Growing up, Craig McDean
wanted to be a motocross pro. Fortunately for Vogue, he wasn’t good
enough. McDean had already begun taking photographs of local rockers by the
time he went off to university in the North of England, at the age of 20.
At Blackpool and The Fylde
College, McDean enrolled in a photography class, but because he “seemed to fall
out with every lecturer”[1]—as he told Creative Review, a British monthly,
in 1997—he dropped out and headed to London. His mission? To track down the
photographer Nick Knight, whom he greatly admired and wanted to work for. At
first he just tagged along on shoots, not getting paid, but after a while he
was hired as Knight’s official assistant. “I took him in because of the way he
looked,” Knight said. “He was more like David Bowie than Bowie. Magenta hair.
But he turned out to be one of the best assistants I ever had. It was like
having Superman on the team. He used to run everywhere; his black belt
training”—in jiujitsu—“showed. I had no doubt he would succeed when he left.”[2]
Knight helped his protégé
flesh out his portfolio by passing on to him commissions that he, as the
picture editor of i-D magazine, did not want. McDean stayed with Knight
for more than two years, after which he briefly worked on album covers. Then he
traveled to Japan, where—with the help of a Japanese girlfriend who worked for
the government—he spent months shooting 4,000 rolls of film on the world of
sumo wrestling. A few images were published in The Face, but the vast
majority stayed in a drawer until September 2011, when they were showcased in
an exhibit and limited-edition book, Sumo.
McDean’s uncompromising
perfectionism eventually paid off, and in the mid-1990s, soon after his return
from Tokyo, he started getting commissions from the big-time fashion glossies.
By 1997, he was the man of the moment: Calvin Klein—still in recovery mode,
after a series of 1995 ads were attacked widely in the media for showing what
appeared to be teenagers in situations that were highly sexually charged—hired
him to shoot all nine of its campaigns, with two of the hottest models of the
day, Kate Moss
and Angela Lindvall. “I felt Craig McDean had the vision, and he could stretch
and could do everything from jeans to collection. I wanted there to be a
thread,” the brand’s creative director said. “There’s a sweetness to his work,
even though they’re sexy and provocative, it’s not off-putting.”[3]
Today, McDean is on
continual assignment for Vogue, Italian Vogue, French Vogue,
British Vogue, Vanity Fair, W, i-D, and Another
Magazine. He has done advertising for Giorgio Armani, Christian Dior, Estée Lauder,
Givenchy, Gucci, Jil Sander,
Oscar de la
Renta, and Yves Saint
Laurent. He works in an ultrarealistic style that makes his models
look sexual, but not crude, whether in the studio or on location. In Vogue
beauty features, such as “Rapunzel Calling” (October 2005) or “Seeing Red”
(January 2009), he has made his subjects’ lush yet touchable locks look
extremely enviable.
McDean’s second love is
architecture. So it isn’t surprising that when he and his wife, Tabitha
Simmons—a former model who designs a chic line of shoes while working for Vogue
as a contributing fashion editor—decided to put down roots, they bought a five-story
town house in the Chelsea neighborhood of New York and began to gut it, blowing
out the roof and back, to create something totally new and fresh. It is the
family’s sanctuary. Except for two rooms, the walls of the home are entirely
white, because, as Simmons explains, “Craig has difficulty with color in a
room. He’s creating images on a constant basis. He wants his home to be a clean
palette—as if he’s setting a refresh button.”[4]
1964: Craig McDean born in
the market town of Middlewich, not far from Manchester, England. He shows an
early interest in martial arts and motorcycles.
1984: After working for a
time as a mechanic, enrolls at an art college in Blackpool, where he takes
photography classes.
1989: Gets his start in
London, assisting Nick Knight, who has become one of England’s coolest
photographers with his 1982 book Skinhead and his work for i-D
magazine and Japanese avant-garde designer Yohji Yamamoto.
Craig McDean, who has created
some of the most indelible images in fashion over the past two decades (some of
them for this
magazine), started out shooting his rocker friends as a teenager in
the north of England. His entrée into fashion photography, though, came with
assisting Nick Knight (then the picture editor at i-D) in the late '80s
and early '90s. McDean's first photographs for i-D and The Face
led to a wildly prolific career, and along the way, he documented the
auspicious beginnings of three of fashion's most idiosyncratic beauties: Amber Valletta,
Guinevere van Seenus, and Kate Moss.
His latest book, Amber, Guinevere & Kate Photographed by Craig McDean:
1993-2005 (Rizzoli), collects McDean's images of the three women over the
span of more than a decade, as they've grown and changed and evolved.
"Each of these young women held her own individual appeal to me. Amber was
this all-American, classic beauty. Guinevere looked like something out of a
Finnish painting. Kate was the waif from Croydon," McDean says.
"Their looks, beauty, and gracefulness inspired me more than anyone else
from that period." Designed and edited in collaboration with M/M (Paris), Amber,
Guinevere & Kate also serves as a time capsule of McDean's analog film
process before the ubiquity of digital photography, incorporating previously
unpublished outtakes and contact sheets of editorials and campaigns, including
those for Jil Sander, Calvin Klein, and Yohji Yamamoto. "Each of the girls
could become a chameleon with each project," McDean says. "I built a
bond and a rapport with the three of them. Just like a film director might use
an actor over and over, I found myself working with these girls."
