ALL MY FRIENDS Raw, free, feeling it. Photographer Drew Jarrett is taking us back to the golden years with Moss and Valletta, Tennant and Sorrenti. Words Edwina Hagon PHOTOGRAPHY Drew Jarrett Arts e’s had the biggest names in “From working with fashion pose for his camera Hand counts some of the industry’s leading Corrine Day with Kate image-makers among his closest friends [Moss] and Melanie – for those unfamiliar with Drew Jarrett, here’s your introduction to a fashion, art Ward on the beach ... and reportage photographer with an eye to flying around the for capturing moments of raw, unvarnished emotion. Whether it’s a young Kate Moss world doing really striding the streets of midtown New York cool campaigns and in a western hat, leather bomber and sequin pants (the ultimate urban cowgirl), editorials while living an exhilarated Stella Tennant thrashing in West London with about in a basement, microphone in hand, or Romani Gypsy children on the streets Glen [Luchford] and of Albania, Jarrett’s photographs embody Mario [Sorrenti] ... The a sense of honesty that feels anything but staged – an injection of informality into the 90s were powerful, cool and measured image-making popular in the early 90s, when these particular raw, creative, honest, photographs were taken. uninhibited good times.” Back then, Jarrett was living in a flat in London’s very stylish White City neighbourhood with Mario Sorrenti (the pair met through Sorrenti’s then-girlfriend Kate Moss) and Glen Luchford – then both fashion photographers on the up. Jarrett was a hairstylist who was spending every spare minute behind the lens of his Rolleiflex camera. He had reached the top of his profession in hair, working on magazine editorials that to this day remain among the most referenced of the past few decades, including photographer Corinne Day’s iconic 3rd Summer of Love story for The like fashion’s best dressed rock stars on an and Amber Valletta are among the familiar and not overthinking the approach,” he the transition to photography without that led to erratic frame spacing – thus Face, which captured a 16-year-old Kate, eternal global tour. “It was a great time,” faces pictured alongside a scrapbook-style says. Through the lens Jarrett mined for missing so much as a beat but also how complementing Jarrett’s proclivity for a fresh-faced and freckled from the sun, at the Jarrett recalls. “From working with Corrine edit of photographs featuring Jarrett’s emotion, forever searching for that certain three very close friends – Jarrett, Sorrenti less-than-perfect aesthetic. Once the film exact moment her career was breaking. Day with Kate and Melanie Ward on the family and friends, the crew he worked sensibility that could be found in the face and Luchford – all pushing ahead in was processed, Jarrett would sort through Yet somewhere along the way, Jarrett beach at Camber Sands to flying around with on shoots, and candid snaps of people of a stranger, a building offering a distinct the same field were able to keep their and cut up his favourite frames, arranging realised he was more invested in making the world doing really cool campaigns on the streets, anonymous bystanders who architectural moment, or a composition competitiveness in check, even finding the images he was most drawn to, that pictures. “[Being a hairstylist] felt like it and editorials while living in West London for whatever reason captured his attention landing just outside the ordinary. “It enjoyment in having their personal rolls of were “a little off and rough, or imprecise” wasn’t a creative challenge anymore for with Glen and Mario. Hanging with Mark at that moment in time. started with being on the streets with film processed together before comparing in the loosely collaged layout seen within me,” Jarrett writes from his home in New Lebon and many creative artists. Living in Among other things, these images people or buildings, architecture, lines, their contact sheets. “I wouldn’t say we the pages of 1994. “I loved the contact York. “I was more inspired by looking for the Gramercy Park Hotel for weeks on end detail Jarrett’s coming of age as a compositions, capturing the rawness … were competitive in a literal sense at all,” sheets I was getting back and the process moments and scenes worth photographing, in New York City, going to cool parties photographer, veering between fashion, It wasn’t about being technical for me, Jarrett confirms when I pose the question. of editing. The seeming naivety and experimenting with light and compositions ... The 90s were powerful, raw, creative, art and observational forms with a it was about light, seeing and feeling, a “We were, and still are, always very innocence of some shots. The cinematic as I travelled around the world with my honest, uninhibited good times.” loose, shoot-from-the-hip mentality and less technical approach than what I was supportive of each other.” style of the scenes … I was most attracted friends, working and having a great time.” You need only flip through the pages a style best described as raw. “It was surrounded by,” he explains. Jarrett further differentiated himself to the light, softness, compositions, loose It was the golden age of magazines of Jarrett’s latest book, 1994 (the original the beginning of establishing my own Perhaps this instinctive approach – by experimenting with cameras that lent approach and beauty in the frames of when big budgets afforded the industry’s copy was pieced together in ’93 and hand- personal style and approach to taking framed by personal worldview rather themselves to inconsistent effects – in imprecision and mistakes,” he says. key players a jet-set existence that had bound in ’94) to know this to be true. pictures … I found a softness and intimacy than stylistic convention – can explain not particular, a Rolleiflex and a broken Much like the snapshots tucked safely them travelling from location to location Moss, Tennant, Sorrenti, Milla Jovovich that came from acting from my feelings only how a hairstylist managed to make Pentacon Six with a faulty advance away in our own photo albums, Jarrett’s 64 Arts including Interview, The New York Times, Vogue Paris, LOVE and Purple, not to mention RUSSH cover stories. Then there is 2017’s Guinevere, a photo book dedicated to cult model Guinevere Van Seenus. Like 1994, this volume sets a course led by that same documentary-style aesthetic Jarrett individualised some twenty-plus years ago. Still, Jarrett knows as well as anyone that change can be a powerful, provocative, electrifying thing. He concedes it is a matter of striking the right balance. “While I’ve worked to keep my style all this time and have pushed with keeping the same approach and sensibilities for my personal and commercial work, I’m interested in the change and am constantly looking at “I try to capture honesty, trying to push my own art, dance, light, shapes, listening to music [for inspiration],” he says. “I try to capture boundaries from the last images I’ve taken – evolving, honesty, trying to push my own boundaries moving on, and always trying to keep the innocence ...” from the last images I’ve taken – evolving, moving on, and always trying to keep the innocence and right composition with the lines, always with something slightly off from what may be more of the norm.” These days you’ll find Jarrett in New York, the city he has called home for the past 16 years. The Rolleiflex and broken Pentacon Six are long gone and a Leica M6 now takes pride of place as the photographer’s camera of choice. When talking about the future, Jarrett mentions publishing a run of photo books – personal projects featuring prints dating back to the mid-90s. He also touches briefly on the possibility of one day realising a longstanding dream – “To be a filmmaker and to make great movies for the Cannes Film Festival.” But for the moment, Jarrett seems happy to stay just a little while longer in the memory of those formative years, his gaze cast fondly upon the photographs that so perfectly document a time that early captures invoke a heady state in Jarrett’s backyard breathing in the same for him was “more free, less restricted, of nostalgia – at once comforting and tobacco-tinged air. with little thought to constraints and the melancholic, familiar yet ever so slightly It is an approach that has served Jarrett realities of life”. They are the stills bound out of reach. They possess a rare ability well to this day. One that, despite the ever- together as proof of time well spent – of to transport you to another time and place shifting editorial landscape, has seen his overseas adventures and all-night parties, as though you were right there with your work remain as iconic as ever (if not more of uninhibited, hopeful youth and the toes buried in the sand of some exotic so), a triumph that is in large part thanks friendships made when life was really beach location, or laying out on the grass to regular contributions to magazines starting to get interesting. 67 Photography by Drew Jarrett from 1994, published by IDEA, available at Dakota501, Melbourne..