INTERVIEW: Music photographer Scarlet Page on her 'Captures' exhibition: "Make the most of the opportunities that you have and try and make things happen."

May 1

May 1 INTERVIEW: Music photographer Scarlet Page on her 'Captures' exhibition: "Make the most of the opportunities that you have and try and make things happen."

Interview: Jett Tattersall

Scarlet Page is a British photographer who has worked with some of the biggest names in pop music since the 1990s and has captured stunning images the most iconic women in pop including Lady Gaga, Amy Winehouse and Courtney Love. She has toured the world with bands such as Placebo, Red Hot Chilli Peppers, The Rolling Stones and Stereophonics, and her work has graced the cover of countless albums and singles over the years.

In 2020, she won The British Journal of Photography’s ‘Portrait of Britain’ award and alongside her photography work she has also started teaching university students as well as running her own photography courses online.

Her work has been displayed across the world, from Britain to Buenos Aires, and on 4th May her exhibition Captures opens in Sydney at Behind The Gallery, 205 Oxford Street, where it will run until 7 May.

"While curating Captures, I sifted through my archives and discovered some previously unseen photographs and hidden gems with an Australian focus. I pride myself on going a little bit deeper behind the mask and capturing the essence of my subjects,” she says. "Reflecting back on my career to date, I can see that thread continuing all the way through."

Women In Pop believe it is just as important to champion the women who work behind the scenes in music as those that are up front on the stage, and we recently caught up with Page to chat about her career.

Hello Scarlet, what a world of beautiful images you live in. I was just going through your collection last night, and you have this gorgeous photo of Skin from Skunk Anansie just screaming on the stage and it is so beautiful.
There are some obvious ones of, say her, that over the years, I've pulled out and put into my portfolio. But part of what I've been doing recently is taking a deeper dive into the archive and just finding all these treasures, like that one, that suddenly I scan and go, ‘Wow, what a great shot’. Because we're moving at such a fast pace all the time, and the magazine makes their edit there and then and everything gets sort of shelved. It's almost like a never ending job, I've got so many negatives and transparencies, let alone digital, but it's the negatives that I've really been focusing on. And then maybe the next 10 years will be the transparencies! There was one I found of her with all these girls on the stage that had come up, and again it was just a really glorious shot.

Your exhibition Captures is coming to Australia and you just mentioned that you take the picture, and then the magazine, or the label will choose what they want, but I imagine, much like with music or anything else, the look of a photograph goes in and out of style. So you may have caught a moment years ago that wasn't, shall we say, commercially viable, or front cover material until now because trends are changing.
Yeah. I saw a picture editor from Q magazine the other night, randomly, and we were chatting about how it's weird on reflection. A picture that you took years ago was okay, but as the time elapses, you look back and because you've captured the person at that particular time, it actually captures so much more than just that artist. It catches a time, it brings things up in people that see it. There's a picture that I've scanned recently for Captures of Nick Cave, and it was a commission that never got used. I just thought, ‘it's no good, god, I've really cocked that one up’. But the people I've shown it to now are like, ‘wow, that's a great shot’. So exactly what you were saying. Sometimes on reflection, and the passing of time, you actually see things in a completely different way.

Of course, and even your subjects, there's a beautiful shot you have of Courtney Love at Reading Festival in 1994. She's on stage, and she's holding her cigarette a lot. It’s like she's holding it for a friend, she looks so innocent, like a young girl. And for so many years, even when I was young girl and loving Courtney Love, I never saw her as a young girl and we never saw her as a sweet young woman. The way she was sold was she always had to be snarling and aggressive and angry, but you've just captured this image that I think is so on point today with how were readdressing the way that artists were spoken about particularly female artists.
I did an exhibition not that long ago and they were showing old images that I hadn't really thought that much about. There was one of Amy Winehouse, and it's certainly not the best image I've ever taken. But what was interesting was presenting it again, suddenly so many people say, ‘Oh my God, that picture of Amy Winehouse, there's just something about how she looks and how happy she is’. It isn't the best picture of Amy Winehouse, but it's evoking something, and that's quite interesting, because you can't always call that, how other people are going to see things. Sometimes I’m too close to it, because I know what it was like and how I shot it. But other people can see it, and it just becomes a bit more magical.

You've been photographing huge personalities your whole career, and predominantly very big creatives. You take a lot of candid photos, but you're also doing sets and album covers. What is your collaboration process like with the artist?
It sounds really wanky, but I quite like it to be generally quite organic. I don't really like to think about things too much, and I quite like to just work spontaneously. But that being said, for example, when I did The Stereophonics album cover artwork that had to be quite thought out. It was a test, and Kelly, the singer had an idea of something he wanted to recreate so we didn't know if it was going to work at all. We hired some extra models, and the record company was sort of filling in the bodies, and we hired a football pitch for an hour. So we knew we only had 45 minutes to get everyone in place. I had even drawn on some tracing paper that was going to go in my medium format camera, so I could see exactly where the crease needed to be and where I was plotting everyone. But if it's a press session where you've got to get a lot of different looks throughout the day, then I'll have a rough idea, but I do quite like to bounce off who I'm shooting. I get more out of it that way, as well.

