Meet the Model - Wonderful Anna

Most photographic days are a matter of division: many places, many models, not enough hours. This one is the opposite. Six photographers, one house and Anna, from the morning until the light we decide to make at the end of the afternoon.

I wanted an event built on duration rather than variety. With a single model there is no reason to hurry. A first set of frames is usually polite; the second is better; somewhere after that something opens, and you begin to photograph a person instead of a subject. That moment cannot be scheduled, only allowed.

We will work in small groups and change the conditions rather than the place: window light in the morning, a single soft source at the middle of the day, harder light and deep shadow later on. Between the sessions there is time to look at what you have, talk it over and go back in with a clearer idea.

Anna has spent years in front of cameras and brings her own intelligence to the work: a way of holding a silence, of correcting an angle before you ask, of suggesting the gesture you were trying to describe. The photographs come from that exchange.

Meet the Model is a shared photographic production. It is neither a course nor a workshop: no lessons and nothing to hand in. Bring the images you would like to attempt and the willingness to stay with them.

I will be with you throughout. If you would like a short explanation of a light, a technique or a piece of equipment, I will gladly give it and try it with you. This informal help is offered entirely free of charge.

The house is reserved exclusively for our production. Lunch is taken together and is included in the participation fee; drinks remain at each person's own expense.

The plaster has left the walls. Where it fell, the laths show, grey, in rows, and the light finds them before it finds anything else. The floorboards are dark and worn. A staircase rises on white balusters whose paint has come away, and the windows have small panes that hold the day in squares. A gilded sofa, a painted screen and a wall of corrugated iron stand in these rooms where the house left them.

Behind it, a paved yard closes in brick: a glazed veranda, iron benches, ivy climbing the wall. A second room with the sky for a ceiling.

Anna does not stand in front of this ruin. For one day she lives in it. She sits where the sofa still holds a shape, stops on the stair, turns in a window, and the house, which has lost everything it was built to hide, begins to look inhabited again. Skin, fabric and gesture are the only things here that are finished.

The photograph is neither the house nor the model. It begins when the two start to play: a shoulder against bare lath, a hand on a flaking baluster, a face in a small-paned window and the ruin behind it, listening. Nothing needs to be built. The house has already done the work.

Over many years of working as a photographer, and of running both a photographic studio and an equipment-hire service, I came to understand what photographers truly hope to find when they arrive on a set. Not simply more equipment, but the freedom to make an image without being stopped by the absence of the right tool.

This is what London Photographic Workshop places at your disposal: a rare, complete photographic production, brought together in one place and made available to you for the duration of the event. It is the kind of equipment most photographers encounter only in fragments, over many years, and which would cost a considerable sum to hire for a production like this.

You will be able to work with HASSELBLAD X2D II cameras and a selection of HASSELBLAD lenses; SUNBOUNCE natural-light systems, including reflectors, screens, Sun-Swatter and Sun-Cage; PROFOTO, BRONCOLOR and BOWENS studio flash; professional battery-powered PROFOTO flash, with a complete selection of modifiers; LEE Filters and professional matte boxes; MANFROTTO photographic tripods; and MATTHEWS grip equipment.

This is not equipment assembled for display. It is a working set of serious tools: the cameras, light, modifiers and support systems that allow an idea to become a photograph when the moment arrives.

Respect is part of the photographic language, not an administrative footnote. All models and participants must be eighteen or older. The models determine their individual nudity and posing boundaries. Consent is specific, ongoing and may be withdrawn at any time. No participant may touch a model without explicit permission. No phones, spectators or behind-the-scenes recording on closed sets.

Images may not be published, exhibited, sold or submitted to competitions outside the agreed model-release terms. No generative-AI training or synthetic alteration of a model’s body or identity. A private changing and resting area must always be available. Models receive proper breaks, meals, accommodation and transport support.

Alcohol is served only after photography has finished for the day. Before each session, the artistic director holds a short consent check-in covering wardrobe, nudity level, location, participating photographers and intended images.