Jim Stogdill’s Neighborhood

 

It is so hard to begin to write down what the lavender shoot meant to me…. it felt like the hardest shoot we did for the entire series and I suppose that is mainly true because it was the first. I want to write this honestly, and maybe that’s going to be a little embarrassing as I know that the people involved will be reading this… but at least now its all done, I can finally admit how absolutely terrified I actually was.

It’s easier to laugh about it now, but at the time there were points when throwing up with nerves was definitely a realistic option. The whole idea began at the end of June, I had been thinking about colour, and wanted to do something really wild and magical, but using a location where colour had occurred naturally as a starting point. I had remembered a lavender farm I used to pass by a couple of years ago, and decided to go back and have a look. I was lucky, the fields were in full bloom, and it was by complete chance that I had arrived at the height of the season. I left my card with one of the farm workers, and went home to write my first begging letter. After a few emails it seemed that the farmer had actually been approached by a number of people who also wanted to use his field, and all of them (some commercial giants) were asking for it for free. Suddenly my requests of “can I use your field, and can you give me a load of free lavender?” began to sound equally rude, and I felt my chance disappearing before I’d even started. However… I was lucky, really lucky.. Brendan the farmer looked at my work online and agreed we could use the field before the public were let in (9.30am) and on the condition he could use one of the pictures for a postcard to sell in the farm shop. There was also one final problem  - The entire crop was going to be cut in two weeks…. My stomach twisted and heat went to my head……

I had two weeks to find a model, meet Elbie for the first time in real life, research and come up with a theme, an outfit, make props, and find a team of friends to help.  I had no choice but to set a date for dawn on July the 19^th.

I know some people may be reading this, thinking it all sounds a bit ridiculous and dramatic, but for me this genuinely was a big deal. I have always been so nervous of working with others because if I'm honest I have little self-confidence, and I suppose I didn’t want to be found out as a ‘fake’. The fact that I still don’t know what half the buttons on my camera do, and I have never hired a model or worked with a make-up artist properly before, was pretty terrifying.  I was also worried it would end up looking ‘home made’ and unprofessional, but I’d reached a point where didn’t want to just carry on taking endless self-portraits and random street pictures. I wanted to see what would happen if I really tried my absolute hardest,….. and so I posted a casting for a model and waited for a response.

Next I had to think about props, the farmer said we could have 10 enormous bundles of lavender to help, and so I bought an old 70’s wicker chair from eBay to customise into a throne for the model. I began work on designing a dress, and researching what kind of mood / theme we could build on. I made a storyboard of my favourite shoots and fashion collections, and came up with the idea of using coloured smoke and powder paint to exaggerate the colours of the flowers and give a more magical feel.  I finally met Elbie in person the Sunday before, and we spent the entire day working on the lavender throne. It took 6 hours to cover less than half the chair at which point we also realised that almost none of the props could be made in advance, as the fresh flowers would die and dis-colour before it was time to take the pictures,. We had to leave the chair and instead try and plan the hair and make-up. This meant we only had the next Saturday to make some of the biggest props before we started the shoot at dawn the following day.

I’ll try not to go into every detail of what had to be done because it probably makes a boring read, but I also feel like I had to explain this much because otherwise I wouldn’t be crediting the friends that helped us. After we met on the Sunday, Elbie and me spent the week emailing each other constantly with pictures of hair and make-up ideas. Elbie had to spend her lunch times going to theatre make-up shops, whilst I spent my evenings, sewing and spray painting parts of the dress that had been sent to me in pieces from a factory in China. We had to get together powder paint and smoke bombs, and just as things were going well, the first model dropped out of the shoot. I had to post another casting, and by now was beginning to feel out of my depth.

By the time the weekend of the shoot arrived I had managed to get the help of a few good friends, the model was arriving in the early evening and the van was being collected that night. The Saturday started with me getting up at 6am, I went straight to the farm collected the last of the lavender, then the shops for more spray paint and set about finishing the chair.  I don’t think I had anticipated just how much we had to physically create in one day. We needed to make a huge umbrella from purple buddleia, the chair was a long way off being finished, the dress was now in two pieces and had to be sewn together, as well as spray painted and customised with flowers… hair and make-up trials, … garlands made, paint mixed up …. It was too much.

