Rachel Brown

Rachel Brown is the photography director for the Magazine, Harper's Bazaar, Town and Country. She also works as a fine art photographer in her spare time away from the magazine, in which she attempts to capture photos to be able to convey a subjective narrative. 

Over the years Rachel has produced many shoots, but one that has stuck out to me most and even inspired me with my final major project is "The Malevolent Eye". “The Malevolent Eye”  is a 4 year project from 2009 to 2013 in which she would return to the USA every year where Rachel captured the imagery whilst trespassing on people's property, wandering at night alone and with strangers found via casting calls. When capturing the images Rachel shot long exposures ranging from 4 minutes up to 15 minutes, during one of her images, once she had left she had been told that a wild bear had appeared and described her experience as surreal and also states that there are strong feminist undertones by going round taking pictures at night, as it is known that women shouldn’t be walking around at night on their own, or meeting strangers.

The way this work inspires me is because I am also creating a project which involves exploring the night and being able to capture different feelings through the imagery and creating questions in the viewers mind about the photo.

Rachel has worked with different artists overtime being a production coordinator, starting with Steven Klein who she worked for, for around 7 months until she left due to the environment being a very negative hierarchical work and was also very anti-women in the environment, making Rachel feel rather uncomfortable. 

Then in 2011, she became the studio manager for Tim Walker Studios, where she was responsible for sorting out all the exhibition spaces, and shoots, making sure everything was set right and prepared correctly as Walkers shoots were very extreme with the way he shot, for example shooting with a real lion for a magazine. As well as had a real aeroplane placed inside an exhibition space. She left that as it started to be too extreme for her, in which she currently is the head photography director for Harper’s Bazaar dealing with different celebrities and models on different days.