Arnaud Lajeunie

A young French photographer on the rise, Arnaud Lajeunie is shooting some really dynamic, bold work. Working with pared-down palettes and hits of bold colour, or simple black and white, Lajeunie is fascinated by the human body, his models assuming strong, often uneasy shapes and forms in his work.We don't know much about Lajeunie himself, but love what he's doing right now, with its echoes of the work of Viviane Sassen and Marton Perlaki.

All images © Arnaud Lajeunie

Bob Willoughby

Widely considered to be the first "Hollywood Special" photographer (an outside photographer hired in by the studios to document their productions for magazines such as Life and Look), Bob Willoughby captured some fantastic, iconic stills from classic films such as The Graduate, Rebel Without A Cause and Rosemary's Baby.

He perfected his craft by pouring over old magazines, and cutting out and studying the strongest shots of stars, which he would use as a starting point for his own photographs when on set. Of course, shooting actors on beautifully built, dressed and lit film sets is easier than in most situations, but Willoughby had a great knack for getting striking off-set portraits too, with the likes of Alfred Hitchcock and James Dean caught in unguarded moments in beautifully composed photos. And some of his on-set photos, such as those on Who's Afraid Of Virgina Woolf?, have an amazing energy and atmosphere to them.

An exhibition, "On Set", showing some of his finest images, is on show at Fahey/Klein in Los Angeles until the end of January. 

All images © Estate of Bob Willoughby/Fahey Klein Gallery

Sylvie Zijlmans

Smoke, flooding, menace and mystery - all part of the work of Dutch photographer Sylvie Zijlmans and her husband and sometime-collaborator Hewald Jongenelis. Destroying sets and drenching her models, Zijlmans creates large scale environments in which she can experiment, capturing the consequences with technical precision. The resulting images are often shown as huge backlit transparencies, dwarfing the viewer and showing the destruction in minute detail. She also creates more intimate, strange series using her family, the sequence with her son and husband wearing many layers of suiting being both playful and disconcerting, since her son is reduced to tears by the experience in one shot. Demanding parents eh?

 

 

All images © Sylvie Zijlmans