Research- Ian Phillips-McLaren

Ian Phillips-McLaren is a British photographer, who mainly does portraits. I wasn't really familiar with his work until I stumbled upon it because of an actor. I saw it, liked how fun it was and how it showed a different side that I'd not seen before to this actor and decided to do some more research on the photographer. He is well known within the photography world, namely for having had a BBC show about him early into his career.

These days he photographs a lot of celebrities and artists as well as regular, everyday people. The reason I'm looking at him and his work is because his portraits look genuine. They don't look overly staged and it seems as though he's taken at least some amount of time to try and get to know the person and then express this in his photographs.

Expressive is probably the best word I can think of to describe his images as the people look at ease, comfortable to let their guard down and in some cases have fun or play around. That level of ease is what can make for a good portrait and like with the previous piece of research, I feel like it can help show me what I should be looking to do to get the best out of my subjects.

My favourite of the images below is probably the very top one of Tom Riley. The expression isn't staged. It looks genuine and as though that was the actual emotion he was feeling. The photograph captures that second of him expressing how he's feeling. Again, it's that connection to the subject that the photographer has allowed us to have that inspires me.