A couple of years ago I wrote a post about how fashion week was starting and I wanted to go into that new season with a “new perspective” — figure out a way to cover the weeks and the month in a fresh new way that I hadn’t before. Whether or not I succeeded is subjective. Did the focus for the photos change? Yes. did the opportunities on what to cover change? Not really. Then it became a habit; every season, it was imperative that I find some new angle or way to approach my coverage.
To be honest, I don’t know what I was chasing, except that maybe if I kept trying to do something different, people would notice. I can say with some confidence that people noticed – for reasons that have nothing to do with me trying to do something different. Because really, there is no such thing as different – just other. Instead of doing what many people are doing, let’s do this other thing. For the yellow brick road leading through New York Fashion Week, the other thing for me is being relatively invisible. I spend much of the week behind the doors of Carolina Herrera, documenting the legendary designer putting finishing touches on their latest collection as supermodels filter in and out for fittings. I’ve been doing that other thing for the past four seasons, and the only thing different about it is that 90% of the best work that I create for New York Fashion Week are images that I’m not allowed to share. Some people would call that a paradox.
Less paradoxical is the fact that on the last day of Fashion Week in Paris back in September, my trusty Sony A99 finally crashed after barrelling through some 200,000 frames. I took it to get serviced three times in the past 6 months and was in danger of starting the season without an ace camera. It was at this time that Adorama randomly reached out to me via email about three days before the start of fashion week, informing me that they were partnering with Sony and had seen my work – and wondered if I’d be interested in shooting the season on an A7RII. Like an angel falling out of the sky and crashing through the roof of my flat and into middle of life, they gifted me the thing, plus two superior lenses — the 85mm/f1.4 G Master and the 35mm/f1.4 Zeiss, along with a battery grip and a flash to essentially replicate my main setup with the A99. (I would later buy the 25mm/f2 Zeiss on my own to round out my usual coverage.) Ironically, I had purchased the A99 predecessor from a competing store back in January, but it never arrived as it was back ordered. After four days shooting with the Sony A7RII, I canceled that pending order. I had a lot of thoughts about the mirrorless system before all of this happened, but I’ll write about that another day. For now, here’s a look back at New York Fashion Week, all images shot on the newest addition to the family. And if you’re wondering about my original wonder tank of an A99, well, it just came back from repair – today.
Article written by Simbarashe Che. To Learn More about Simbarashe click here. This article first appeared on the Lord Ashbury blog.
