Reminiscing with Katie Grand… The production of Tears and TearSheets.
This week, CEO and Founder of Perfect, Katie Grand and Idea books will release Tears and TearSheets, an almost three-hundred-page collection of magazine tear sheets from throughout Grand’s career as a stylist. Featuring work by many of the most famous and influential photographers, hair and makeup artists, designers, and models from the nineties until now, the book is not only a summary of Grand’s extensive portfolio but a history of contemporary fashion more broadly. By preserving the original layout and graphic design of each image, including the creases separating left half from right, Tears and TearSheets is also a celebration of print as a medium for fashion photography. I spoke with Katie over the phone while she, ever on the move, was en route to the airport in Milan to discuss her early years at Dazed and Pop, behind the scenes gossip, and distilling over twenty years of image making into a single volume.
AMBER LATER: Obviously, you had a lot of material to pull from and a lot of options for the book. How did you start with the process of going through the archives and deciding which images you wanted to use?
KATIE GRAND: Phoebe Arnold is someone that I’ve worked with for a very, very long time. She worked with us at Pop and then we both went to Love together. So she was quite familiar with my work and she got everything together. Then one morning we literally just went through it and said yes or no. And then we sent about four or five hundred images to David Owen at Idea Books, and he edited it down to, I think about 290 pictures, and then we just switched some in. I lived with it for a couple of days and then said, ‘Oh, I missed that, I missed that’— you know, ‘I missed Christina Ricci crying.’
David edited in a lot of less familiar images, images that don't come up on Instagram a lot. When it came down to it, there were things that I felt should be in there that he'd not put in the edit. I really wanted Kate Moss spray painted. But it was 8 to 10 pictures in the end that I think I put back in. So pretty much it was his edit, and it was just very nice to have someone edit my work.
Olivia McCall is a really close and very organised friend who helped to get the work together. She’s so bossy, which was exactly what was needed.
AMBER LATER: Were there any images either of them pulled up that you had maybe forgotten about or just hadn't thought about in a long time? Images that, seeing them now, surprised you or that you saw in a new light?
KATIE GRAND: I was trying to picture images that don't come up on Instagram. There were quite a few that I'd thought ‘I'd really like to see that again.’ When Phoebe presented the edit, there was a lot of stuff that I'd forgotten about, like there was a lot of early work with Mert and Marcus or with Dave Sims that I'd forgotten about.
Rankin has a very, very good archive. For the first round, he sent a lot of contact sheets, so it was interesting to see a lot of the outtakes. We didn't use them in the end, but it was just kind of nice to see them again. Various pictures of me holding boxes or backstage pictures of me that were quite fun.
AMBER LATER: Were there moments you found where, looking back, you can recognise being ahead of the curve? Moments where you could pinpoint a certain style or aesthetic you were experimenting with that has since proliferated or become more popular?
KATIE GRAND: I mean, I suppose I see my work referenced more now than I did at the time. I think in the early days we were always so surprised when a photographer would want to work for us or someone would lend us clothes. I remember the first time Helmut Lang lent us clothes and it was literally like we had a party around my desk at the office, you know, or when we were invited to the Margiela shows and then we were invited for drinks afterwards. Or back in the day when Nicolas was doing Balenciaga, we would be invited to his apartment for drinks. There were things like that that happened at the end of the nineties when it sort of felt like, oh, we're being embraced. Because I think when we set up Dazed, it was set up out of not thinking that we could go work for other people. Rankin was very much of the mindset of, why beg to work at The Face when we could be The Face? He used to say that a lot. Rankin always had that drive to be successful. We were always very shocked when we got invited to things or when people entertained us.
We always felt like the outsiders. We came from doing a college magazine. There's a few things that I didn't put in the book but I did a college magazine with Rankin called Eat Me. We worked at the student union. At the beginning, no one on Dazed had ever even worked for anyone else, no one had even interned for anyone else. We just never felt part of the game.
