Ellen Rogers

Today we had a lecture from our second and third year tutor, Ellen Rodgers. Primarily a fashion photographer, she only works in film and has been published in the likes of Vice, Dazed and Confused, Vogue Italia, i-D, British Journal of photography, and more.

She draws inspirations from external sources, normally away from photography, such as film, computer games and music. Her MA work was inspired by a folk horror aesthetic which was part of films she loved during the time.

Ellen studied her MA and it was during her degree show that she was approached my several stylists wanting to work with her. She begun working with a stylist straight away and demonstrated how key it is to work with people and how she was lucky enough to do so. The stylist had a vision for the direction of her work that was completely different to her own; at first she didn't even like the images she was producing; but they were successful; she was part of an emerging aesthetic called witch folk, and her work was unknowingly being spread and was even used on the covers of music albums she didn't even know existed.

She went back to another stylist whose aesthetic she preferred and wanted to take her work in a different direction, working for Vice magazine frequently lead to lots of commercial work, and thinking of creative ways to work many different brands into the shots.

Ellen highlighted how much work she was doing and the stress she was putting herself under and how exhausting it made her, working only on film meant that her turnaround was about a week as she hand painted the colours, scanned the images in separately because they were so big and edited them together, and colour graded the digitals to match the prints.

Throughout her career she constantly wrote about her thoughts, struggles and life in a blog. She feels this oversharing helped her career and lead to her becoming a writing contributor to www.lomography.com She left her commercial practice for a period of time after a close family death, and returned to Norfolk as she wanted to learn how to make mistakes and be around students as she liked the mentality of them. She has since returned to her practice and is working on a series titled Gnosis.