Let my beloved come into his garden, and eat his pleasant fruits

Just before the warm weather came, Ben asked me to be in a shoot for Dazed that he was doing based around all of the hippy commune free love images and ideas he'd been thinking about for a while. So we all spent the day in an incredible old manor with dusty floors, high ceilings and flowers hung upside down to dry all around the walls, which had derelict gardens in the middle of a forest just on the edge of London. The day was spent shivering in the grass amongst blankets, huddling around the open fire inside, and trying on wide-brimmed sun hats, all to the strangely muted sound of an old piano played by an old man who was working on restoring the place. These are the pictures as they were published:















And some of the references:

Stretch out thine hand toward heaven, that there may be darkness over the land

On my birthday Arturo and I made a picnic of salad and cheesecake and travelled on buses across London to get to Richmond Park. Almost all of the grass and shrubs were flattened and burnt brown, and everywhere we saw dead trees and piles of chopped wood and logs. So we lay in the leaves with our heads against a log to eat the picnic, with a glimpse of the blue lake just beyond. Then we crawled under some logs and climbed up fallen trees, and I took these pictures as the sun was getting low and all around us glowed orange.

He speaks in dreams, in visions of the night

The first day that I moved to Paris last year, Maciek and I spotted a huge derelict house on the hill just below the Sacre Coeur as we walked around talking about taking romantic, dramatic, violent pictures on rooftops with smoke clouds and the constant danger of falling.

After we found a huge church with intricate scaffolding and ladders up one side near to the Gare de l'Est, we planned and proposed the shoot to Vice, and then spent the following weeks scaling the church wall at two in the morning and breaking into the abandoned building on the hill, stepping over dead pigeons, whispering in the bell tower, and setting alight thick black 'fire paste' on Maciek's dining table.

I styled the shoot with Charlotte, and we spent days walking around the press offices in the 3rd arr. looking over and over for blankets and sheets to drape around the models. These are the pictures as they appeared in the magazine:








And some of mine and Maciek's references:






When we had taken all of the pictures at the end of the month we knew the way up to the roof of the church pretty well, so climbed up one last time with a giant bottle of wine we'd taken from a bar to drink looking over Paris. After that we started to climb up onto rooftops whenever we saw scaffolding in the summer, to sit in the sun and look down at other rooftops. These are some of the pictures mostly taken by Arturo of us climbing around in the weeks when we were shooting:

There is a river, the streams whereof shall make glad the city of God

For the last week I've woken up each morning feeling as though it's summer with the sun streaming through my window, so I pulled everyone out of their rooms on Saturday afternoon to have a picnic on the river bank. I bought flowers and fruit from the market on the way, and had to settle for tiny cakes and pink wafers after I couldn't find party rings for the picnic anywhere. But by the time I'd dressed and positioned everybody, and taken my rolls of film, they were all shivering so we packed up and ran back to college for steaming mugs of tea and the acknowledgment that summer is still not quite here.





And these were some of the images I first thought of when I had the idea for my pictures:

For they have sown the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind

Brighton beach just after Christmas was windy and freezing, but the pier with the machines where you could gamble two pence coins away, Poundland, and the fish and chip restaurant were pretty warm. We ate cockles swilling in vinegar and waded into the icy sea next to the burnt pier as soon as we got to the beach, when we took these pictures.

Of making many books there is no end

Paris at Christmas time was icy and filled with long afternoon walks after waking up at midday. We cooked stews, went to the cinema, stared at the snow falling every morning, and sat around Camille's log fire with mulled wine and whiskey. One afternoon just before she left for Bordeaux, I shot these pictures of Camille around her flat, with loud 60s music playing from her bedroom.

Behold, how great a matter a little fire kindleth

Halloween at Cambridge meant we all dressed up and ate a spooky formal dinner in the Hall, drank too much wine, slurred through our desserts at each other, and never made it out of the college grounds. Theo's 'Fire' outfit should have won best costume though.

Yet a little sleep, a little slumber, a little folding of the hands to sleep

It was a freezing night around this time last year when Rosa came over and we played around with clothes and images and ideas we'd had for a while, as well as making absurdly elaborate cocktails and trying to catch my rabbit. I think the heating went off at midnight, so then all we could do was huddle together for warmth. These are a few of the pictures I took that evening.