The phone rang and my friends Eva and Charmaine had arrived from London on the train, I grabbed 3 pairs of scissors and met them at the station. The first thing we had to do was steal some flowers – buddleia – it is the closest colour flower to lavender that grows wild and is big enough to cover large areas.  Buddleia grows wild along the train tracks so we started cutting down great stalks of it every time the coast was clear. We must have looked utterly ridiculous as none of us are tall, and all the best flowers were way out of our reach and mainly hanging over the fence that separated us from the tracks. So we jumped and cut, jumped and cut, jumped…… Eva pulled down an entire bush, whilst I lost my footing and landed in nettles. We squealed, laughed, and hid the bunches in the back of my car thinking we had more that enough……. We were so, so wrong.

After stripping back the leaves and cutting down the stems, the enormous bundles of flowers looked tiny and not even enough to cover a third of the umbrella, we had taken most of the flowers we could reach and knew we would have to go back and get 3 times more than we had. So after making slow progress on the chair we went back again -  this time my friend Kiem and Elbie had also arrived at mine and so there were now 5 of us,. We gave up waiting for people to pass and just pulled at the branches laughing and swearing, it had started to rain and we were past caring and were getting desperate. We stuffed the car to bursting point and headed back to mine, It was now past 4pm, and my garden was covered in stolen buddleia and bundles of lavender. There was a Chinese paper umbrella covered in glue that wouldn’t dry, or allow us to stick flowers to it., a half finished lavender chair, the dress was still in pieces and it was raining. Everybody carried on stripping the flowers and working on their various props whilst I went upstairs and sat on my bed panicking. It looked rubbish….. I had no idea if the flower umbrella was going to work, or even dry before tomorrow morning, I was going to have to sew the rest of the dress by hand and I had already run out of my last can of spray paint.  The forecast was rain for the next day, and we only had 8 hours left until midnight. ……That gave us 3 ½ hours to sleep, and then we had to leave at dawn. I felt sick, this was embarrassing… the model would be arriving any minute to walk into this mad house covered in glue, flowers and bugs, to have her make-up trial done in my kitchen, while Kiem attempted to make some extra home made smoke bombs out of miracle grow fertilizer and food colouring in a frying pan next to her!

Time passed and the model arrived, she was actually an absolute sweetheart and found all the chaos exciting and didn’t seem to be too scared of what I had planned. Kiem soldiered on with making the buddleia umbrella with matt, whilst I finished the dress and Eva sewed garlands of flowers… by 9pm, we made some sort of a little break through and suddenly everything started looking really good. The umbrella looked amazing, but was incredibly heavy….. I could just about pick it up and it was soaking wet with glue. The dress was finished and fitted (thank god) and now we were on the finishing stages. By midnight everyone was exhausted, me and Eva were sitting in our pyjamas sewing the last of the buddleia onto the dress whist Matt worked on the garlands and Elbie finished preparing Natasha’s hair for the next day. We went to bed at 12.30.

We had to get up at 3.45am…. Elbie started the hair and make-up on Natasha, whilst I got my kit together and started drawing little sketches of how I wanted the pictures to look. I always do this when I'm nervous so I wont forget what my original idea was when I’m on the location. The boys started loading the cars and by 5.45 am we were on our way to the field. I sat in the front seat and stared out the window willing the clouds to break, it was overcast and dull. I remember I kept rubbing the ring my mum gave me for my 18^th birthday praying she would somehow fix the weather for me,… I leant forward in my seat hoping it would some how get us there quicker.

We arrived, we unloaded, the model got dressed, and there I was…… starring at a dull, dark field without a clue how I was going to make this look good. Every time I had been to the farm it had been sunny and the whole crop had been lit up in a sea of bright purple, now it looked dead and drab and the wind was picking up.