AMBER LATER: I think that position of being an outsider, or operating more independently, can be very helpful in creative work. Something I’ve noticed when we’ve worked together is you always have a lot of references that aren’t always the most typical fashion references, but references that come from comics or film or literature. I remember moments when I or someone else has mentioned a movie around you you’re quick to write it down and keep track of it for later. Could you talk a bit more about your cultural intake, what you absorb and how you transform that into imagery? Your relationship with that circuit of culture in general.
KATIE GRAND: I think I've got quite a sort of nostalgic taste. I think a lot of people, as they grow up, refer back to probably the first time that they became aware of film or music or going to see live music. I definitely have that mid-eighties brat pack set of references that are easy to herd, you know, The Breakfast Club and Pretty in Pink. There's a lot of teen movie references that I would draw upon. And then a lot of sixties films, seventies films. Quite often I don't even take it in.
I watched a film flying to Atlanta called That Thing That You Do, and it's a film I've been wanting to see for ages, but it's not on iTunes. And of course I don't really have a video recorder anymore and you can't find it easily. But it was on the plane. I think it's from the late eighties, early nineties, and Liv Tyler is so young and gorgeous and as I watched it, it was like, oh my God, this character. I love this character. And then I ended up turning Amelia Gray into that character last week for W with Willy [Vanderperre].
I think it's just sort of what sticks in your head. We're so used to looking that we get snow blind. It's so easy now to look at film or fashion photography or documentary photography. It’s literally at your fingertips. So when a great film comes on and you have no option other than to sit and watch it and not be distracted, that's just such a pleasure now. So I was really in love with playing with this early Liv Tyler character.
AMBER LATER: With that idea of turning people into characters and building out these narratives, do you approach that differently when you're working with a model versus a public figure who already has a particular, fixed identity or reputation established in the public eye? Do you feel like you have to adjust? To give a specific example, there’s one set of images in the book from when you shot designers Phoebe Philo and Stella McCartney, I can’t remember from where, but—
KATIE GRAND: Oh, the first issue of Pop. I’d never edited a magazine before and I was pretty nervous about it. I decided that the only way that I could do it was to photograph my friends. At the time I was hanging out with Phoebe and Stella a lot, and Luella had the studio opposite Phoebe and Stella, and then Katie Hillier was working for Luella at the time. I wanted to photograph my friends. That came out of nervousness. The only thing that I did know about that shoot was I wanted to use spraypaint and I wanted to use just white t-shirts. It's fine if it's your friends, you can get a can of spray paint out and no one blinks an eyelid.
I think Stella and Phoebe had maybe fallen out over the weekend. They were both at Chloe together at the time. Phoebe came in and had made a white t-shirt dress. I remember thinking, “Oh, there’s something going on.” I remember us nervously gossiping about it, like, ‘oh, what’s going on with Phoebe and Stella?’
It was one of those shoots where you kind of sense that something’s afoot. And it was.
AMBER LATER: So, if they’re your friends, you already have such a good sense of their personality and what's going to work and what's not going to work. So I'm sure there's comfort there. But if you're working with someone like, again, a celebrity whom people already have a certain preconceived notion of who they are, this is what they're like– how do you navigate that? Knowing that people already have certain expectations when they see this person? How does that inform how you choose to visualize and present them?
KATIE GRAND: They're all different. I work with a lot of the same people over and over. When Kristen’s [McMenamy] up, she's going to decide who she is that day. When I shot her with Rafael [Pavarotti] for Perfect, I wanted to shoot her in what I was calling boring fashion. I just wanted to photograph her in a pencil skirt or a pair of jeans and a white T-shirt. She's such a big character, you don't need to put the big couture dress on her. But every other time I've worked with her, I've put the big couture dress on her. So I got all this archive Margiela, and I remember her walking into the studio and saying, “Why would I wear these old clothes?” And I was like, I know, but we've got these pieces, some from New York, from Steven Philip, such amazing collections and she just said, “I'm not wearing old clothes. I don't care how hard you worked, I don't want to wear old clothes.” And then I just was like, “Yeah, but you're such a big character. Let's make the clothes understated.” So she was like, “Oh, yeah, I get it. But I'm not wearing the vintage. No, I'm not about vintage. I'll wear the white t-shirt, but I'm not going to wear the old clothes.”
