Vici Watkins is a Still Life photographer. Vici was asked to provide images in the following three disciplines: Street, Fashion and Self Portrait.
"My relationship with still life photography started a couple of years ago, when I had hit a brick wall with using portraits. I found they had become too restrictive when trying to express internal emotions/experiences. Viewers would always look no further than the sitters' external image. Somehow, portraiture was just too simplistic. Instead of inviting or challenging viewers to look deeper into the work, it felt like it was having the opposite effect, as though the ideas I was exploring should create external symptoms on the sitters. Visibility of ideas needed to be paramount. I started looking for other ways to explore personal subject matter and found still life had much more opportunity to be either punchy or subtle, depending on the result I was after. The scope for taking ideas further and exploring familiar subjects in new ways was so much greater working with unusual objects.
Fast-forward to today and I've developed a way of working where the ideas are more important than the final images. I prefer to strip my ideas right back to their core, while pulling apart and breaking down the objects I use, resulting in simple, pale, and subtle photographs."
