The Beauty to the Alternative Scene

Jade Sutton explores the Alternative Scene through her photography. Her main influences are films such as horrors, alternative fashion, music and nightlife. Her aesthetics to her work consist of beauty to the alternative scene.

She became interested in Photography in early teen years when she noticed that she could do photography for GCSE. It made her learn the basics of Photoshop, which she took a strong interest in and she would edit images, using layers to create intruging images which would take her spend hours on making one perfect. She loves making her images high contrasted. She also likes to distort her images too with different effects. She then later on decided to do a BTEC National Certificate in Art & Design (Photography) and now is currently in her first year of a Foundation Degree in Photography. She says that she is rather enjoying the course and that she has a lot to learn before having a career in it.

Jade Sutton mainly uses DSLR and flash gun with colour gels though she likes to work in the Studio as she wants to stretch her creativity level. In the studio she works with soft boxes, tungsten lighting and colour gels. Sometimes she uses film which could either be 35film or 120 film and one of her favourite type of processes is Cyanotypes as not many people use them and it’s different to just standard prints. Though she likes printing in colour and mounting them on form board as it’s a modern sense. She loves editing in Photoshop and creating images that are quite surreal.

She was primarily influenced by David LaChapelle and Helen Barr as she thought their work was diverse to the majority of photographers that she had seen. David LaChapelle inspired Jade Sutton with how his work is exceedingly contrasted and innovative. She also likes the way he sets up his shoots in his work which she uses in her location shoots, now though she takes many photographs before deciding which ones she wants to publish. With Helen Barr she likes how her images are quite creepy looking and innovative to a lot of people’s work. She loves how alternative it is compared to other artists that she has seen and would like to corporate that into her work.

This photograph is from one of her early pieces of work with a band called Decayed Messiah, she wanted contrast and originality in her images so the only way she could do this was by captivating many images as she could before the band left stage. Working with the limited of light she had, she set her camera to 0.5 seconds and while taking the image shifted the camera to the right so that a light effect would be created.

Helen Barr’s work is all art based but her surrealism to her work interests Jade Sutton as it’s contemporary and also alternative though it looks very Photo-shopped. She likes how Helen Barr’s work is quite creepy so she puts this into her work. This image by Jade Sutton was done in her early years. This image was taken outside of a church where her model Lucinda acted vicious towards the camera. This was later edited in Photoshop with many layers and effects. She thinks that this image is rather rustic and alternative in a film aspect. She created this image by taking the image of Lucinda in front of a church and than in Photoshop edited her teeth to create fangs, created an effect on her skin, made the image more contrasted and created another layer that looked like trees over the church.

Jade Sutton’s favourite photograph that she has achieved so far is a studio shoot working with a model, sweets and cards, as

it gave quite an Alice in Wonderland look. She said “it was very different compared to other shoots as I normally work with clothing, gigs and horror styled shoots, so to achieve this is quite beautiful.” She mentioned how she liked the original photographs that when it came to altering them in Photoshop, that it didn’t appear as superior. She said that she wishes that she will do this again in the near future and experiment with it more as in changing the background colour.

We thought we would ask Jade Sutton what she would like to do in the future and she said “I would like to teach children photography as not many children get the

chance to start photography at GCSE stage and in between I would like to do freelance photography as I still want to carry on with the Alternative Scene. That would mean though me completely my degree first and then progressing to a teaching degree.”

We thought we would ask her if she wasn’t doing photography right now what would she be instead. She replied “I would join the police force as I find in rather interesting and I would never know what I would be doing every day.” We thought that this was somewhat bizarre as it is entirely dissimilar compared to what she is undertaking now nevertheless we can see why she would be fascinated. We asked what she isn’t too enthusiastic on in photography as a genre and she said, “Wedding photography, as its not her style of photography because working with too many people can be really hard to do as their concentration level isn’t like a model, were a model is always on the determined to creating a perfect image, so to work with a lot of people is hard as they aren’t positive when having their picture taken.”

Overall we think that Jade Sutton’s work is inspiration to the Alternative Scene and is very new and modern which we think that people will take a liking to, Jade Sutton does definitely show the beauty to the Alternative Scene as she hits all the different types of the alternative scene, so therefore we believe that she could reach great heights with her work if she continues producing work.