The first picture I had seen in my head had been the umbrella scene, for some reason I had dreamt of a girl in an enormous dress clutching a parasol made of flowers with coloured smoke pouring from the top. This was the one picture I really wanted to get, so I started jumping over the aisles of flowers looking for the right place. We got the model to stand on a stool, as the dress was nearly 8ft long and then set up a stepladder in front of her for me to take the picture from. The field was swarming with bees and Natasha was terrified…             I was then stung badly by a bee, it was agony and nothing was looking right.   The dress looked too narrow and the light was terrible. Finally I decided we had to do something so grabbed a pair of scissors and slashed the entire back of the dress open, it instantly filled out and looked twice as big… Elbie and Eva then got under the skirt and held it out whilst the boys moulded a smoke bomb onto the top of the umbrella and lit it……… and then it happened…….

Just as the umbrella was passed to Natasha, the sun came out,……. it was still low in the sky so it lit her entre body from the front … The smoke bomb began to fizz and plumes of blue burst from the top of the umbrella…… and then the wind came.  I could barely catch my breath, it was exactly how I had seen it in my head. The skirt of the dress started billowing in the wind, and filled up like a giant circus tent. The boys started cheering shouting ‘here comes the sun’ whilst Elbie and Eva were collapsing with laughter under the skirt….. It was amazing; it was all happening together, whilst Natasha held onto the umbrella bracing the wind like something from The Wizard of Oz.  And  so that was it, the smoke spiralled and danced, the dress rocked in the wind and I kept pressing the shutter, it was working, it was working !!!! After we got that first picture, I felt like we could do anything. We moved around the field setting up the different props and scenes, we ran over our time, and ended up with the public coming in to the field and following us around to see what we were doing. We even threw 3 kilos of powder paint over Natasha, which was such an incredible thing to see in real life. The colour was extraordinary, she looked liked she had died there and then in a cloud of purple in the flowers. It was exhausting – everyone ran backwards and forwards dragging props and buckets of paint but by 11 am we had finally finished. We packed up the car, went back to the house, had bacon sandwiches and tea, and then everyone went to the train station to go home.

Afterwards I stood in my empty kitchen at looked at what was left, there was lavender everywhere, paint on the floor, bags of equipment and cups and plates, and my crumpled sketches I had drawn in a panic that morning. We had done it, and it had looked good. I didn’t mess up, and it didn’t rain…… nobody knew how I had felt, and probably didn't until reading this,. It was such relief I could have cried. I went straight to bed and slept until 3pm, got up, cleaned the house and loaded the pictures into my laptop…. And immediately emailed Elbie the first raw shot of the smoke umbrella picture. Now I knew we could do this again, I knew it could only get a little easier after this. I sat and thought about all the help these people have given us – no one was getting anything out of it, yet they still worked till midnight and got up with the dawn. It had been chaos, but wonderful chaos – I suppose none of us would have ever sat in a field at dawn with a lavender giantess and a smoking umbrella before that day… and that is what it was really about…… creating something magical for the absolute hell of it . That’s when things changed for me, and photography became more about the moment, the experience you shared with these people, than the finishing of the actual picture. I was getting to do this for real and sharing it with equally passionate people, It felt so good, and I felt closer to all of them for it. We had laughed ourselves stupid and we all looked like hell, but it had been so much fun.

A moment later. Elbie replied with lots of squeals and exclamation marks, and ended the email with the words ’what are we doing next?” …..and that was really how Wonderland started..............

** Special thanks to Kiem for some of the behind the scenes pictures *

 

 

 

