Daniel Sachon has just had the last 10 years of his life stolen. He’s holding out hope that the thieves will realise the decade-old laptops and backups they snatched from his car will be worth nothing on the street, but mean everything to the fashion photographer. Like many 26-year-olds, Daniel filled the devices with as much personal data as professional: digital assets saved over a lifetime of schoolmates, career-firsts and personal projects. But unlike many 26-year-olds, Daniel’s recent files included a campaign he just directed for Kim Kardashian’s SS23 collaboration with Dolce & Gabbana.
Daniel’s photographs echo a timeless high-octane glamour in cheeky rebellion. It’s part and parcel of the fashion photographer’s ongoing fascination between art and commerce, as well as the pair’s symbiotic relationship with beauty and obsession. One of the London native’s latest projects to be exhibited is BITCHES, a photo series that pairs big name models with dashing hounds. While attempting to subvert the sexist roots of its own title, the series constructs a deftly stylised mise en scène set in the aestheticized eras of the late 20th century. The result? A howling homage to femme camp and hysteric glamour.
“When the concept of femininity has never been more wonderfully nebulous, these images cast a variety of women in all their diversities as self-professed bitches,” writes model Georgie Hobday, who poses in the series with a pack of Red Setters. She charts the word’s loaded literary history, from feminist scholar Jo Freeman’s 1968 Bitch Manifesto to Roald Dahl’s erotic short story collection Switch Bitch to Hemingway’s taste for the bitch-goddess trope.
“We can’t have the conversation without acknowledging the fact that the word was always reserved to insult a woman who had her own point of view and knew what she wanted,” says Daniel, who was initially nervous about how the show’s double entendre would be perceived. “In my work, I’m always really keen to make sure that women never look like they’re being objectified,” he says. “It was this idea of: nothing needs to be taken too seriously, but if you do want to dive deeper, we can have that conversation.”
Shot in London and Los Angeles, the BITCHES best-in-show flaunts a range of pedigrees, from socialities and celebutantes to Pomeranians and Rhodesian Ridgebacks. Daniel has been shooting dogs since the start of his career and scouted pooches from past clients, street run-ins and — “in very LA fashion” — casting calls. Aside from the scientific phenomenon of dogs looking like their owners, models had their own photogenic pets to join them on set, as was the case with rock royalty Georgia May Jagger and her two Papillons.
“It’s better to just let the dog give you what you get and work with it,” Daniel says. “It can sometimes be that the actual models are a little bit harder to work with.”
In most cases, though, form followed function when it came to pairing off each woman with man’s best friend. The British model and makeup artist Beauty Spock cosplayed as a rococo Marie Antoinette, so pugs were a natural addition, while fashion designer Mowalola sprawled topless in the sand with a protective and confident Cane Corso. Artist Nadia Lee Cohen sulks about in silk lingerie with equally elegant, slightly aloof Afghan Hounds. And for the painter Ariana Papademetropoulos, “I knew I wanted something that felt quite soft, but still very regal and noble,” he says, and a pair of St. Bernards did the trick.
Alongside the photography series, the exhibition unveiled behind-the-scenes video footage and Polaroid test shots that serve a different narrative entirely, as was the case when he directed model Ariish Wol with a dozen puppies. “The digital image is really wide and you see all these puppies climbing over her and she’s fit quite awkwardly,” Daniel says. “But then the Polaroids have an almost-trashy charm to them and look a bit painterly. So it’s really cool how they can sort of play off each other.”
BITCHES is shameless in its worship of cinematic fantasy and runs circles around the tropes and myths of the HBIC. Dogs are an obvious through line, but Daniel’s main storyline concerns how context changes art. Part of the fun of playing dress-up in the trappings of femininity was confusing the stuffy conventions that once separated a fashion campaign from a museum work.
“A lot of the pieces when framed and on the gallery wall in that White Cube context do quite clearly translate as art pieces,” he says. “But then if I was to slap a logo over one of the images, I think it would very naturally feel like a campaign.” Studying rockstar editorial photographers turned blue-chip artists like Ellen von Unwerth and Helmut Newton elicited a eureka moment for Daniel — what if there was no difference between a billboard and a framed photograph?
“We’re now in a time where photography is part of the visual vernacular that we all share because of Instagram and social media,” Daniel says. “I think that’s been the entryway for art photography to be seen as part of the art world, as opposed to separate from it.”
Credits
All images courtesy of Daniel Sachon and Imitate Modern