Midnight Express Magazine

There are photographers whose pictures you recognise in a second.

A colour. A light. A face. A strange situation that could belong to nobody else.

Miles Aldridge is one of them.

In his pictures, red is never simply red. It is too red. Yellow is too yellow. Kitchens look as if they have been taken from a dream after too much Technicolor. Women have the perfect appearance of advertising heroines, but something is always slightly wrong. A bottle of ketchup, a fried egg, a packet of cigarettes or an ordinary sofa can suddenly become as important as a face.

It would be easy to call him a fashion photographer. Or a filmmaker. A Pop artist. A painter. A storyteller.

None of those descriptions is quite enough.

Miles Aldridge does not really photograph the world.

He rebuilds it.

A camera that had photographed the Beatles

His story could begin with a photograph of the Beatles.

Not one taken by Miles Aldridge, but with the camera that would eventually become his.

His father, Alan Aldridge, was one of the most influential British graphic designers and illustrators of the 1960s and 1970s. He worked with the Beatles, Elton John and The Who, and created some of the psychedelic images that helped define the visual language of the period.

Miles grew up in a world where pictures were not a profession. They were simply part of everyday life.

He watched his father draw. He sat on his lap while he worked, breathing in cigar smoke as Alan created his psychedelic illustrations.

Then, one day, his father needed to get some work done and wanted his son out of the way.

He gave him a camera. It was a Nikon F.

And it was not just any Nikon F. Alan had originally bought it to photograph the Beatles. Miles was ten years old.

He had no idea that the camera he had been given to keep him occupied would eventually become part of his own visual language.

His father taught him one simple thing. When photographing a person, focus on the eyelashes. Decades later, Miles still does.

There is something rather beautiful about that kind of inheritance. Not a theory.

Not a complicated technique. Just a pair of eyelashes.

The photographer who wanted to make films

Despite his family background, Miles did not grow up knowing that he would become a photographer.

He studied illustration at Central Saint Martins in London. Then he became interested in moving images and began directing music videos.

In the mid 1980s, he was fascinated by Super 8 and by the films of Derek Jarman. He even approached Jarman in the cafés and bars around Soho and asked him about cameras.

At one point, inspired by Federico García Lorca, he travelled by train from Barcelona to Seville with a Super 8 camera and twenty rolls of film, attempting to make his own cinematic homage to the poet.

The cinema came first. Photography came almost by accident.

His sister Saffron became a model and Miles started taking pictures of her. His girlfriend at the time was also a model.

One of those pictures was seen by someone who liked it. Suddenly, Vogue wanted to meet him. There was just one problem. Miles was not really a photographer yet.

And he did not have a proper portfolio. His early photographs were kept in a shoebox. That shoebox effectively became his first portfolio. Within months, the career had begun. The story sounds almost too perfect.

The son of an important graphic artist becomes a famous photographer.

But that is not really what happened. Miles did not inherit a photographic career.

He inherited a way of looking.

A photographer who wanted cinema

Before becoming a photographer, Aldridge wanted to make films.

That explains a great deal about his work.

His pictures rarely feel as though they were simply taken in the real world. They look like stills from films that we have never seen.

A woman is sitting in a kitchen. Something has clearly happened.

But what?

That is exactly what makes us look. Aldridge likes the moment when the viewer arrives too late. The scene seems to have started before the shutter was pressed and will continue after the photograph has been taken. Hitchcock taught him something important.

A perfectly ordinary object can become threatening.

A glass of milk. A pair of shoes. A kitchen. A cigarette. A woman sitting quietly.

Nothing has to happen for the viewer to feel that something is about to happen.

The threat does not have to be shown. It only has to be suggested.

The ketchup accident

There is an almost ridiculous story behind one of his most recognisable images.

A bottle of ketchup was accidentally dropped on the kitchen floor.

The red splashes caught Aldridge’s attention. That could have been the end of it.

Instead, he recreated the accident in a studio.

And because reality was not colourful enough, he used paint to make the ketchup even more intensely red.

That small incident says a great deal about the way he works.

Aldridge does not simply photograph reality. He edits it. He exaggerates it.

He rebuilds it until reality becomes more real than reality itself.

The accident is reconstructed. The mess is designed. The chaos is controlled.

Even spontaneity has a storyboard.

A fried egg and a cigarette

One of his most famous photographs came from another apparently absurd idea.

Aldridge wanted to photograph lipstick colours for Vogue Italia.

But he did not want to photograph a woman wearing lipstick.

He wanted to photograph what she might have left behind.

A cigarette with lipstick on it. Stuck into the yolk of a fried egg.

The idea was inspired by Hitchcock’s Rebecca, in which a woman stubs out a cigarette in a jar of face cream.

Franca Sozzani, the legendary editor-in-chief of Vogue Italia, approved the idea.

The photograph appeared across a double-page spread. Anna Wintour subsequently asked Aldridge for a signed print. An egg, a cigarette and a little lipstick had become an important moment in his career. It also revealed something fundamental about the relationship between Aldridge and Sozzani.

She understood that fashion photography could be something other than clothes.

The clothes could almost disappear. The story was more important.

Franca Sozzani’s gamble

Aldridge’s relationship with Franca Sozzani lasted for decades.

