On a cold February London evening, Manchester based fashion photographer Amy Lidgett chats to me over Skype, legs crossed sitting on her bed in her dimly lit bedroom. Lidgett giggles candidly when I ask her about the photographic equipment she employs to capture her dreamlike fashion images. “It’s actually kind of embarrassing… should I show you?” asks Lidgett, “I’m going to show you…”. In her eagerness to show me her prized camera, the bubbly 22 year old knocks her laptop in a flurry of limbs before settling back in front of the webcam holding it forward with a mixture of pride and embarrassment across her face. The camera responsible for most of Lidgett’s editorial work turns out to be an old beat up compact Olympus A11 35mm film camera, held together with tape. “I get the strangest looks when I turn up to a shoot and pull out my camera. I always tell them that I know it looks unprofessional, but trust me, it’s really good!” laughs Lidgett.“I love this camera, and the amazing thing is that I picked up randomly on eBay for £5 (including shipping!).”

 

Lidgett is part of a growing number of young photographers moving away from the polished art of digital photography, in favour of film photography, experimenting between SLRs, cheap compacts, and toy cameras. “It just feels more… real,” explains Lidgett, her love of film is palpable. “Film has a tendency to evoke such genuine, raw emotion,” says Lidgett. Digital photography, while it certainly has innumerable qualities (Lidgett herself uses a digital camera on occasion), has a tendency to be too clear, too perfect, too cold. As a viewer, and a photographer, the final images can feel quite removed. Film, on the other hand, has a tendency to feel familiar, like an old memory. “I find the end results have more depth, dreamier colours, and viewers become more emotionally engaged,” says Lidgett. Shooting film in the fashion world however does have it’s quirks.

 “I often get comments on how much I move around on set, but with 24 shots per roll of film and a bag of maybe 12 rolls with me on the day, I have to work hard to get the right shots the first time around. I don’t get the luxury of picking and choosing my shots, so everything has to be composed before I press the shutter,” explains Lidgett. 

 

After experimenting with fashion and textile designs in college (“my final project was a dress inspired by Mary-Kate and Ashley, where I actually printed their faces on fabric and lined the entire dress with it… yeah, it was really ridiculous”), Lidgett decided that her real talents lay behind a camera, capturing and styling fashion rather than creating it. Her breakthrough series, entitled ‘Brother’, saw Lidgett breaking the mould of photographing beautified girls in favour of everyday young men. The results were so loved that a zine was created from the images and sold in cult UK bookshop Magma. “At the time, I discovered that styling menswear was so much more inspiring for me personally and gave me greater freedom to experiment,” explains Lidgett. After focusing mostly on men’s fashion photography through university, Lidgett has since returned to female fashion photography to balance out her portfolio and also to create her first online zine, ‘Olive’, with friend and collaborator Ellie McWhan. The uniqueness of ‘Olive’ stems from photoshoots featuring more ‘real’ young men and women, as well as the contrast of an online zine created through a handmade approach. The zine was created by hand with stickers, drawings and cut outs adorning the borders, before uploading onto an online platform. “It was a lot more work than we first expected,” says Lidgett, “we’re quite hands on, so we wanted to do it all and have complete creative control. We found we were inspired by the sketchbooks and journals we would keep while studying, as well as the collaborative approach fostered by the image making course we were taking.” 

 

Like the best of us, Lidgett has a penchant for Pinterest and Instagram. However, unlike most of us, Lidgett manages to use these as actual tools for inspiration and planning, rather than disappearing down a tunnel of endless procrastination. In fact, Lidgett’s shoot entitled ‘Paradise Street’, which features in the most recent print issue of Zeum Magazine, was dreamt up by a chance encounter of an image of a painted pink brick building, a blue shutter, and the street sign ‘Burrows Rd’ on Instagram. Through Google street view, Lidgett managed to track down the exact location of the shot and organise a last minute photoshoot while she was down in London assisting at fashion week. The results speak for themselves. 

 

A certain colour, a model’s expression, an outfit, building or location, all of these seemingly insignificant elements have the potential to spark Lidgett’s imagination where she combines youth culture, nostalgia, dreamlike colours and raw intensity to produce her truly unique shots. While one usually associates professional fashion photography with laborious and ludicrously expensive equipment, Lidgett’s subtle and honest approach, as well as her battle worn camera, just goes to prove that it’s not the camera that takes the picture; it’s the photographer.

Images courtesy of Amy Lidgett and PITCH

Published in PITCH Zine Issue# 25, February 2014