So Kristen will be like that, whereas with Kate [Moss] you're not going to get a super long amount of time, so you have to come in very organised and have it figured out. And also, you never walk into the studio and not feel the weight of working with Kate Moss. She walks in, she’s always stunning, she’s always slightly nervous and you want to do a really great job for her. But you need to think about it first. You can't just turn up and go ‘oh, let’s wing it’ because she’s always much, much happier when she's playing a character. So what the process is depends on who it is. Sometimes, like when I've done those Oscar portfolios for Vanity Fair and you've got those huge Hollywood A-list stars, you just have to fake it like, I'm faking knowing what I'm doing.
AMBER LATER: Faking it, how so?
KATIE GRAND: I'm faking that I've got confidence about this. Because you're Charlize Theron. Of course I don't have confidence.
AMBER LATER: You still feel that way even now?
KATIE GRAND: Yeah, definitely. It's almost like I have to act feeling like I know what I'm doing.
AMBER LATER: What were some of the more challenging times that you've had on set? Or maybe one of the pages in this book that reminds you of a problem that you had to overcome on the day of shooting but, looking back, it ended up being worth it?
KATIE GRAND: It's always different because you never really go into the studio with the same group of people. It's always different, so it never gets boring. What can be difficult? Say, Tim Walker’s a really easy photographer to work with, but he wanted to shoot with a lion. And of course that was really difficult and kind of terrifying. Mert and Marcus would want to put someone in a pool and after eight hours, that becomes really difficult. I don't think it's ever predictable. Which is what's great.
AMBER LATER: A lot of fashion imagery is known for being provocative or somehow transgressive in a very direct, explicit way. And I feel like you have some images like that, but it’s often a bit more subtle. There’s always some extra thought going on beyond an immediate jolt. Have you ever had any particular intentions with your work in wanting to challenge a certain social order? With regards to gender, sexuality, any of those sorts of categories…
KATIE GRAND: There's been things that I've done that now seem passé, but at the time, weren’t. Rankin was an amazing fashion photographer, and he always said we can't go into a studio unless there's a concept. There's one picture in the book of this very, very old lady, and she's in Helmut Lang. At the time, that wasn’t the norm in fashion pictures. And he did a shoot, it wasn't with me as the stylist, but he did a shoot with curve girls like 20 years before mainstream fashion magazines picked up on looking at bodies that weren't fashion sample size.
When we launched Love, there was, for me, only one cover and that was Beth Ditto. And I remember Condé at the time saying are you sure? Are you sure? And I was absolutely sure. I'd work with Beth, with Steven Klein, and I just knew. She gets very nervous before she goes to a shoot, but when she's on board, she's just so confident, and she was like no other person that I’d worked with at the time. We shot her naked, and then when the pictures came in, Nicholas [Coleridge] was like, oh, you know what? Why don’t we use a really beautiful head shot. And I was like, no, this is about launching a fashion magazine with Condé Nast and trying to do something that you can't get anywhere else. A lot of that was because Rankin was always all over the idea that it can't just be a fashion picture. It has to have more than that. When we did Lea T with Kate, that was sort of revisiting these ideas of what normal sexuality was on the page for fashion magazines at the time.
When these images now come up on Instagram, they're judged with today's eyes on it, like— why is Lea kissing Kate? They’re not in a real relationship. Yeah, okay. But at the time it felt like something that was exciting and definitely no one else was doing that at that point.
AMBER LATER: And while an image like that, in other hands, is often very focused on a sort of male gaze and objectification of the subjects, you play with these modes of femininity or sexuality with a different level of awareness. There’s an image in the book of, I believe, Kiki Willems, where she’s adopting a sort of exaggerated feminine, almost drag queen persona. And then you have other images featuring vinyl or latex, fetish wear, but you never get the sense that the models are reduced to a sexual object because of it. There’s still a lot that complicates the images beyond just titillation.
