T Magazine: A Young Photographer’s Intimate, Dreamlike Images
Whether shooting a portfolio of Senegalese people at work and play or young women in varying states of undress, the images taken by the British photographer Harley Weir, 28, capture unguarded moments with an honest eye. In “Boundaries,” her first solo show — which opened at Amsterdam’s FOAM Museum earlier this month — Weir’s photos draw the viewer into proximity with her subjects, so that skin and emotion are magnified. “There’s definitely a sense of intimacy to my work,” she says. “That’s the strongest element.”
Growing up in Twickenham, in southwest London, Weir first picked up a camera at the age of 7 (shooting some pigs on a school trip to a farm) and eventually went on to study fine art at Central Saint Martins. And while she cultivated a love of the risqué — and sometimes voyeuristic — art of Balthus, Araki and Jock Sturges that would go on to inform her own work, she quickly found herself at odds with her more conceptual classmates at CSM. “It was frowned upon to do something that was good looking or less considered, more intuitive,” she says. “But I don’t like the idea of coming to an art project knowing what you want — for me, I find photography a way of learning, to figure something out with an image.”
She says that the internet was “her portal into photography” — she started posting pictures she took of family and friends on her Flickr account at an early age. After graduating to a Tumblr account, she caught the eye of Vice magazine, for which she shot a fashion editorial at the age of 17. Since then, Weir’s images have graced the pages of The Gentlewoman, i-D, French Vogue and AnOther Magazine; she has also photographed campaigns for brands like Proenza Schouler and Calvin Klein.
“Boundaries” mixes Weir’s ethereal portraiture with still life images and reportage work in Israel, India and Jordan. In selecting the images for the exhibition, Weir says she tried to achieve a balanced representation of her images so “that it reads like a visual poem, open to interpretation.” But even in her documentary work, a certain dreamlike quality prevails. A recent portfolio of photographs of temporary homes at the refugee camps of Calais, for example, becomes a meditation on the resilience of the human spirit against odds. “I love the real and the natural, but I think an image is never really real and I like the idea of making something otherworldly,” she says. “I like to be involved and show something of myself in the image as well.”
