Beauty off-duty

JANICE BREEN BURNS

March 13, 2010 – 2:24PM

Models play up for Sonny Vandevelde.Photo: Sonny Vandevelde

SONNY Vandevelde is a fashion photographer. But he doesn't work at the sleek, neat, choreographed end of the catwalk where models pause and pose prettily before twisting away, job done. He works at the other end, the "wrong" end, behind the catwalk's scenes, in the cacophonous storm that rages at the back of a fashion show's relative calm.

He shoots amid the racket and chaos of a hundred or more models, make-up artists, hairdressers, stylists, dressers, designers and assistants, all hell-bent on their part in producing those perfect moments at the "right" end of the catwalk.

"They're freaked out, they're stressed, they're running late, they've got a pimple, they don't want to be photographed." Vandevelde ticks off his typical working conditions with a laugh. But the self-taught, Belgian-born, Australian-bred, world travelling self-proclaimed "surfer dude" with the distinctive blonde moustache and trilby that he tilts rackishly back on his thick, ear-length hair isn't bothered by much, really.

He weaves and squeezes between them all, around the racks of frocks and rows of shoes, the lit mirrored tables and clusters of cameramen, the reporters, PR people and security guards, scanning, scanning, scanning with his camera lens for any bright, crystalline moment that will perfectly convey . . . Actually, he's not sure what it will convey, but he knows when he's nailed it.

"It's a different reality," says Lee Carter of New York based cult webzine Hint, one of Vandevelde's many commissioning editors. Others include the New York Times, posh glossies such as European Elle, Marie Claire and New Zealand's Karen magazine, cult blogs such as Diane Pernet's "A Shaded View on Fashion" and sonnyphotos.typepad.com, his own site.

Carter's coverage of fashion weeks for Hint, from Antwerp to New York, Sao Paolo to Paris, are almost entirely cobbled from Vandevelde's backstage photographs. "There's the fashion, and there's something else — about the whole machinery of fashion," Carter says. Using backstage in preference to front-of-house photographs is a practice increasingly copied as fashion embraces transparency as its "new black", revealing its raw behind-the-scenes mechanics, from clothing production to campaign shoots and catwalk shows.

Transparency was a necessary evolution as every aspect of fashion was being circulated by bloggers, Tweeters, Facebookers and iPhoners anyway. But, intrigue with Vandevelde's kind of photograph also appears sprung f
rom boredom and mistrust of mainstream fashion's heavily doctored imagery. "You fall in love with Sonny's photos because of their energy and colour but also because they're another view, a different way of looking at fashion," Carter says. "They're more honest, away from the usual calculated, controlled images you see everywhere else."

An exhibition of Vandevelde's work, Backstage, The Photos of Sonny Vandevelde opens at Mars Gallery, Port Melbourne, as part of next week's L'Oreal Melbourne Fashion Festival cultural program. An official launch by renowned fashion journalist and blogger Patty Huntington will also be held on Friday. "Anyone can take a shot backstage but there's a small core of photographers who do it beautifully and Sonny's one of them," Huntington says. She blogs backstage and enjoys watching Vandevelde work. "He just 'gets it' — the chaos, the models walking back gracefully [from the catwalk], then the second they get past that magic point, having five people pulling and tearing at their clothes. He captures the drama and theatre of backstage."

Vandevelde specialises in photographing models after their laborious metamorphosis from beautiful, fresh-faced girls, into high-fashion fantasy women. His trick is to tease the girl under the gloss back into the open, while the trappings of fashion are still upon her . "I just say to [the models] 'be yourself' and a new one, who doesn't know me, might say 'How?' or 'Why?"' he says. "I tell them: 'Because you've just sat in make-up for two hours, you've just been dressed by who knows and you've hung around, you've walked up and down looking fierce and in those excruciatingly painful high-heel shoes and now you can let it all out. You can scream, you can smile, you can be goofy or quirky or look like you're taking off on a 10-foot wave if you like. You can just be yourself."'

