer, we discover a canvas for questioning and understanding.
Miles Aldridge photographed by Peter Lindbergh.
SLEEK: In your career, you initially started in filmmaking before moving on to photography. What made you gravitate more towards photography?
Miles Aldridge: My work is often described as cinematic and narrative, which is true because I love cinema. Cinema taught me that the world of the imagination is just as important as the real world. Throughout history, photography has been used to capture the real world on camera, whereas cinema has always sought to create a dream world. So, the tricks and ambitions of cinema left a deeper impression on me than traditional techniques in photography; and after all, both art forms use the same device. I found it more truthful to tell stories that are fantasy.
S: Photography is used as a tool to capture a moment. Your work process involves several steps, though, beginning with sketching long before you even pick up the camera. Do you still consider your photographs to be moments?
MA: I think traditional photography is about one decisive moment; life itself is thus depicted as a series of moments that we capture with a camera. However, I don’t really follow these principles because I want my photographs to convey the feeling of being eternal. I am very much against the idea that a photograph can only ever capture a moment; I try to stretch and elongate the moment in my work, which is, in a way, anti-photography.
S: Your photographs do evoke a sense of surrealism.
MA: I find it interesting that when we are in a dream, we have an altered perception of time. One of my great heroes, surrealist painter René Magritte, talked about his ambitions to make his paintings as precise as a dream. I love this idea, and I try to reference it in my work. We experience the dream world with such clarity that it appears almost uncanny; entering it after living in this grey waking world creates an incredible, vivid moment. I think that is why I like to deploy strong colours and sharp details in my photography.
Jean Paul Gaultier, 2011 @ Miles Aldridge.
Untitled #3, 2016 @Miles Aldridge.
S: Though your photographs do seem surreal, they depict real memories of your own upbringing.
MA: When we are in a dream, we often try to undo something we have experienced, and a story may unfold in a complicated, surprising way. My mother died quite young, and I was left with this mystery of who this woman was. She passed away when I was in my twenties, and through my work, I try to put together the pieces of her life. Great art is often about a return to childhood. My own take on this theme is both nostalgic, in the sense that it is full of references to the Sixties, and futuristic, because photographs at the time could never have been printed at this scale and with this resolution. Being simultaneously nostalgic and futuristic also does away with the idea of creating a single moment in one photograph.
S: Your work touches on topics that are dark, though you use vibrant colours. Why do you choose this harsh contrast?
MA: In my own story, we have my father, an artist who has worked with The Beatles and The Rolling Stones and who brought a lot of rock’n’roll energy. Memories of domesticity come from my mother. My work is sort of a mashup of these two people. I never got to experience life in a traditional, happy family, and then it all culminated in their divorce. My images often show women in a similar situation, asking themselves how they got into this nightmare. But then I do it in these beautiful colours to get people to approach the photographs like a butterfly coming to a flower. When they stand in front of the pictures, they start asking questions. A lot of people say that my work reminds them of themselves. With these domestic nightmares I create, it is important to show that women are not crushed by their environment; rather, they are turned to stone, petrified because both their family world and our consumerist society are so oppressive. They keep their emotions hidden, just like my mother had to do when she was going through all of this drama with my father and the family falling apart, and yet she never said a thing.
S: Your body of work, which has been created over a span of 20 years, is now being exhibited at Fotografiska Berlin. Has anything changed in your approach to your work?
MA: I am incredibly flattered that people want to see the work I have created over the course of 20 years. It feels very complete to me. I first started working before the rise of digital photography, and even though I now live in the times of Photoshop, I still shoot on film. I prefer the colour in analogue photography, and people look better because there is something too HD about faces captured in digital photography that makes them less interesting to look at. I am very proud of my work coming together to create a complete world where everything connects. If you look at the oldest photograph and the newest, they could have been taken in the same week. Of course, there have been adjustments, but there has always just been this one vision.
Credits:
Photography: Miles Aldridge
Words: Angelina Mo
As featured in SLEEK 80 – FORTUNE. Available in print and digital here.
Miles Aldrdige’s exhibition Holy Mary. Supermarkets. Popcorn. Photographs 1999 – 2020 will be on display at Fotografiska Berlin until May 12th.