This was the first shot from the series (sorry i forgot to upload it before 'book-pit') ..... the reason i haven't written about this character is because she will re-appear later in the series in full length and in colour..... so I'll wait till then to explain how there is an old bucket, donated flowers, a cat collar, smoke bombs and spray paint involved in this one! :)
I suppose the one thing I wanted to say about it for now though, is that i love this picture because it isn't part of that air-brushed bullshit I have to look at everyday in magazines. I was nervous about showing the shot to Katie because it is unconventional, and makes her look older than she is. For me though, this is beauty at its best - it radiates strength, and power and has something so ancient about it. I instantly thought of queen Elizabeth when I started working on it, and her eyes.... they just burn.... This is why I love photographing Katie, she is not of this world, and she feels almost undiscovered to me. Without her i could never have made these characters look convincing, she is truly extraordinary.
Below is the third shot (now i'm up to date!) ..... and all i can say about this, is that we really paid for it afterwards. I sat Katie in a bush just before the sun went down in the woods, poor Elbie sliced her finger open on a thorn, and me and Katie were literally eaten alive by mosquitos. We were bitten all over our scalps and bodies ( got 45 bites) and to make matters worse i got 3 huge bites on my forehead (that looked like massive angry spots) and 4 bites ON MY EYELID! So you can imagine what a mess we all looked, and we were so,so exhausted by the end of that day. However, i love the shot to bits and Elbie, if you are reading this..... you did such a brilliant job xxx

The ‘book pit’ was probably one of my favourite scenes from the project. It just came out of nowhere, and evolved so quickly that within a week the whole idea was so engrained, I felt like we had already taken the picture. I found the pit whilst I’d been looking for a location for a completely different character, which required vines and tall trees, and so I’d gone to a new part of woods near house on my bike to research. Its probably true to say I’m a ‘tree geek’ because I spend so much time wandering around with my camera looking for ones with interesting bark, branches… tall ones, small ones… ideally dead ones, and anything that looks like it could be over 300 years old! That morning after leaving the normal path and climbing onto steeper muddier ground, I came across what looked like an old animal pit – like a giant bite out of the ground, just big enough for a human. This was the starting point…. I then began drawing doodles of a girl asleep in the pit with long Rapunzel hair draped around the whole edge - encircling her as if she was protected by its power. I told Elbie about the idea, and she started looking for lots of long hair extensions whilst I kept thinking about what else we would need. Because I had always seen the project as a kind of giant storybook, I had always wanted to do a picture with hundreds of books but had no idea how, and I didn’t want to cheat by reproducing the effect with just a few and photoshop. Luckily by pure coincidence, a couple of days later a very kind lady called Veronica  Barrett    placed an advert in the ‘freecycle’ group I had joined to get props from, for over 50 huge encyclopaedias. I emailed her straight away begging for the books, and by the weekend I was driving home with a car full of 8 boxes of leather-bound beautiful books!

I feel terrible about this, but In order to get the books looking right for the picture, I then had to spend most of the weekend soaking each one in buckets of tea and coffee and laying them out in my garden to be dried by the sun. The process took forever – every night they had to be put away, and every morning they had to be put back out in the garden – sometimes sprayed down again with a hose, or crushed into shapes to look like they had been read a thousand times. It took 3 weeks for them to finally look right, but it was worth it!  We took the picture at about 6 in the evening on a beautiful summer’s day. The pit was really secluded and sheltered, so the light was soft and warm. We started throwing the books into the pit…. Katie got into the old lace dress and climbed in on top of them all……. and…. it just happened. I can’t explain what this looked like in real life… it was like standing in a real fairytale, all the light was completely natural,…. and it was so quiet – just the noise from the rush of the stream along side us hidden behind the trees. Light broke through the branches, and after all the laughter of dragging the books to the spot and getting Katie in position, I suddenly stopped and couldn’t believe how magical it all looked. There were no big teams of helpers, it was just me, Elbie, Katie the model and my boyfriend Matt….  and it was precious. The second I finished, me and Elbie started jumping about hugging each other we were so excited. We pulled Katie out, and grabbed the books… we still had to get back to the van as we had one more location to do before the sun went down. I will always remember driving away that day…. everyone was sitting in the front chatting whilst I was in the back sitting on top of the books and the step ladder. We pulled out onto the road, and as the trees disappeared from view,  and the sky filled the back window ..........the sun filtered through the clouds, and I feIt mum beside me. It had been such a rush, and I had been so nervous about the picture… and yet it had all gone perfectly and just as I had seen it in my head. It was a good day for so many reasons; and the picture was just a part of the happiness I felt…..

I felt I wanted to write something before I finally started uploading the project, mainly for my own memory, and some for anyone who wanted to know a little more about what was done, and where this all came from.