So they do. They shriek, laugh or smile shyly or brazenly, stick out their tongue, jump, dance, flip the bird or pose jokingly, haughtily, in classic po-faced model style, sticking it up the job that pays them so lavishly but can also be exhaustingly hard and even sometimes humiliating work.

"They're just joyous," says Lee Carter. "Sonny does that. Even after all these years, I find myself getting really entranced."

Vandevelde's photographs are inherently non-judgmental; there is no lurking sense of an eating disorder, or exposure to drugs, exploitation or any other negative issue that invisibly underpins many mainstream editorial photographs of models. Vandevelde's show only the subjects' pure response to being young, beautiful and in high demand.

The contrast between these photographs and more common fashion images of unsmiling and stoney-faced young women (and men) stomping along a catwalk is simple, but strangely intriguing.

"I think it's because he can reveal their enthusiasm and their youth," says Marion Simms, editor of Karen magazine. "He's so well respected, he's got access everywhere and the girls obviously love him. It's like a little dance he does when he's working — a sort of playful repartee. They trust him but he works hard for that. You've got to remember these are mostly just teenaged girls and they're there with half a bowl of fruit on their head but can he get them to forget that, to be themselves."

Vandevelde, 44, moved to Sydney from Belgium aged 10. He enrolled in a Sydney college of photography after graduating from high school. "I didn't last two weeks sitting in that stuffy air, being taught boring technical stuff." Instead, he latched on to a mate of his dad's who worked as a gaffer on local movie sets. "I helped him roll out the cables, break out the lights, that kind of stuff." His reward was hands-on experience and an old Pentax camera and light meter, which became his constant, absorbing companions for the next few years. He meticulously recorded every meter reading and F-stop against the various photographic conditions he captured on film — what worked, what didn't. He experimented relentlessly with developing techniques.

And his career spiralled naturally u
pward: from helping out at a commercial photo-lab to shooting minor, then major, campaigns, including for Quicksilver, and finally his launch into the international fashion-week circuit. Then, on a fateful day in 2001, he recalls that a few photographs he had shot backstage at a fashion show caught the eye of a magazine editor.

"They said: 'Have you got any more of those?"'

Vandevelde's specialty since — his "nice little earner", as he calls the work that keeps him on the move, criss-crossing the globe at least nine months a year — is a professional blessing but also, increasingly, a personal curse. "It's frustrating because my reputation as a backstage photographer is getting in the way of other work," he says ruefully. After a decade on the fashion-show circuit, he longs for a little less fabulousness, a little more stability with his Sydney girlfriend (a former model turned kindergarten teacher and photographer) and a lot more control over his creative output than he usually gets in the chaos behind a catwalk.

The trouble is, though, every season more editors latch on to his work, and more fans of fashion generally recognise the rarity of his skills and access. Italian Vogue is among his most recent converts, German Elle magazine ran a story on him in its January issue, and there was an exhibition of his backstage work recently at New York Fashion Week.

"The thing is, he's also a phenomenal location photographer," says Simms. She recently commissioned Vandevelde for a desert location shoot — "hotter-than-Bali couture dresses and rubber" — and received a remarkable folio of sleek, hyperreal high-fashion shots to order for Karen magazine.

"What he can get out of those teen models is literally amazing. Beautiful," says Simms. "He just does what he has to do. And he's so tenacious, almost child-like in that way."

Later this month, Vandevelde, the very Aussie surfer dude, will become an Australian citizen, and he hopes soon after to shrink his travelling work from nine to six months a year with more Sydney-based editorial and advertising campaign commissions. "I hope, anyway."

In the meantime, his career as a fashion photographer on the "wrong" end of the catwalk barrels ahead.

"I realise I'm kinda lucky — this way of life I've got. I have to pinch myself now and then. Here I am surrounded by the top models in the world and the top make-up artists and designers and all those professionals, all in one room. You'd have to be a pretty bad photographer not to get something beautiful out of that."

If you're in Melbourne, try to get along to the exhibition.