Fearless focus
Photographer Tiggy Ara proves that adding nerve to talent can take you to places you never would have predicted
With the red tape regulators and proper protocol police always on the lookout, it’s not often that you find a story where bending the rules triumphs these days.
Enter Tiggy Ara.
Sat in the Elato Chocolate Café in Canterbury’s Kings Mile, the photographer and Team ‘cene sipped beers and chatted about discovering her skills and the time she got away with one thanks to a masterstroke of bravery. And we love it.
Having studied at the Canterbury Steiner School – a school where ‘you learn to do more creative things rather than academic’ – Tiggy struggled with dyslexia before finally finding art in her final year.
“I wanted to go to UCA in Canterbury after I left school, but I didn’t actually make the grades that I needed to get in because of my academic side,” she explains.
“But I wanted to go so much that I just turned up. They kept saying that in a few days’ time I would need to bring in my GCSE certificates for you to enrol.
“I was there for five days until it came to the deadline. I spoke to one of the tutors, told them the truth, and that I really wanted to do it, and showed them my portfolio.
“They said ‘well you’ve been here five days, so you might as well stay’.”
I think the phrase is ‘turning a blind eye’, but that stroke of kindness set Tiggy on her way, as well as some humungous balls as well.
“I could have left it, and not tried, but in my mind I knew that if I didn’t take that opportunity my life could go in a very different way,” she says. “I knew that it was what I wanted to do, and I wasn’t going to let something I struggle with let me down.
“I wanted to go to UCA in Canterbury after I left school, but I didn’t actually make the grades that I needed to get in because of my academic side. But I wanted to go so much that I just turned up. ”
“It can be a bit of a grey area, if I apply for a job now, no one asks for my GCSEs. I believe that as long as you are passionate and hard-working, that is more important. Looking back, I think that was a significant moment.”
Having studied moving image at Brighton University it was time to specialise, and photography was the calling.
“When you leave uni it’s quite scary. You spend your whole life knowing what the next step is. But after that, I felt so pressured, so there was a bit of waiting space of nothing, which gave me a time out.
“I worked in retail and was looking through all the magazines at pictures and models and felt like I could create that, so I made it my mission to learn photography properly.”
But none of this digital lark, Tiggy went straight for film.
“You can’t beat it,” she says. “In digital, people spend ages with all these filters on their pictures, and all it is really is trying to make a modern photograph look like film. Digital has its place but it’s great to back and use film styles.”
A short stint in New York continued her learning alongside other photographers and
in September she flew to LA, why? “To see what I could do,” she says.
She did a lot, it turns out. Though getting kicked out of a hostel is almost always not the best move, in Tiggy’s case it meant she went to stay with a new contact she had made, an art collector of all people!
“So, I was staying in this house that was full of art. It’s just really funny how things work out sometimes,” she says. “It is really good to travel and put yourself into different situations, because the weirdest things happen.
“In the hostel, I also met this guy who was going to be filming a music video the following day and asked me if I wanted to be an extra in it. I had nothing else to do, so I went for it.
The music video was for songwriter turned singer, Jesse Saint John, who has crafted songs for A-listers like Britney Spears (Love Me Down) and Charli XCX (Cloud Aura).
“It was the weirdest experience, I had to dance, to this song that was being played triple fast. I still haven’t seen the video. But I told him I was a photographer and ended up doing a shoot with him.”
STYLE
Anyone who has seen Tiggy’s Instagram knows she has a style. But pigeonholing it is less easy.
“It definitely has feminine undertones, for ages my passion was to capture femininity on film, but as i've broadened my ideas and subjects, I would say my passion is definitely being able to connect with my subjects and capturing their true essence,” she explains.
“I think the one thing that always drew me to photography was the ability to create a whole narrative in one frame, and it can be anything you want, I'm a bit of a daydreamer but a very impatient daydreamer, so I really enjoy the process of visualising an idea and then being able to create it far more quickly than it would ever happen in real life.”
It was a shoot with Texan model known as Nude Nora in an east London car park, where Tiggy found her niche.
“It was partially nude stuff, can you imagine that, in Stratford?,” she recalls. “I bought this vintage blue velvet two-piece, and she has amazing long blonde hair. It was the colours, of the background with her eyes, and it was that set, so when the pictures came out, I had this feeling that this was it. Soft but raw.”
While private portraiture for musicians and models has been the day to day, Tiggy is now moving into the fashion industry having shot at London Fashion Week and producing and styling a fashion mini film.
“I am trying to move away from taking pictures of things I don’t like shooting. People think that because you are a photographer you like taking pictures of everything, but it is still an art form, and everyone has their own thing they like taking pictures of.”