No one captures girls quite like Elaine Constantine. During the 1990s, when the world’s biggest fashion photographers were in the studio creating scenes of unattainable glamour, Constantine’s subjects were young women mucking about in suburbs, eating chips in sleepy seaside towns and dancing with reckless abandon on packed-out dancefloors. She favoured a messier kind of beauty, and to the cohort of youth culture magazines making their mark on London at the time – namely i-D, The Face and Dazed – her vision aligned perfectly with theirs. Later, she’d bring that exuberant new energy to the pages of Vogue and fashion houses like Burberry and Dior. Never losing the spontaneous warmth of her early shoots, perhaps what makes Constantine’s portraiture so special is that she’s first and foremost always been a documentary photographer. Be it those chip-eating girls by the seaside or a luxury fashion campaign, her work has always been underpinned by the subcultures of her youth.
Born the youngest of five in a working class Catholic family in Manchester, Constantine was heavily involved in the Mod revival scene that sprung up in the 1980s. Not interested in school, she instead spent her teen years sneaking out to all-nighters, driving around on scooters and taking pictures of her headstrong girl gang on a “shitty plastic camera”. At the time she just wanted to record her life, but these early pictures led to a job at Salford Tech as a demonstrator (“somewhere between a lecturer and a technician”) and, later, a career in London as Nick Knight’s photography assistant. Her first commissions for The Face were to document the frantic, ritualised energy of Northern Soul events in London. These nights sparked not only a decades-long obsession with the culture that has resulted in books, exhibitions and a 2014 BAFTA-nominated film, but also birthed a spirited photographic style that celebrates the imperfections of the individuals in front of her camera.
Here, the legendary photographer shares how taking pictures of her school friends saved her, and why she’s always hated shooting inside a studio:
Elaine Constantine: As a young person growing up in greater Manchester, I didn’t know what feminism was. I was from a very working class background and people didn’t go on to do degrees, so the word didn’t come on my horizon at all, but I always had the idea of being an individual. I had brothers and I knew I had to be tough. I didn’t want to be objectified, although I could never have explained that in that period.
In the early 80s, my peers from school were wearing the most horrendous stuff: Bubble perms, rah-rah skirts, white high heels, you know? It was horrific. But when the Mod revival came around, it was for me. I loved everything to do with the 60s and early 70s: the leather three-quarter coats, the scooters, the music that they played in the discos. It coupled with this fantastic Scar revival, and I was listening to The Jam, Secret Affair, The Action, Specials, Madness, Selector. It was a really fantastic time to be young.
I either fell in with a group of girls who were similar minded or we all influenced each other. We were very much self-possessed. We weren’t waiting to get boyfriends to drive us around on scooters. We were getting our own scooters. I think in a kind of naive way, we wanted to be a cool gang, and to get pictures of us looking cool was paramount. The camera I had was a shitty plastic thing that you opened up and it had a tiny cassette in it. The actual viewing frame was nowhere near the lens, so the shot was always off to the side to the left. You’d get the pictures developed at Boots and they were never in focus.
It wasn’t like I grew up looking at Magnum pictures and we didn’t go to galleries – it wasn’t in our world. If I think about the initial kind of desire to take pictures, it was all about identity. In some ways it saved me because I didn’t get any exams. If I didn’t get into photography, I may not have wound up coming through this amazing time in London that was all about recording street culture and music culture. It was all instinctive.
I started working as a demonstrator, which is somewhere between a lecture and a technician, at Salford Tech. I used to teach a very basic photography course which lasted one day to every design student in Greater Manchester. A really brilliant fashion lecturer called Ian Lewis, beautiful chap, came into my studio one day and went, ‘I think you’re really good. Why don’t we get together and do pictures?’ That sort of launched a little relationship where me and him captured fashion students’ work on local models. Then I moved to London and started assisting Nick Knight.
In London at that time, there were only two or three magazines you wanted to get into, it was The Face and i-D, really. I hadn’t got the confidence to go to those magazines and go, ‘Look at my folio’, before I worked for Nick. When I came away from assisting him, I felt very confident technically. I was thinking, ‘Yeah, I’m good now. I know I’m good.’ I would always see The Face being flung around the desks in the graphic design department at Salford Tech and they were all worshiping it. I never thought I’d be doing covers for them within the decade.
“People at Salford Tech said,‘Oh, you really do know how to get a woman looking strong’”
Initially, I thought I needed to do pictures like Nick or I’d never get my foot in the door. We’d just done non-stop studio stuff and I thought mags would expect this high level of lighting and processing. He’s got this amazing eye for graphic shapes and amazing colours, he’s like some kind of inventor. I’m not that. I was never that. I had to kind of just slap myself in the face and go, ‘You can’t be a little Nick!’ I had to kind of go back to where I came from. It’s like your own identity and your own personal stuff.
I was really interested in documentary photography and I used to go to a fantastic bookshop on Charing Cross Road. Everything I earned I spent on books and I amassed quite a collection. I started bringing together all my favourite documentary photographers like Shirley Baker, Penny Smith, Chris Killip, Martin Parr. And then maybe it’s because I’ve got a very low boredom threshold, but I really did not like shooting in the studio. I’d always try to force it outside. I liked having people moving and I’ve always liked that. That’s how my style came together really.
Then it was meeting certain stylists, like Nancy Rohde and Polly Banks, who were working with The Face and were amazing. They were women my age from similar backgrounds that had come through youth culture. They weren’t about selling clothes. I kind of found my feet with that because they could give me images that I believed in. What they pulled would be totally surprising and esoteric, and they were things the characters I was trying to create would wear. That’s what I was excited by.
I remember when I started taking pictures, people at Salford Tech said,‘Oh, you really do know how to get a woman looking strong.’ I guess the idea that there was a woman in a picture and she was aware that a man was looking at [her] bothered me without me really understanding why. I think what’s remained in my approach is a kind of abandonment; the idea of not performing for a camera.
Credits
Words: Orla Brennan
Photography: Courtesy of Elaine Constantine