Meet the British potter-turned-photographer whose breathtaking nudes transform subjects into elegant and sculptural forms
Natalie Denton
WHEN FORMER potter Josh Redman’s sensational nude of 83-year-old Frances scooped the coveted National Portrait Gallery’s John Kobal New Work Award (whose past subjects have included famous faces such as Felicity Jones), it caused immediate and widespread critical acclaim, not just because of the confidence exuded by the subject and shooter, but also because Redman is relatively new to the professional photographic community.
“I was a sculptor in ceramics for nine years. It was my life,” Redman tells us. “I was working from a converted dairy farm for which I was paying about £80 per month in rent. Then one day I was asked to leave, and there was nothing else like it that I could afford. Rather than compromise on my ceramics, which would have happened if I’d moved to a small studio, I looked for alternatives.” Encouraged by his girlfriend to take up photography, Redman made the decision to go all in, selling his kiln and potter’s wheel to buy a Canon 5DS and a few lenses, then moved to London with no real idea what he was doing. “I had no contacts in photography and no real idea of what photographers did besides taking photographs. I hadn’t even put up a light stand before, but I was obsessive and did whatever I could to gain skills. Fortunately, I wasn’t getting any of the ‘normal’ jobs that I was applying for, so I didn’t have much choice, really. In creative terms, I was constantly experimenting with the little gear I had, and was building an almost aggressively creative portfolio, with what turned out to have far too many facets for a commercial buyer to be interested in.”
PLAYING WITH MODELS
Over the next few years, Redman adopted a calmer methodology, enabling his style to emerge. During this formative period he met Frances, the subject of his winning Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize image, that won him a £5,000 prize along with the recognition. “I was completing an ongoing series of portraits and I was finding models to work with via social media, when I came across Grey Modelling Agency. Frances was signed to them so we met via the agency. She came to my studio and we did a portrait session much like any other that I was doing for this series.
“I try to keep the models so that they aren’t sure what they are meant to be doing, and we just chat and they move around. Sometimes we play games such as ‘do the alphabet backwards’ to catch them off guard, but often they are just walking about or talking and twisting their bodies casually. In the end, I wanted a semi-accidental iconic pose of some kind.”