You travelled across America with in the 90s when it was just these amazing, big grunge and pop punk festivals. I mean, I was in the audience as a teenager at the time, and as much as I loved it, it was still charged with an atmosphere of fear for women because it was a very male dominated space and safety wasn't a consideration. There was almost this attitude of ‘Well, you got your ticket, you want it to be here, so just suck it up’. And I just wanted to know how was that for you? Because you were a young woman working in a hugely male dominated industry at the time.
I haven't got all the self confidence and certainly I remember the first few shoots I went to I was very shy and I didn’t speak out, so that sort of fly on the wall thing suited me quite well to begin with. I've always been quite ambitious, I've always wanted to do things, and I'm always keeping busy and wanting to push myself. On the first tour I did I knew the tour managers for the two headlining acts, The Beasties Boys and the Smashing Pumpkins. I look back and think god, how did I even have the balls to go out on my own, pay for a hotel, make the phone calls ‘can I get a lift down to the venue’, and then when I was there, I just took pictures of anything that I had the courage to do. I would approach people like, the tour manager of The Breeders and say, ‘can I get a picture of them before they go on stage?’, and they couldn't help me out, but that's what I was doing, trying to be a bit of an opportunist, and just waiting nicely. I was quite lucky, I didn't have any really bad experiences, the only things was when I was assisting [other photographers] people would immediately think I was the girlfriend of the photographer, or sometimes I'd arrive on a shoot, and be told ‘the makeup room’s over there’, but it didn't really bother me. It's only looking back that I think, ‘bloody hell, actually, it was quite a big deal’. There weren't many female photographers, and all the shoots I was being commissioned to do work of men, my job just meant that I was commissioned to do things, I couldn't choose myself who I was shooting. It did feel like there was sometimes jobs for the boys and then when I got pregnant, people would say, ‘Oh, she's a mum now’. But I was in the photo pit about six weeks after giving birth to my first child, in body maybe not in full mental capacity! Having my first child coincided with you film moving to digital, everybody became a photographer as well. You have to keep evolving all the way through.

You started doing album covers and your work went from the stage to the studio? How did you find that transition? Was it just a natural progression, or was it a real shift for you?
Even when I wasn't shooting so much live stuff, it would be that access all area kind of fly on the wall kind of thing as well as studio. I haven't really thought of it as a shift like that, but I suppose it has become a lot more portraiture, certainly when I did my Resonators project, which was all guitarists, and even though they felt like they were quite fly on the wall because it was a case of me turning up at their houses and making something happen, it was spontaneous, but it definitely is portraiture. I spoke to someone the other day and he definitely talked to me as though I was a portrait photographer, which predominantly, when you look at my work it is quite portraiture-y.

Talk to me about Captures, because you were saying that it was really about going back over and finding these images that weren't used at the time, and there is a focus on these portraits of Australian artists.
My first ever image published was of Chris Cornell shot at The Big Day Out. I thought that was quite nice, the fact that my first image that was used on a magazine was shot in Sydney. It started me thinking of the other Australian bands that I have shot over the years, like Powderfinger and The Vines and Silverchair. Digging around I found these pictures of beautiful young Silverchair boys in grungy backstages and they just are so evocative of that time. I thought that would just be a nice thing to add into this, you know, as well as portfolio classics.

You grew up surrounded by music and musicians, but when did you start going ‘I just want to capture this’?
I went to art college after school and knew I wanted to do something arty, and my drawings were all very sort of static and just reproducing what you're seeing. I had known quite a few photographers as a child, and just the whole magic of the chemicals and the dark room really intrigued me. On my foundation course started doing some photography and just having your own camera. it just feels really special, a manual camera that you can set all the settings or play around and catch people in midair or shallow depth of field and then process the film and print it yourself. I didn't necessarily want to go into music, but I just knew I loved photography. I fell into assisting a music photographer, which obviously was in a familiar environment, but like I say, I didn't feel particularly comfortable. I felt a bit scared for a little while until I found my footing. But I suppose there's that element of you've got nothing to lose. That's something I say to anyone now is just make the most of the opportunities that you have, and try and make things happen and work on your own personal projects, because they're the talking points. Resonators was a personal project, and I did one for Warchild charity called Your Child. All the way through I've peppered my work with projects, which have been really hard work, but also really fulfilling to look back on. Right now my projects are more going into the archive, I’m focusing on that and eventually doing a book because it is nearly 30 years since I started, which is a blooming long time!

Captures exhibition
Venue: Behind The Gallery
Address: 205 Oxford Street, Darlinghurst, 2010
VIP Opening: Wednesday 3rd May, 6 - 8pm
Public Opening: Thursday 5th May, 5 - 8pm

To keep up with all things Scarlet Page you can follow her on Instagram and Facebook.