When they first started working together, he was still making fairly conventional photographs, often against white backgrounds.

He was becoming bored. Sozzani allowed him to experiment. The backgrounds became darker. Shadows appeared. Objects became characters. Accessories became props. And eventually the photographs started telling stories.

This was the real turning point.

Sozzani understood something that is often forgotten in fashion photography.

The photographer does not necessarily need to photograph the thing he has been asked to photograph. He can photograph the idea behind it. A shoe can become Hitchcock. A handbag can become a crime scene. A lipstick can become a memory.

A collection can become a film that never existed. That freedom was enormously important to Aldridge. He once described his meetings with Vogue Italia in a particularly revealing way. The magazine had seen the fashion collections.

He had not.

He arrived with his drawings and his ideas. He might propose a beauty salon. Or ketchup on a floor. Or some completely unrelated visual obsession.

Then the clothes would be fitted into his story.

That is almost the opposite of the way fashion photography usually works.

The clothes were not the starting point. The idea was.

Beautiful women in uncomfortable situations

There is something unsettling about the women in Aldridge’s photographs.

They are beautiful. Perfectly made up. Perfectly dressed. Perfectly lit.

And yet they often seem trapped.

They look absent. Or bored. Or worried.

Sometimes they look as if they are waiting for something that we know nothing about.

The beauty is seductive. Then it becomes disturbing. Pink becomes artificial.

A smile becomes sinister. A perfect kitchen starts to look like a prison.

A glamorous advertisement becomes a nightmare.

This is where Aldridge becomes much more interesting than a photographer with a recognisable colour palette.

He does not destroy glamour. He pushes it until it begins to reveal its darker side.

The family hiding inside the pictures

For years, viewers could easily concentrate on the cinema, the colours and the Pop Art references.

But there is another, much more personal story running through the work.

His family. His mother in particular.

Aldridge has spoken about the emotional influence of his mother’s life and frustrations, and about the way his childhood memories gradually found their way into his pictures.

Some of the images that viewers interpreted as sexual violence or horror were, in fact, connected to something completely different.

One photograph of a woman in a hospital bed, for example, was interpreted by a journalist as being about rape.

Aldridge was surprised. For him, the image was connected to the death of his mother. That distinction matters. He does not necessarily photograph memories.

He transforms emotions into fictional scenes. He takes something private and turns it into something theatrical. Pain becomes colour. Memory becomes a set.

Childhood becomes a film.

When photography becomes therapy

Perhaps this is why Aldridge’s photographs can feel so strangely familiar.

We do not recognise the actual rooms. We recognise the emotions.

The family tension. The boredom. The loneliness. The feeling of waiting.

The strange silence inside a beautiful house. His pictures are not autobiographical in the traditional sense. They are emotional autobiographies. That is a very different thing. And perhaps one of the reasons his work has remained so powerful is that he does not simply tell us what happened to him.

He gives us enough space to project our own stories onto his.

The two-minute wait

There is another surprisingly old-fashioned element to Aldridge’s practice.

He still loves film. And he still uses Polaroids.

At a time when a photograph appears instantly on a camera screen, Aldridge enjoys the fact that a Polaroid has to develop.

You have to wait.

For a couple of minutes, you do not quite know what you have made.

He has described that moment as part of the pleasure of photography.

The Polaroid is not the final image. It is an approximation, a way of checking the light, the colour and the pose. But the waiting matters. It forces you to stop.

It gives the photograph a small moment of uncertainty.

Perhaps that is one reason Aldridge has kept working with film long after digital photography became the obvious choice.

Digital gives you security. Film does not. With film, you have to concentrate.

You have to look. You have to make the decision before seeing the result.

And that uncertainty is useful.

From accident to obsession

There is something else that explains Aldridge’s photographs.

He notices things. A bottle of ketchup falling onto the floor.

A green tourist bus passing Place de la Concorde. A lipstick mark.

An abandoned cigarette. A particular colour. A strange light.

The important thing is not necessarily the object itself.

It is what happens in his head when he sees it.

A green bus can become the reason to invent an entire story about two German tourists in Paris.

A fried egg can become a Hitchcock reference.

A bottle of ketchup can become a scene of domestic catastrophe.

The real world provides the trigger. His imagination does the rest.

The photograph comes last

This may be the best way to understand Miles Aldridge.

The photograph is not the beginning of the process.

It is the end.

First comes the idea. Then the drawing.

Then the set. Then the light. Then the colours. Then the clothes.

Then the model. Then the objects. And finally the camera.

That is why his photographs feel so complete.

Nothing seems accidental.

Except, sometimes, the thing that started the whole idea.

A dropped bottle. A colour glimpsed through a window. A cigarette.

A memory. A film. A childhood image.

Aldridge’s great talent is to take those fragments and turn them into worlds.

Worlds that look perfect. Worlds that look familiar.

Worlds that are also completely impossible.

Perhaps that is why his photographs remain so difficult to forget.

They look like memories from films we have never seen.

Like dreams we almost remember.

Like advertisements for lives that nobody actually lives.

And beneath all those perfect colours, beautiful women, immaculate kitchens and impossible situations, there is something much darker and much more human.

The moment when an ordinary life begins to crack.

Aldridge simply chooses to photograph that crack in the most beautiful colours imaginable.

Grégory Herpe