Speaking with Nigel Shafran is a bit like playing a game of Whack-a-Mole, as the photographer frames and reconsiders and second-guesses things that he says almost as fast as he says them. “I don’t want to sound like I know anything,” he remarks at one point.
It could be that Shafran doesn’t want to commit, or rather that he believes in the autonomy of the receiver of his output. As he puts it, “You don’t want anything to be closed about what it means. You want everyone to [see] what it is for them.” It might be going out on a limb, but it is perhaps possible to see a link between Shafran’s belief in leaving room for interpretation and the airiness and space present in his recent pictures for Vogue.
Openness and even vulnerability are at play in his latest publication, Workbooks 1984–2024. It seems significant that it follows on the heels of 2022’s The Well, a collection of his fashion work, because the photographer makes clear distinctions among the types of projects he takes on, saying the “commercial work is my job, but the book, et cetera, is my work, in a way.”
Workbooks would suggest that for Shafran, (noncommercial) work and life are intermingled. That’s not to say that he’s acting as a recorder or documentarian, but that in seeing his pictures we are seeing the world through his eyes. As he notes, “Everything that goes in you, either consciously or unconsciously, maybe has some effect.”
The press release puts forward that Shafran keeps his notebook diaries, in part, as preparatory studies for future work. Coedited with Linda van Deursen, Workbooks presents a selection of pages from those diaries. Shafran points out they are four times removed from reality, being printouts of photos pasted in a book that he photographed (the pages are not scanned) and then printed.
Save for a blurb on the cover flap, Workbooks is textless, but only in the sense that there are no interpretive or explanatory essays or statements. Shafran’s notes, which vary from quotes to grocery lists to budgets, are present throughout and become part of the overall analog collage aesthetic.
The 1980s pages are particularly moving; there is an urgency in this section, and an undomesticated day-to-dayness that speaks of the freedom of youth. “I think the early work is much more energetic, naive, thoughtless,” Shafran concedes, but he is no Benjamin Button. Indeed, as his current work for Vogue demonstrates, he retains a sense of playfulness. Workbooks confirms that the photographer still finds wonder in all sorts of unexpected places.
Workbooks 1984–2024 by Nigel Shafran is published by Loose Joints.
