…  about Peter Kemp – Art Photographer

Peter Kemp has a diverse photography background from which creative and surreal portaiture has emerged as his favorite genre.
Coming almost full circle and returning to picturing fantastical figures from stories he enjoyed as a child.
Bringing together his own props and sets, often retro or antiquated and carefully sourced,
Peter allows his shoots to come together organically with the contribution of his models’ ideas and belongings.

Rather then imposing a tight concept or formula onto his subjects, he becomes the orchestrator of a creative team who all bring their own contributions to the outcome.

Combining a flurry of ideas into the final form, Peter shoots several images for a short series for his models
in glamourous lingerie following their own sartorical input which sends a frisson of sensuality through his images.
With poses and expressions reminiscent of 50′s pin ups, but with more attention to bizarre and even postmodernist concepts,
Peter often subverts the positioning for amusing effect, turning women into Bell Boys and Old Men into glamour models.

This artist’s imagination is reminiscent of a more fashion – orientated Gergory Crewdson, or a darker Tim Walker.
To gaze through his work is to wander along a bewitching path of deftly positioned historic waxworks, frozen
with varying emotions in moments of symbolic gesture with magnificent objects.

Peter’s attention as an artist is focused on the characters he created, the composition and expressiveness of the whole scene.
He insists that the mechanics of photography are of second priority, though he has a clear technical competence in working with the best tools.
Shooting in medium format and most often with strobes in controlled environment.
His final images are abundant in meticulous detail, only a glimpse of which is seen here on these pages.

written by Natalie ‘Miss Aniela’ Dybisz   – www.missaniela.com   - 
Fine-art and commercial photographer based in London.