London Design Festival 2017
200 grs
Louis poulsen, Skandium
A few weeks ago I worked as the official photographer for the Brompton Design District during the London Design Festival.
This is always one for the most exciting assignments of the year, as I get to visit all the shows in one or two days and to catch up with designers and curators I’ve worked with before, or those whose work I get to photograph year after year at LDF, like Martino Gamper, Merel Karhof and Marc Trotereau, Ineke Hans, whose work I had photographed at the Aram Gallery just a week earlier, Max Frommeld, Bethan Laura Wood, Faye Toogood or Studio Ilse and I love seeing their work evolve from a year to another.
Peter Pilotto Townhouse
It also is an incredible race-against-the-clock kind of challenge every year: for this edition I had to shoot over 30 exhibitions spread out across South Kensington in a day, sometimes literally running from one to the next and praying that the few last ones I’d visit would wait for past their official closure time as the night was drawing in (so glad they did!). I could easily have spent a few hours shooting some of them, trying out more angles, taking time to understand the work to photograph it in the most relevant way etc, but that taught me a lesson in terms of prioritising!
Cassina
Conran Shop
I then returned home to enjoy a cup of tea and rest.
Well not at all actually.
The rest of the night was spent in the studio editing through a few thousand images so that they’d be in Dropbox by the early hours, ready to be sent to press by anyone who needed them. Sometimes everything happens so fast in the day that it’s not until I edit the pictures that I can fully appreciate the work and read (a bit) about it, so however exhausted I am by then this is also a phase I very much enjoy it treats me to a rewind of the best shows and images of the day.
Faye Toogood and friends
Martino Gamper