2016.
Ten years ago this month I ripped up my entire process. I had been trying and failing to make my way to fashion print by shooting editorials I funded myself, begging stylists to work with me, begging magazines to grant me commissions, begging agencies to consider my portfolio. There was one guy at a very big agency who, in late summer of 2015 told me my book was terrible, so terrible in fact that it put him in a bad mood as he looked at it. I thought my photos were good but he wasn’t wrong. I’d spend the last three or four years following the guide to making it as a fashion photographer, did all the things I was supposed to do debt be damned. I was pretty certain it was never going to happen for me, at least not the way I’d been doing it. So, in January of 2016 I took everything down from my Instagram, trashed my portfolio and decided to try again, this time forgoing much of the advice I had collected. When I look back through my photo roll from 2016 I see a lot of cool things, the start of some simmering ideas but mostly, some very specific moments in time that would later spring me forward. I kept shooting street style in the main seasons but I wasn’t thinking about it at all. Mostly, I kept making photos and asking myself repeatedly, “What the hell are you looking at? What are you trying to do?” Anything, but this.
This was probably the last year in which I took a bunch of photos that I thought were singularly very good or great and could pick out of a haystack. But I realised then that what I wanted was something else; having a cool photo or two didn’t make progress sustainable. But I had a different gift, an odd and onerous one that had always been at odds with my production and sanity. I could just be prolific, as if writing a novel. Before I owned a camera, I wrote so many novels.
So, in 2017, I would stop shooting editorials entirely, but I would start directing and filmmaking commercially. And of course, photographing fashion week on my own dime because how could I not. That was something I was always supposed to do. #tbt
A portrait of an artist made by another artist called Shawn.
Some song lyrics in the background that kind of remind me of an experience that mirrored the experience of a whole bunch of kids that look kind of like me.
Sometimes I miss when I used to look kind of like me.
Sometimes.
New York, 2025.
@shawnpbruce
For photographer and visual columnist Simbarashe Cha, style is a universal language. He explores how the clothes people wear help us understand their lives, their culture and the world we all share.
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