A notoriously private person, David Sims prefers to leave little trace—only the fleeting moments he’s captured on film. With his gritty, stark, realistic, and anti-fashion style, he was among a small cadre responsible for the renaissance of British photography in the early nineties; his use of minimal background and flat studio lighting reflected the decade’s pared-down aesthetic. Today, he is a regular contributor to
Vogue, delivering immaculate and energetic images that eschew story line, stripping away all distractions to put the focus strictly on the clothes.
Born in Sheffield, a depressed postindustrial city in the North of England, he dropped out of school as a teenager to become an assistant to the photographers Robert Erdmann and Norman Watson. Soon, he was represented by the agency M.A.P. and getting his work into print in
i-D and
The Face. In 1993, he made his first appearance in
Vogue, with a small black-and-white portrait of
Shalom Harlow for an article on the battle between “supermodels and superwaifs.” But it was a 1995 campaign for the Japanese avant-garde designer
Yohji Yamamoto that was the real turning point, pushing Sims to the crest of a wave of punkish nineties realism.
His style has shifted with time, becoming more kinetic and less nitty-gritty after the turn of the millennium. His first major assignment for
Vogue—a 2004 accessories portfolio of platform and column heels, titled “The Anti-Stiletto”—set a new standard, showing the model of the moment,
Daria Werbowy, in motion as she leaped across the page and kicked up her heels in flowing party frocks. Sims still prefers to shoot against a plain backdrop, but he instructs his models to bend, jump, and otherwise push the edges of the frame. He works at
Vogue not just with one main fashion editor, but with all the magazine’s stalwarts:
Grace Coddington,
Tonne Goodman,
Camilla Nickerson, and
Phyllis Posnick.
Sims’s wife, Luella Bartley, an English writer and magazine editor who first became famous for her now-defunct fashion label, has admitted to being nervous about revealing new projects—say, a book cover or home-decorating scheme—to him. Why? Because he is an arbiter of extreme discernment. (“Dave has such amazing taste, so he always ends up doing the house,”
[1] she said in 2007.) The couple, both fanatic surfers, live near the waves in a seventeenth-century farmhouse in Bodmin, Cornwall. When the writer Mark Holgate visited Bartley—and their children, Kip, Stevie, and Ned—for a
Vogue profile in 2006, she said that she and her husband share a need to create their own atmosphere and surroundings: “We will get the most beautiful piece of furniture, something that cost a fortune,” she said, “and we have to do something to it—scratch it, slap on stickers, anything—to make it ours.”
[2]
When Emmanuelle Alt spoke to Holgate about her vision as the new editor in chief of French
Vogue, Sims’s name popped up. He’s been tapped by
Prada and
Yves Saint Laurent to do advertisements. And after he photographed the model
Kate Moss with faux–cropped hair for
Heads: Hair by Guido (a beauty book published in 2002), she was inspired to lop off her locks for real. All these are proof positive of how the discernment and taste of this least self-promoting of photographers are respected not just at home but across the industry.
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