The cover of Donna Trope’s cult 2001 book, Beauty Shots, sees a latex-gloved hand hold a model’s perfectly made-up face to the side, while the other hand stubs a lit cigarette out on her cheek. Disturbingly beautiful, it’s a shot that encapsulates the legendary LA-born photographer’s practice, who has spent her career injecting the conventionally pretty with a shot of something darker. Among the most successful beauty photographers of her generation, Trope’s subversive imagery – laden with the tension of sex, pleasure and pain – has broken boundaries and defined eras. She revolutionised UK beauty advertising in the 1980s and 1990s and courted controversy with editorial work for magazines like Dazed and Vogue in the 2000s. She’s filled galleries, won awards, and published several highly-collectable books. With a vision that’s as exacting as it is seductively conceptual, she has always done things her own way.
When she picks up the phone, Trope is just starting her day at her studio in LA, where she has been situated somewhat accidentally for the past four years. “I came here to take three months off and then the pandemic happened,” she says. “I’m dying to go back to England.” Trope has never liked LA. She left her conservative family for London aged 19, where she found a spiritual home in a disused warehouse in Hoxton with a mish mash of other penniless artists. With no artistic schooling or connections, she set about becoming a photographer with unshakable grit, putting up advertisements in pubs, asking girls on the tube to be her models, and gleaning technical tips from guys in photography shops on The Strand. A determined self will from these years remains today, she says, in a perfectionism on set. Trope’s vision is precise, down to the angling of an eyebrow or the prick of a needle on glistening skin.
Here, she tells the story behind one of her first self-portraits, sparking outrage with her work, and why it’s important to be a team player even when you don’t want to be.
Donna Trope: Growing up, I was the only person I knew that was into cameras for some reason. I just loved it. I always had a hidden agenda: going to the beach, going out with friends, hanging out. Whatever it was, I would ambush people to take their picture.
I started to take self-portraits because I had been asked to do life modelling at an art college, where you stripped down and people would draw you. I got paid some ridiculously tiny amount, it was peanuts, but I was just so excited. I wanted to make sure that I looked as good as I could. l tacked up a white towel as a background on the fence of a friend’s roof and I also had, not a strobe, but a continuous light source.
I just practised doing poses. I didn’t dare take nude self-portraits because I was just too totally shy at the time. I did do many slightly sexy looking poses, or what I thought was sexy. I had a hairbrush as a prop. I was kind of copying modelling pictures. It was really quite naive.
I had worked for an art dealer and I had gone to London on a trip with them to a Christie’s auction. I loved London and decided to move. I wanted to be a photographer. I didn’t realise that you should assist, forget the fact that I wasn’t educated in photography. I didn’t even think of that. I romanticised everything.
I ended up on Old Street. It was nothing at the time, this was like early 80s. I found a warehouse and I put ads out in the local pub, saying, ‘Do you want to share a studio with me?’ They were raw spaces but I knew I couldn’t afford it alone. This building had different floors with artists on one floor, a photographer on another floor, and the guy at the top had a wood-burning fireplace that would heat his whole room. It was very Dickensian.
I started taking pictures of artists. I found a thing called the Art Diary with their personal phone numbers and got a lot of famous artists, and some not so famous, and ended up shooting portraits of them. My passion was to do fashion or beauty but I didn’t know how to do that.
I only did beauty because I had such limited space in my studio. It was a teeny little one room where I lived, a bedsit kind of thing, and I would shoot the models in the corner. I would do their makeup and hair. I would go to Portobello and second hand stores and I would get bits of fabric and lace and leather. I would wrap it around their head. I did it all.
There was a time I borrowed a Stephen Jones hat slightly illegally from a neighbour’s studio before it went back to their client, a magazine. They turned a blind eye and it was shot in 30 minutes while the courier was waiting to return it. I loved that image, I was very proud of it. That was when I had more confidence to keep working with models and I started going into agencies to do tests.
At this time, editorial photographers did not shoot ads. It was so separate. Advertising was a dirty word, but I knew I had to make some money. I went to an ad agency and they hired me to do a year-long Max Factor campaign. They had no idea I’d never done a job before. I didn’t know how to make a budget, I didn’t have a producer — I didn’t even know what a producer was! It was so crazy.
I was so naive in my approach. I shot everything on 5×4, which was really a gruelling task. It’s plate film, so you have to go into a dark room to load it, you have to go under a black hood and everything is upside down. It’s very labour-intensive, but I thought that to learn anything I had to do it that way. It really is another world what we did back then. I worked conceptually a lot because a banal beauty picture with some makeup just isn’t enough for me. I worked with Katie Grand way back in the old days of Dazed & Confused. There was one shoot we called Preservation Vamp which was all about staying young. We took the idea of vampires and plastic surgery pushed it to its extreme. We were accused of promoting death and suicide. We were all but crucified by the UK press. A top model agent was forced to resign as she was writing editorials about our story as ‘death chic.’ Jefferson Hack and Rankin both appeared on daytime talk shows to defend the cause. After the backlash came the applause and our concept was finally understood. Today it would be a no brainer!
What I would say remains [when I look at this shot] is that I posed myself. The way I work, I like to pose the model, actually put my hand under her chin, put it up a little bit to the left, or direct their eyes over here. I do get a little bit exacting, when you’re doing beauty that’s important. When I was taking my own portraits I did the same thing.
The way I want to see myself is the way I’d like the model to look. Even if the image isn’t me, it’s still under my control. Not everybody likes the way I’ll shoot a model. I have a client who dislikes my low angle POV so much that they have built a bespoke platform for me to shoot their models. Never mind that my POV remains in tact. I feel honoured that I’m given the attention. I’ve figured out a way to do it now, sneakily from above.
My advice to someone starting out is to be a team player, which I wasn’t really all the time. I would try to be. Now I sound like a kindergarten teacher, but it’s about meeting the right people and being true to yourself.