Willy Vanderperre
A models.com interview by Wayne Sterling
As a member of that very select group of photographers responsible for visualizing contemporary fashion through high end editorials and advertising Willy Vanderperre has cultivated an air of mystery due to the privacy of his practice. His is not the image of the jet-set high-glam fashion scenester staggering from Fashion Week to Fashion Week, but rather that of a meticulous and cerebral visual artist carefully exploring his ideas on the behalf of the brands and magazines that keep him in heavy rotation. As such Mr. Vanderperre has shot for a wide array of clients that run from V to Arena Homme Plus, Fantastic Man, ID and Love to Jil Sander, Proenza Schouler, Prada, Raf Simons, Givenchy and Dior Homme. For each client he remains respectful of the central ethos of the given brand thus giving his imagery great range and innovation even as he keeps the graphic discipline that is a signature of his photographs. In this exclusive interview with MDX Willy Vanderperre outlines the roots of his vision, his thoughts on fashion films and the emotional drive that is the key impulse behind his image-making.
All photos courtesy of Willy Vanderperre / Management Artists for models.com
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Could you start Mr Vanderperre, by telling us a little bit about your background and how you came to be a fashion photographer?
I grew up in the southwest of Belgium, and at an early age I knew I wanted to do something creative, it was my dream. I was obsessed and was following art school every weekend. Then around my thirteenth year I went full time to art school, nearby where I lived, in the same province, the West Flandres. When I turned eighteen, it was the period in which fashion was really important in Belgium. We had the boom of the Belgian designers ‘The Antwerp 6′ and you would see them written up in magazines everywhere. What that early influence of fashion did in my life was, that it gave me the extra push to study fashion at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp where everybody from that group of designers came from. When I arrived in Antwerp, Margiela had just started, but was doing one amazing show after the other in Paris. It was the early 90′s, the period when fashion and photography and art photography… they started to flirt with each other, like a cross-over, where it was acceptable for an art photographer to do fashion photography and vice-versa. It was around that time that I went through a transition, and where I found, that for me the medium of photography was more interesting. I was more excited, to go about finding images, cutting out images, taking pictures…creating the world around it, than the actual design of fashion itself. Because I always thought that at the end, to translate and capture the emotion I wanted, it was more efficient to do it in images. I think that is the main reason why I went through the transition from studying fashion to photography.
It sounds like those days at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts were quite a defining influence on your aesthetic.
Oh yes for sure, because you know, you come to the ‘big city’…Antwerp… and only entering this ancient school building (the architecture of the school itself dates from the 1600′s) …, where you had corridors filled with Roman and Greek Renaissance statues and you have that feeling of a lot of history, the weight, you could actually feel, in this school. That was quite impressive. In the backyard of the school was this little building, on the verge of collapsing. You would have to very carefully go over the stairs, because if you took one mis-step, you could literally push your feet through them. It was almost dangerous. So I think that the whole thing melted well together. It was the switch from the 80s to 90s, the reaction on excess with minimalism and deconstruction, the first appearance of grunge. So that feeling of romanticism, together with the history, the building and the run down corridors with the statues, it really did make a big impact on how you formed your visual language. I really think there was something quite dark and magical about it, matching perfectly the zeitgeist of the period.
That aesthetic, is it individual to the talent of that generation or is it something instinctive to Belgian culture?
I don’t know … I think maybe it is a Belgian cultural thing because Belgium is a very small country. We were never conquerers. We were always conquered. So I think that has a lot to do with the individualism of people. There’s an introversion of feelings rather than making a show of them.
What would you say is the basis of your long running collaboration with Olivier Rizzo?
