PICTURES: PHILIP CASTLE
WORDS: JANICE BREEN BURNS
(Longform: 10 minutes to read)
Philip Castle shoots Paris from the back. Backstage, back of house, a fashion show’s interminable, mind-numbing backstory of castings, fittings, final adjustments and run-throughs. He’s the strapping bloke on the fringe of fashion’s behind-the-scenes organised chaos, watching, quiet, (“I try to be a mouse“) poised to mine its fleeting moments of beauty. In fact, “quintessential feminine beauty,” he says, to be more precise. “That’s what I have my eye on. I’m trying to capture what I’m attracted to…I’m looking at stuff that makes me ache, the most beautiful women the world has to offer…”
His compositions often sing with sex, or rather, an elegant, luscious backbeat of sensuality. It’s well suited to his primary patrons in Paris, Chanel then Collette Dinnigan. “I’m an artist,” he says, and adds with a hoot of blokey laughter; “But I think I’m also a really cultivated perv.”
He makes no apology for his red-blooded heterosexual perspective on fashion. Clothes – fashion’s raison d’etre to the mostly women and gay men who create them – are an evocative afterthought to Mr. Castle and appear so in most of his photographs. When I ask if his imagery might be different, or more accurate if he focused academically on the cut and fall of cloth, the patterned surface and texture of fabric – the fashion – he says, no. Beauty is the soul of fashion; fabric is merely a symptom.
“Fashion is a human instinct, manifesting as an industry,” he says. “It’s about the love of beauty, the worship of feminine beauty.” He’s well qualified to plumb this worship (his own word) as his raison d’etre. It’s worship, he says frankly, that underpins all his fashion imagery. (Hold that thought as you scroll down, here, through his archival images, to those captured behind the scenes for Collette Dinnigan in Paris in recent years.)
For a fashion photographer, Mr. Castle is more than usually intriguing: a former hard news photo-journalist for Fairfax Media’s The Age newspaper, recently graduated with honors in psychology from the University of Melbourne, a self-confessed perfectionist with borderline obsessive compulsive tendencies. In his natural habitat, the backrooms of Paris Fashion Week, he’s a rare and potent vintage. “I’m very interested in the human psyche,” he says. “Very aware of my role, the environment, people participating. To be a photographer is a self conscious thing.”
Mr. Castle’s first Parisien assignments with Chanel were for The Age fashion editor Jan Phyland, almost 20 years ago, followed by work for Deborah Thomas, then editor of Elle magazine. His idea, to shoot fashion candidly, focusing on its backstage backstory in news journalistic style, was counter-intuitive and rare at the time. Fashion imagery had stalled in a high key, laboriously contrived and artificial aesthetic. “And people were getting sick of that,” says Mr. Castle.
His own reportage style caught subjects candidly, or were set up to appear spontaneous. Models paused in moments of distraction, often without professional hair and makeup. Pioneer photographers such as Bruce Weber were selling comparative work to progressive glossies, Italian and American Vogues, but the genre was still evolving. Mr. Castle’s experience fit like jigsaw into the new cultural consciousness that privileged fashion as a “natural” and “real” phenomenon that fit into everyday life. Few photographers had cut their creative teeth in quite the same way.
“I’d photographed everything from fatal car accidents to the Sims Metal Factory disaster,” he says “But I’d also got myself onto the fashion pages (of The Age) and busted my arse to make something of it.” In the early 1990s, he had little competition. Most hard news photographers considered fashion lowly in the pecking order of journalism. Not young Mr. Castle though; he found it a joy.
“I’d always wanted to photograph women,” he says bluntly. “I worshipped feminine beauty.” To this unashamedly blokey shooter , whose gender and sexual orientation, at least, were typical among fashion photographers, The Age’s fashion pages were a gift and later, Paris was Nirvana.
One of Mr. Castle’s most evocative images from his first years with Chanel, became an iconic metaphor for the odd sexual mathematics at work in a typical Paris fashion show. He shot it in radical reverse; not from the bottom of Chanel’s runway, but from halfway along it toward the photographers’ pit, brilliantly capturing a lone, skimpily-clad girl and the hundred lense barrels pointed hungrily toward her.
In fact, Mr. Castle rarely ventured beyond the runway exit to shoot front-of-house. Catwalks, for him, are a nuisance; too formulaic, too predictable. “If I did want a couple of runway shots for my coverage, I’d (run out from backstage) jump into the middle of the pit, grab a few, get yelled at, then run back.”
What he preferred to capture was in the small private moments and blurred, girly smudges backstage, images that quickly evolved into a mesmerising new genre: delicate and sensual without the vulgarity of a Terry Richardson or the simpering romance of a David Bailey image. Mr. Castle’s photographs were also, beautifully suited to the powerful fashion house of Chanel as it steered carefully into a new and uber-cool consumer demographic.
Until disaster struck. His contract with Chanel ended, abruptly and embarrassingly, when the fashion house’s logo was used without permission to spruik an exhibition of Mr. Castle’s Paris photographs in Melbourne. It was a marketer’s mistake but, Chanel corporate protocol had been breached and the punishment out of Paris was swift and summary. The exhibition and an calendar of Castle photographs intended for international circulation, were immediately cancelled. “I lost a lot of money,” Mr. Castle says, still deeply disappointed by the memory. “But the worst was, I really thought my career was fucked.”
He could not have been more mistaken. Salvation came with a prophetic commission by Elle editor, Deborah Thomas who had watched the sad saga unfold, twigged the injustice of it all, and offered Mr. Castle a contract to shoot a multi-page spread on Collette Dinnigan’s Paris back-story in a similar style to his work with Chanel.
Years on, Mr. Castle still works exclusively for Collette Dinnigan in the lead-up to her shows in Paris. Although his commissions were erratic in the years his university exams clashed with Fashion Week, he covered enough to maintain a certain sympatico with the legendary Australian designer. His most recent commission was last week. He flies to Paris ahead of Miss Dinnigan’s casting and fitting days then, literally, settles into her background to observe. As she works, he watches, waiting for “something beautiful” to happen.
“I’m always aware of how big my presence is in there,” he says seriously. “I want to be a mouse, but it’s very hard for me. I can certainly tell from Collette’s attitude when I’m more conspicious than she really wants me to be; she doesn’t have to say anything, she just kind of radiates things….” Mr. Castle shoots the Dinnigan drama spontaneously, or composes and freezes little vignettes derived from the activity and “freakishly beautiful” raw material all around him. Sometimes, the sheer loveliness of what he sees, has him frantic and wanting to capture it all.
Once, he found himself shocked by the glorious turn his life had taken. It was in an elegant apartment overlooking the Place Des Victoires; a breeze lightly lifted silk curtains, a soprano was singing… “That day – whoa! – there were fittings going on everywhere, some of the most beautiful girls on the planet were in various states of undress, Collette had hired a soprano opera singer who was practicing her piece, and the wind was sort of blowing these curtains into this beautiful, whitewashed room in Paris. It was…,” Mr. Castle still shakes his head at the memory, “Nuts.”
The scene was also another glorious metaphor for modern fash-matics, according to Mr. Castle, or the ways and whys the industry works. “If it was just about the clothes, they’d just put them on a conveyor belt and send them down the line, wouldn’t they?” he asks rhetorically, “But instead, they get the most extraordinarily beautiful women to wear them down a catwalk and be photographed by hundreds of straight guys who are syndicating their photographs to every corner of the planet.”
That, he says, is what fashion is all about: “Clearly, it’s not just about selling clothes….”
