One thing that continues to fascinate me with fashion images is the amount of effort it takes to get the final result to look entirely effortless. Often the public never find out the story behind the editorial story, which in some cases can be more or almost as captivating as the actual images themselves. Take the shoot I styled for the press shots for Fashion Camp (FC) for example, which have already begun to make the rounds on some Naija blogs- with no credit given for the actual images- a huge faux-pas if I might add. Seems like a lot of peeps need lessons in Copyright 101. But that’s another ‘tory.
For those of you that don’t know- from 2nd to 6th August 2010, FC will be held in Lagos. Arieta Mujay, is the brainchild of FC and wanted to create a forum whereby fashion savvy teens and twenty-somethings could learn and understand the ins and outs of the fashion industry. It’ a project that I am very passionate about and I have been working on it from the very beginning.
On the day of the FC shoot I woke up very nervous indeed- my biggest worry was that ‘the girl’ who was supposed to be bringing the customised FC T’s hadn’t rung me to confirm that she would be doing so (like I told her to). Then there were other concerns churning in my head like- would everyone show up and on on time, would it rain thus ruining my outdoor shoot, would my friends who I’d got to model be comfortable infront of the camera? etc etc.
When the shoot time came I was so happy and relieved to see everyone had come on time and seemed happy and enthusiastic about the project. I say everybody- what I mean is- everybody came apart from ‘the girl’ who was not only supposed to be one of the models but who had the customised FC T’s. The whole point of the shoot was to show people wearing customised FC T’s to advertise and show off what FC was all about. Translation- no customised FC T’s, no shoot-palaba/see me see trouble/e-wwwWOOOO! 45mins into the shoot time, having heard nothing from ‘the girl’, I knew it was time to incorporate Plan B because the show had to go on. Furthermore, I wasn’t going to let anyone get in the way of doing the shoot that I had prepared so hard for. I knew that all we needed for the shoot were T’s that had ’FC’ written on them, so we needed to buy colourful plain T’s and find some way to incorporate the words, ’FC’ on them. Luckily the photographer (Natasha) was also a very good friend of mine and she was great in helping me to stop freaking out and channel that energy into actually getting the T’s. Having spent 3yrs (actual time- 30mins) trawling up and down Brick Lane trying to find T’s that were the right size and the right colour; the next mission was to find the right kind of marker that would work on the T’s. Having gotten the marker (after a lot of trial and error), the next issue was how to write the ‘FC’ logo on the T’s. I left Natasha to do this because at the time my hands were still trembling with rage because I had got a text, A TEXT from ‘the girl’ which basically said that she was running ‘mega late’ as she just had ‘to go the d hospital’ and would call ’as soon as she could’. Might I just add here that after ignoring my frantic calls to her, ‘the girl’ did not send this ‘informative and helpful’ text till an hour into the shoot and did not actually call me again to explain what the %%^!! was going on until around 8pm- when the shoot was over- but that’s another ‘tory. Can you see how many side stories are linked to this one editorial story?!
Anyhoo back to the shoot; it went amazing well and I have to commend my ‘real models’ for working better than some of the actual models I’ve worked with in the past. Doing an outside shoot is often more complicated than working in a studio because with an outside shoot, there is less you can control and predict. And it was nice to see that when my female model got the ol’ classic ‘get your ~%^* out luv!!’, she calmly reciprocated by raising her middle finger to the passing truck and went back to striking all sorts of fierce-rocious poses. A true professional!
Having given you a largely summarised (!!) insight into what it took to create these shots for FC, I hope you can understand why it makes my blood boil when I see blogs use the pictures with no credits or when I see a press article to do with FC that hasn’t got my name and even more so when I see blogs that mention the participants of FC and highlight everyone’s name except my own. I find it shocking and completely unacceptable, it also saddens me as well.
All that being said, sites like SHF give me hope as they are a testament to the fact that there are Naija online sites who know how to give credit when credit is due and further more, we know how to give it properly and that is what keeps me soldiering on.
And on an even happier note, I’d like to end by giving a BIG THANK YOU to my team who helped me to realise my creative dreams-
Photographer- Natasha Cheek
Stylist- Biki John