I met Olivier on the first day at school in Antwerp. So it really is a long-time collaboration. We’ve been friends ever since. We started in the same year at The Academy. Olivier and I… right after graduation we just started to team up together. It would be Saturdays, Sundays… mostly on weekends that we would get together for a shoot. He was styling. I was taking pictures. Peter Phillips, who was at the Academy with us was make-up. We shot outside on location, we shot in our living room, always natural daylight, very raw, it was all about the emotion we tried to capture in the expressions of the models. The living room where we worked from, had the perfect light-orientation and Belgium has the most beautiful diffused light. We just did things that we wanted to express to the world. It was raw and emotional. I guess it was that rawness, that search for real emotions, that people picked up on. Many years later, what is great about teaming up with Olivier… is that, when we work together, we’ve known each other for such a long time, and we’ve worked together for such a long time, we understand each other. We trust each other, but we also push each other every time again and again. We don’t want to fall into repetition. I think we always strive for something that pushes our work forward. Or that gives people a different look on how we work together. I think we always try to do something unexpected in terms of imagery or in terms of styling. I think that’s the nice thing about it. That comes with friendship and trust and I hope we can continue working together forever because he is a very talented person.
Did you ever think that the work you were doing on the weekend would ever have a commercial application?
At that point, none whatsoever. We all were very naive back then. We just shot! I was obsessed with this one girl, Chloe Winkel, and one boy, Robbie Snelders. So him and her… we always worked around the same boy and girl in a shoot because they were a source of inspiration. Those images were also the start of the link with Raf Simons. Raf was a close friend of ours and he was just starting his collection. He was translating perfectly what happened around that time with his clothes, that we used a lot of them on Robbie and Chloe mixed in with their own clothes and lots of vintage. One of those early images went into an exhibition and Terry Jones from i-D magazine picked up on it. And that’s when the first picture got published. Ever since then we did shoots and we worked together and then I just always took the liberty of sending it to i-D magazine saying “This is what we’ve done. Do you like it? Perhaps you’d like to publish it” and I’d always be fortunate enough that they liked it (laughs) and it just continued. Also Alix Browne, who used to work for V magazine at the time, was there at the start. Alix was in Antwerp and we bumped into each other. We started to talk. She did not know who I was, I didn’t know who she was. She was in Antwerp to see about some advertising for V Magazine, the start of it, the launch of it. V Zero saw the publication of some images we had produced, my first publication in the US. It was Robbie, still the same boy, with a Mickey Mouse painted on his face. We started to collaborate with them in the same way. They commissioned, we proposed. There was never a thought that if it continued in that direction it was going to become a commercial success or anything. We just did things and sent them out. We just had fun. Later, at one point you start to think about the commercial application of your work.
Do you find it ironic that 90s Antwerp now ranks as its own reference point for so many contemporary designers and stylists?
Ironic? Hmmm… Maybe because everything was far more spontaneous than it looks now or how people think of it now.
What would you say is the process by which a young photographer develops a style that is signature and unique?
I think what it was and still is… is that you have to stay true to who you are, and I feel you have to express, honestly… what you are. Of course you absorb a lot of things and that’s quite natural. For me, the raw image that was confrontational, that had this grittiness to it, an emotion, that’s who I am.
The portraits you create for Givenchy have been an interesting strategy in how couture is presented and documented. Could you tell us a little bit about how the project developed?
Riccardo wanted a way to look at Couture that was not the runway. It was almost like going back to the origin of couture, where it was a private thing. He also wanted to have something that had a consistency and carried a repetition. He teamed up with art-directors M/M Paris, and we came up with the idea of doing the pictures from the front and from the back. Each season we change the surroundings, but the composition stays the same, so it is a reproduction of that same composition, always filled in with different clothes, different girls. It gives you a beautiful timeline of the collections and a simplicity because of that consistency.
Speaking of timeline, are you trying to push the medium of fashion photography to have a larger and more lasting significance. Or are you happy simply crafting a beautiful picture for that moment?
Sometimes you think of the beautiful picture. But you also try to express through imagery and through photography, the zeitgeist, what is happening in the world at that moment in time. It’s not about just the clothes, it’s about the emotion. Sometimes the beautiful picture is enough but then in the back of my head, I’m thinking, “Will this help fashion? Will it have an impact? Will it do something? Will it be more than the beautiful picture?”
. Valentine's picture is the only one that succeeds, the rest are just impossible to transform, they reminded me of Sex & The City's The Turtle.. you can put him in Helmut Lang, but he's still The Turtle. 
