Ellen von Unwerth isn’t just the life of the party. Ellen von Unwerth is the party. At least, that’s the thesis behind SCAD FASH’s latest photo exhibition, This Side of Paradise, which celebrates over three decades of Ellen and her camera playing host to some of the sauciest, sexiest, swinging-est scenes that pop culture has ever seen.
Ellen’s life has always been spectacular though. She grew up during the 60s and, she tells me, spent her teenage years living on a hippie commune in rural Germany, rooming with a pair of guys, and listening to The Doors at all hours. “It was a party all day long,” she says. Naturally, from there, Ellen joined the circus (another spectacular, of sorts) as a magician’s assistant, for three years, before she was scouted by a photographer.
However, the modelling life didn’t provide Ellen the kind of excitement she’d made a life chasing. Being in front of the camera — being told to look pretty and sit still — wasn’t just a drag, it was demoralising. “I wasn’t happy because I wanted to express myself,” she says. “I always wanted to be silly and do something fun.” Ellen was always much more interested in her boyfriend’s darkroom than their impromptu photoshoots, suggesting, excitedly, that they blow up all the photos rather than just a selected few. In response, he gifted her her very own camera, giving her a quick crash course (“when the circle lights up, press this button”) before she was off on a trip to Kenya that would launch her career.
It wasn’t long after the fashion set caught sight of Ellen’s travel photos that she was booking shoots with alt publications like i-D and The Face, and campaigns with indie designers like Katharine Hamnett. The latter’s going-out dresses shot in hotel rooms, splayed out across settees, racing across crosswalks, accompanied by a coupe of champagne, all in Ellen’s signature, stark black-and-white style.
Despite her unmistakable visual hallmarks — high contrast and saturated carnival colours — much of what makes an Ellen Von Unwerth photograph just that doesn’t come from within the camera at all. It comes from Ellen’s ability to corral a crowd, summon an atmosphere and incite a situation. “Women love to show me their personality, their sensuality. I think they really trust me and open up. They’re comfortable enough to behave very sexy, to show their legs and their boobs and their décolletage. And I love that!” elates Ellen, who credits her ability to put her models at ease with her history of being in front of the camera, as well. But she also has her “little tricks,” she notes, with a knowing, mischievous grin: “We have lots of music playing. And a little champagne helps.”
Sometimes, on set, Ellen says she feels like a circus director, carefully blocking out each scene, doling out roles and motivations to her cast of characters (“You, over there, you’re jealous! Now, look over there: hot guy!”), writing and rewriting the narrative until the call list is a mile long (“Well, maybe the girl needs to meet her friend. And, why don’t we have a couple of friends?”) and the party-themed shoot has become a veritable party, unto itself.
But that’s the magic of Ellen’s images. Each is a situation, a film still, the photographic equivalent of “last night was a movie.” When I ask her whether she can recount a particularly raucous party memory from her 90s heyday, she smiles and asks, “Of a real party or my photo parties?” Because often, the edges of one blur into the other. A photograph of RuPaul, all cat-eyed and blonde-beehived, standing platform-heeled in a dirty New York bathroom, elicits memories of summer spent in Italy, where Ellen had been filming a movie with 90s supers Helena Christensen and Eva Herzigova. “There was a big party scene in Italy; RuPaul was there, too,” she says. “The producers put us up in a tourist-y hotel, so we had all these supermodels and drag queens with big hair walking around. It was like a Fellini movie!
Across the exhibition’s glittering pink walls and through its confetti curtained thresholds, Paris Hilton unscrews a bottle of rosé, befeathered drag queens crowd a banquette, models scoop oysters into their mouths and mug for the camera, Christina Aguilera emerges from behind a velvet curtain belonging to — one might imagine — the backrooms of a burlesque club.
The photo parties live their own lives beyond the frame — and the exhibition. After the vernissage, Ellen tells me her and her friends swung by Atlanta’s Clermont Lounge, the city’s oldest strip club. It was a party, yes, but it was also a reconnaissance mission: Ellen had been location scouting for an impromptu shoot with a model-slash-contortionist she had met at yet another vernissage in Los Angeles the month prior. “I rarely shoot in studios. I shoot mainly in clubs,” she explains. “I like them gritty with texture on the walls. It makes the pictures more rich.” The Clermont and its bestickered brick walls passed the test.
With a career that’s spanned almost three decades of debaucherous style, Ellen’s reputation precedes her. “People know my pictures, so they know what they’re getting themselves into,” she says. But sometimes, not… Turning her attention to one of the exhibition’s show pieces, a stunning black-and-white portrait of B’Day-era Beyonce, Ellen recounts the somewhat bizarre circumstances of her shoot with the pop icon. In the days leading up to the session, a snake had escaped from a nearby zoo. The day of, as Ellen and her crew waited for Beyonce to arrive at the “seedy” motel where the shoot was to take place, the photographer gave herself a fright, imagining that the snake might have crawled into the guestroom through the vents. Production was halted as the crew cleared the room… and then Beyonce arrived. Sometimes, it seems, her subjects might not know what they’re getting themselves into, but, Ellen assures, “They know it’s not going to be a boring picture.”
Credits
All photography courtesy of Ellen von Unwerth.