Intent on Intense: Faversham photographer Celia Croft
Photographer Celia Croft has trained her lens on female bodybuilders, local wrestlers and even carnival queens
“I’m just kind of fascinated by intense people, and people who are quite obsessive. I’m really drawn to it.”
With projects that aim to encapsulate the fervency of its participants, photographer Celia Croft has trained her lens on female bodybuilders, local wrestlers and even carnival queens - always looking for obsession.
Hailing from Faversham, Celia has had an interest in ‘the intense’ ever since watching floats carrying the hometown ‘queens’ through the streets on parade day.
“I don’t know, I’ve always been attracted to glittery things, I think,” she says of her subjects. “And they all have some kind of glittery thing going on in there.”
CORE is an acclaimed book released by Celia and collaborating art director Kate Kidney Bishop that documented a two-year project photographing female bodybuilders.
“Bodybuilding just feels really obsessive to me,” says Celia. “Kate and I were initially going to do one shoot for a magazine and then we thought ‘Actually, let’s not give it to them, let’s just do a project and keep going with it’. I really loved photographing them.”
Having reached out to three bodybuilders through Instagram, the artists were delighted when their subjects told their friends, and more and more showed up to shoots.
“It took a couple of years in total, but it wasn’t like we were doing it every single day. When you make a book, it’s like you take the photos for one year. And the other year is putting it together, finding out how you’re going to do it, how you’re gonna get the money to do it.”
Having specialised in photography during a foundation year at UCA Canterbury before going on to study fashion photography at Falmouth in Cornwall, Celia has turned heads with her very specific style - an embellishment on the real world.
“This is always the hardest question,” she says. “It’s kind of a mix - documentary but also setting up scenes as well. So, not everything you see in the picture was originally there. It’s a world that I like to say I live in. It’s not fully truthful. It merges more creative ideas with documentary, I guess.”
A former Canterbury school pupil, Celia was taking pictures from a young age but never saw it as a possible future career.
“I can’t remember how old I was when I first got a camera,” she says. “But I just took so many pictures. I was so annoying, I think. Just pictures of my friends, just literally photographing everything and I never really thought that it was something I was going to do later on.”
Having been commissioned to shoot a collaboration between fashion label Guess and retailer LNCC, her recent work with Fila saw a shoot with female wrestlers used in Dazed magazine.
“I think you can be quite free within fashion. Obviously, it has to look nice, but at the same time you can create a story that doesn’t exist,” she says. “I’ve always wanted to photograph wrestlers as well because I guess it’s similar to bodybuilding in some ways - the extreme look of it.”
Celia is a lighting technician for commercial photography on the side, which no doubt informs the very particular lighting in her own shoots, while she also uses film in a Nikon F4 camera - a model that was originally released back in the 80s.
“I do darkroom printing, too. So that’s why a lot of my photos are kind of blueish toned,” she says. “I’m quite an analog person. I like to see things physically rather than on the screen.”
The latest book project is entitled Offerings, which has collections of photographs stretching back a full decade.
“I released it a month or so ago - it’s photographs of offerings in whatever shape or form,” she says. “It started off with photos of things that people leave on graves like flowers, real or plastic, but then it kind of turned into accidental offerings that people would leave. Like glitter on the floor left after a rave or something - that kind of feels like an offering to me.”
INFO: www.celiacroft.com
