It doesn’t take much to take a photograph today. A smart phone and Instagram are the tools of the trade, social media the seemingly inexhaustible audience. But to be a real photographer is to have passion for, and hopefully an income from, the images one produces. It’s to have a vision and aesthetic that sets you apart from the crowd, that defines your work and speaks to those who consume it.
Toronto’s Arden Wray is one photographer whose experiences and projects have fostered such an aesthetic, one of nostalgia and intimacy. Looking at her photographs, it’s easy to feel like you have exclusive access to her mind and subjects.
Wray’s interest in photography started as a result of a class portraiture project in high school that had her place friends in front of “pretty backgrounds” and wait for facial expressions she liked. While she really enjoyed the project, the academic focus of her school meant she never considered photography as a real career option. Instead, Wray spent her first year of university studying a disparate set of subjects at McGill, finding herself spending more and more time taking photographs. Scared to take it seriously but finding that all her time, spare or otherwise, was going to building a portfolio, Wray bit the bullet, applied to Concordia’s photography program and never looked back.
Since then she has completed an assortment of personal and professional projects that speak to her unique style, a style she sees as an extension of herself. Curious about how exactly it evolved, I spent an evening with Wray discussing her projects to get a glimpse at how a photographer’s aesthetic develops.
Boots & Pine, Wray’s most recent project has been getting its fair share of media attention as a website that chronicles the style of Toronto’s young creative class. Wray shoots her subjects in their homes and neighborhoods, styled in their own clothing. The resulting photographs have a sense of ease and comfort that makes them approachable. “It’s important for me to not go in with a lighting set-up and make it very stiff and take a long time on every shot and not be talking in between” says Wray about her approach with Boots & Pine.
A selection of images from Boots & Pine. Images via Arden Wray
Inspired by the likes of Freunde Von Freunden, The Selby, and Backyard Bill, Wray wanted to show off the people, businesses, and sense of community that she felt defied Toronto’s reputation as a “really tough, isolating, ugly city.” Positive response to the project has come from as far as Brazil and Australia.
Boots & Pine is a clear evolution of Wray’s earlier Concordia work. In 2010’s Nesting she explored the themes of making your first home away from home and falling in love. The set features photographs of Wray’s apartment at the time and the scenes are not unlike the ones she captures in her current work. “I’m always interested in private spaces and private moments… that sense of quiet is always there for me and that’s important for me to try and seek that out.
A photograph from Nesting. Image via Arden Wray
The soft, serene quality of Nesting is also something that comes across in Wray’s travel photography. Travel, she says, is essential for her to feel creative and invigorated. The places she chooses to travel are places she knows will inspire her to take photographs. Steven Shore and William Eggleston are two of the photographers that have influenced Wray’s approach. “They both worked in the moment, taking inspiration from spaces they’d entered and people they’d encountered by chance, and moments they’d happened upon.” In her personal projects, Wray shies away from manufactured moments, an instinct that gives her photos a prevailing feeling of authenticity.
“I feel most inspired to create when I’m somewhere that I’ve never been before… and so I seek out those opportunities to put myself somewhere new.” But Wray’s travel photography is not just about sharing or preserving a moment. “It’s also experiencing it,” says Wray. Her photos of Greece and Buenos Aries are perfect examples of how this approach transfers the feeling of first-time experience to viewers of her work.
From Wray’s travels in Greece. Image via Arden Wray
Part of her ability to capture the mood of the places she goes is surely due to her use of film photography. For a long time, Wray was a strict proponent of never using digital. And though commissions and the cost of film have forced her to turn to digital as a more reliable method of getting the shot, Wray’s personal photography is still almost exclusively analogue.
Some may say that the era of Instagram threatens to make a style such as Wray’s, one that harkens the grainy effects of analogue, less unique. Wray, not surprisingly, disagrees. “I don’t feel like from a surface perspective my work is especially vintage. I don’t think it looks like instagram. [But] I think that the textures and the kind of aesthetic that I’m drawn to in the content of the photographs could be described that way.” This doesn’t bother her however. In fact, she’s a fan of instagram. “I think it’s interesting being able to see what people are up to… I think it’s doing really good things in terms of people sharing… [and] having to be, even in some small way, creative in that share.”
Making the switch to digital for commissioned work (such as for WORN Fashion Journal, OTM Zine, and various catalogue shoots) has given Wray an opportunity to see how her aesthetic asserts itself in a new medium. “What’s kind of been a blessing and a curse is that I approach pretty much everything more or less the same way,” she says of shooting personal projects and street style versus editorials and catalogues. “It’s important for me to be friendly with the models and to be a friendly presence on set,” she says. She points out that, in fashion photography, it’s not uncommon for photographers to create a boundary between themselves and their subjects; “If you make somebody uncomfortable it shows.” Her ability to put subjects at ease goes a long way to producing a sense of reality in her shots, even in her more experimental work.
Wray’s set photography, a job she took on after leaving a visual merchandiser gig at Anthropologie, also exemplifies the sense of intimacy that prevails in her work, but making the decision to pursue photography full time was not easy. In leaving Anthropologie, Wray only had a five-week set photography stills contract planned. She saw a psychic wondering if she had made the right choice. “In this case I think she was more counselor than anything,” Wray says of the psychic. “By the end of [the session] she was just saying say it out loud, you ARE a photographer, when you leave here I want you to hold up your head up high and say it out loud.”
Set Photoraphy from the upcoming web series Long Story Short. Image via Arden Wray
So far, it looks like Wray made the right decision and learning to direct her subjects on set has been the biggest takeaway.
Wray used to wait for her subjects to act, capturing expressions she found engaging, but she quickly found that method was not successful in the controlled environment of a film or television set. Wray was forced to learn fast and has found the skill immeasurably valuable for work, especially for Boots & Pine, where she is often in and out of her subjects’ homes in a short amount of time. Yet, the pace of life captured in Wray’s photography never gives this away. Instead, Wray’s subject matter: colours, textures, ornate detailing, painted plaster, and printed tiles, give the photos a nostalgic aesthetic and slow, stop-and-smell-the-flowers pace.
“I think I just kind of can’t help but to produce the way I produce… Even if you look at my fashion work, most of it is identifiably mine,” says Wray of her aesthetic. Sometimes, even when she thinks she’s broken from her style, she’ll look back on a project and realize it easily fits into her body of work. “Because I’m not creating my environments and because I’m not setting up a studio shoot or staging something, I think it’s kind of inevitable that it would be that way.”
And this is the exact method she suggests to any new photographer trying to find their look. “Carry a camera with you and if you find that you’re really into somebody that you see, or a specific space, or if it ends up being that you’re shooting only light falling on texture… if that’s what you’re picking all the time, then that’s you.”
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Eva Voinigescu is an intern at Toronto Standard. Follow her on Twitter @EvaVoinigescu.
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