Back in April of this year I met a hair and make-up artist called Elbie van Eeden online just after finishing the Crystal fighters shoot, as well as a model and circus performer called Katie Hardwick. Both girls I really wanted to work with, but at the time I had become increasingly unwell over losing my mother, and the dates and days slipped by.

Luckily for me Elbie remained in contact until I finally felt well enough to think up a shoot. We had already become pretty good friends, and after months of taking very few photos, I decided that this might be the time to try and do something on a larger scale than my previous work.

The pictures I have always enjoyed creating the most often shared a strange dream like quality, and it was this direction that I wanted to work towards. I had never felt entirely happy with my previous attempts as I only ever had myself to use, and usually ended up in knots with frustration, unable to create the kind of hair and make-up that makes an image look credible / believable ……... If I’m honest I was also very nervous about working with other people.

 I had already begun collecting pictures in the spring  - magazine tears, film stills, adverts; little prints of old paintings etc. I always have these things lying around as well as vintage clothes and half thought up props, but never any focus or end project to put them in.  These bits and pieces combined with old pictures I had taken of my local woodland, began to make me realise there was so much more to be explored.  I started researching, trying to find interesting locations, I made story boards and wrote a lot of begging letters to companies and land owners,…… and so what started as one relatively small shoot began spiralling into a far bigger scarier project! By then it was the end of June, and all these plans needed a great deal of work, and good weather – living in England and having a full time job meant these were two things I didn’t really have!.......

Until I met Elbie : )

We spent our first day together threading 6 huge bales of Lavender through an old chair I’d bought off eBay for one the props.   We sat on my living room floor and whilst I drew crappy sketches of ridiculous ideas on an old notepad, Elbie instead of frowning, just clapped her hands together, and started talking about where we could buy the things we needed!! Without realising over all the months of emails I had finally found the person who wanted to do this as much as me, and would do anything, and work as hard as possible to try and bring the ideas off the paper into real life. And so the project became ‘ours’ and In the process I had unexpectedly found a very special friend.

I will write more about some of the individual shoots, and post pictures of the props we made, as well as some of the funny behind the scenes photos when each new picture is uploaded on Flickr –as it’s too much to write here all in one go.

But to sum it up, we basically had no budget, and everything had to be made out of nothing. We used old buckets, stolen flowers, chicken wire, spray paint ….. eBay and Freecycle to create the Props – one item was made from an old riding hat, 7 meters of chicken wire, half an old cushion, a paint roller and 4 bin sacks of flowers donated by a very kind retired lady ! 

I designed the clothes, and in some cases made them myself, or begged and borrowed from friends.  For the Lavender farm shoot we had 4 friends stealing armfuls of flowers from the side of railway tracks in the rain, all to create one very heavy umbrella covered in a mass of buddleia (thank you Kiem, Eva, Chamaine and Matt!) ... the list goes on.

So we ‘did it on a shoestring’, and all crammed into the weekends. It may have been better with money and complete freedom, but I doubt I would now have the memories and the friendships I have gained.

We finished shooting on September the 2^nd and I now have a tonne of editing to do . It would be impossible to finish all the pictures before uploading the set, so I will be posting them as I go…….. but really this was the feeling I intended when I first began the whole idea. I suppose I wanted this to almost feel like an old storybook full of strange characters and places…. none related to each other, just mixed up and unexplained. So that is why I made the above picture – almost like the dust jacket for this series……… (and yes it started pouring with rain just after I took that picture!)

I hope you enjoy them; it has brought me a great deal of happiness to do this, even though I’m now absolutely exhausted!

This set is dedicated to my mum Maureen Mitchell, who I miss so very, very much.

 

 

Special thanks to everyone below –

 

Mayfield Lavender Farm

Great Fosters Hotel

Katie Hardwick - model

Natasha Musson - model

Jessica Flavin - model

Matthew Stevensen

Eva Alberici

Kiem Tang

Charmaine taylor

Hedi George / Lynn and ray - for the flowers!!!!

Veronica Barrett- for the books!!!

Affirm Heart factory  - China