Vicki King

0:12Hello I'm gonna start right from the beginning I'm Vicki King I'm a photographer. And I'm gonna talk to you a little bit about my work and how I got into photography and the way that I think about it and how that influences the kind of images that I make today.

0:28So I'm from Leicester originally and when I was a teenager I actually worked in a blood lab so I was on quite a different path to what I'm doing now.

0:40And I had quite a bit of beginner's luck I think because I stumbled across photography mostly by accident and I didn't know anything about what I was doing with the camera I didn't know what an f-stop was or an aperture but somehow me messing the settings up at the time made me think the images that I made were much more interesting than what was actually in front of me so after finding this kind of magical thing that came really naturally and excited me so much like I became very obsessed with it and ended up moving down to London to study LCC about 10 years ago.

1:19This is some of the work that I made when I was there like I became really obsessed with lights and I was thinking about it as there's like higher power in the images like this kind of spiritual entity and what photography was literally made from so from the beginning I was introduced to it as this thing that was more about making a fiction and an elevation of real life opposed to something that was purely documentary photography the ability to find something unreal in the mundane moment it's something that I find really fascinating it can make real life feel secretive and mysterious a little bit like in its inception how people viewed it when it was first made up with Victorian spirit photographers who are tricking people into thinking they can see their dead grandma in a long exposure photograph obviously I'm not trying to do that.

2:11But it's something quite interesting to keep in that mindset of looking at things with a sense of wonder like it's this mixture of science mixed with something inexplicable this was something that I made it uni as well it was like my final project.

2:30And it was initially inspired by some of the news footage during the 2011 London riots where. There was a lot of like imagery of like the sky on fire and this real sense of like social unrest and I was kind of comparing it to like old John Martin paintings who he was a painter who painted these really like big apocalyptic scenes with like voids in the sky and then it became about something like much less literal in the end and I was trying to make something that was more like this apocalyptic like dream space where everything was on fire and it's still something I'm really interested in working with now like these visual metaphors so this was something that I made this year I went on a bit of a trip that was very unplanned to the Shetland Islands in January where they have this fire festival could up hell er and it's it's to mark the end of the euro season where all of the men in the island dress up as Vikings and then walk through the streets like with burning torches so I took a flight up to Aberdeen and then took a ferry for 15 and a half hours over the North Sea in January which was completely traumatic literally like glasses were just fooling around on the floor and like people were like falling off their seat and I just spent essentially a whole day trying not to throw up for myself so I got there.

3:53And then it was just this tiny little island where we're just being battered by the elements from all sides maybe this is one of these pictures where the story is like more interesting the picture but I'm like I toiled for this I'm gonna put it in and I only managed to get one image and I was there because it was just raining so much I was standing there by myself and I was thinking how to press photographers do this I don't know where.

4:20I am or where to stand from but it looked at in magical this is another one that I made more recently and then going back a little bit to when I left University I thought okay. I really need to try and keep making images like that's my main prerogative I mean when you leave like you're not necessarily equipped to become a photographer.

4:44So I got a job in a studio and I very tentatively started working in fashion I thought that was an interesting way of applying some of the things I was already interested in with making work like making something that was more fantastical and about the body and surface and light so this is some of the fashion work that I have made but this one I wanted to encapsulate some of the elements of the project that I showed you previously so the initial plan was to shoot on location at night and light it.

5:22So it appeared really surreal but as a lot of things with fashion we didn't have the budget to fly a whole team over to a random country so we ended up doing a studio in Paris in the middle of winter and I wanted the girls to kind of feel like they were exploring this like unknown planet and there's like in-between space that was somewhere between real life and fantasy so as well as like making things out of nothing Photography has really given me the opportunity to travel to some amazing places one that I'll go into in a little bit more depth was this one by shot for modern weekly we went to Iceland I think when you're in a new place you're naturally experiencing everything on like a higher sensory level anyway.

6:10But I wanted to capture the beauty of like the sublime natural elements but also from a really human perspective like it was a fashion shoot that we didn't want to use models so we decided to use Icelandic girls that were friends it's like 1:00 a.m. About the night before.

6:29And I didn't know who we were going to shoot so I was like kind of going from Facebook of like the very limited amount of Icelandic people trying to find people that would be up for giving us like a couple of days of their time to come on a road trip with us. And I found this amazing girl Alma who was the one lying down in this picture sent her a message saying hey do you want to come on this like ridiculous road trip from Rekha Vic across to east Iceland and she was absolutely up for air I feel like that's probably not something you get so much in London like people seem to be much more up for just going on ran on trips with strangers there are some more pictures from the shoot so if you haven't clocked onto already I really like to spend a lot of my time in a fantasy space that photography gives me opposed to real life.

7:25This is another project that I've been working on for about five years with my friend vex who runs a porn company called a four chambered heart. And this is another image that we made together I think it's quite it's quite nice to shoot with somebody that you've known for a really long time when you're sort of like working with different people every day as well does that create a connection of like having a long history with somebody and understanding each other and the way that you you like to work and where you come from so we kind of created this like an anti-gravity like void pond or that's what we wanted it to look like and have her kind of floating in it.

8:02And this was the actual reality which was a Finding Nemo paddling pool in a kitchen in Leeds it's a really fetching picture of me in it. So that concludes my talk and all of my evidence that photography is a total lie I hope you enjoyed it thank you [Applause]