KATIE GRAND: I mean, I think it's about collaboration. That's another reason I like to work with the same people over and over, because you're not going to get the best out of the subject in just one day. To come back and work together over and over, you kind of build where you left off. I suppose you've worked with me three times now, and probably the most recent was the most resolved in a way. And I'm sure we'll work together again and it will go further.
It was a bit subliminal but I think, in the end, it was important that the book was chronological because it does make you realise, for example, Donna Trope’s pictures still stand up today. We were interested in cosmetic surgery. At the time, it was something that only the rich and the privileged did, and now I don't have many friends that don't have lip filler. Or the old lady with Rankin, I think that picture was probably from about 95, 96. It wasn't until much more recently that it became normal to sort of look outside the casting box. I know certain designers have from time to time used people who didn’t fit the typical mould in their shows. Margiela did. But it definitely wasn't seen in the pages of fashion magazines like it is now.
AMBER LATER: Looking back through these images, did it inspire any changes in how you want to approach things going forward? Do you often go through your archive so that a lot of these images are readily accessible in your memory, or was it kind of unique that you spent so much time going through your past work and thinking about it?
KATIE GRAND: I feel quite oppressed by history, one's own history. I find it makes me feel uneasy that we do have this work behind us and these possessions and all this sort of baggage. So I felt quite uncomfortable looking back at stuff. I've got a pretty photographic memory, so it's entrenched in me. But the way that this book was done was so fast. The edit was 3 hours with Phoebe. She put a hell of a lot of work into it, but the part that I did was a very quick yes, no, yes, no. It was intuitive. Then before you knew it, it had printed. It didn't feel laboured. When you see the physical thing, it’s soft back, it’s 288 pages. It's not precious. It's tear sheets. It feels very immediate. I never wanted it to be this tombstone end of a career kind of retrospective. It was just something that was kind of fun to do, a bit throwaway. The way that David works was very in tune with what I wanted to do, and it worked. Or, I hope people like it and think it works.
AMBER LATER: How did you pick the cover image, with Bella?
KATIE GRAND: David on a Friday was like, we need to have the cover for the printing on Monday. This was right when the Queen had died and I was just like, oh my God, I don't know how we're going to do this. It couldn’t be a super old picture. I liked the idea that it was a female photographer taking a sexy picture of a sexy girl looking sexy. So yeah, that was it. Either I was going to shoot something brand new over the weekend over Zoom, which was proving very, very tricky. Or it was between that or another picture. And then I just put the KG, my signature, on that picture and everyone was like, oh yeah, that's the cover. Graham [Rounthwaite] put Tear Sheets on it and that was the end. I’ve been behind a lot of magazines but I've never had my name on the cover before. That was weird.
AMBER LATER: What initially inspired this project? Where did the idea come from that this was something you wanted to do?
KATIE GRAND: I thought that style magazines have a very unique typeface. The magazines that I've worked with have very special art directors, and they've had an identity. And when I see pictures coming up on Instagram, mine or anyone's sort of historical images, I do like seeing the old typefaces and the pictures in context. And I think with photography books you get the photograph and there's something quite precious and detached about it, whereas rephotographing the pages felt or looked a bit more disposable and kind of gave you a sense of nostalgia. But also that gives it a context that is much easier to digest than the image alone. On Instagram, you become very used to seeing the full image without credits, without headlines and intros. And I thought we should be reminded of these great art directors with these great typefaces. David actually wanted to get rid of a lot of the graphic openers, and I was like, oh, we've got to keep a few, because I think the graphic designers also did amazing work on that, you know, on The Face especially, or Interview with Fabien [Baron].
(At this point in the conversation, airport background noises began to infiltrate our call)
I'm really sorry, I've got to check in now.
AMBER LATER: I think that was just enough time. Thank you, Katie.
KATIE GRAND: You have everything?
AMBER LATER: Yes, I think so– have a good flight!