Photographer Emma Summerton thought fashion was something you saw in the Myer catalogue. Now she’s the first Aussie to shoot the prestigious Pirelli calendar.
Inside a large warehouse in an unremarkable industrial street in north London, something unexpected is happening. In contrast to the grimy buildings outside, I walk into a verdant garden-of-Eden landscape, backed by a giant photo of planet Earth. Then I pass a patch of scrabbly, log-strewn red-earth desert.
This is Emma Summerton, a working-class girl from Wollongong who has become one of the world’s premier fashion photographers, and divides her time between the elite echelons of New York and London. The subjects are similarly stellar, including any female model, actor or singer who might come to mind. This year’s crop includes Lila Moss, Cara Delevingne and He Cong, although Summerton has also tapped a selection of artists, writers and activists to round out the dozen.
Now that she’s at this Pirelli pinnacle, it seems a good moment to find out how she got here – and what she might do next. Sport was her early passion. Though she was increasingly drawn to art, “it still felt like a very far-away idea”, she recalls. “I was a pretty wild child. So I guess everyone was trying to rein me in and get me sorted, so that I didn’t go off the rails. So I went to hairdressing school.”Advertisement
“I plucked up the courage to ask if he ever needed an assistant. And I kind of made out like I knew what that involved,” she says. She didn’t travel with him much, but did go to his pad at the famous Chelsea Hotel in New York. Inspired by Patti Smith, she’d long dreamed of going to the Big Apple, and had confided in her art theory teacher, Jacques, that this was her ambition.
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