‘I’m just not very good with people’, still life photographer, Dan Tobin Smith, laughs when we ask why he favours an inanimate subject, over coffee at his purpose built De Beauvoir studio. ‘I’ve got this thing: no people, no animals, no velvet’. It’s a rule that’s fared him well, having shot countless still life editorials for prestigious titles such as Numero and Wallpaper, campaigns for luxury fashion brands including Alexander McQueen and Louis Vuitton, as well as an album cover for Jay-Z. No big deal. ‘I just started shooting funny little things when I was about fourteen’, he remembers, and even though he went on to study painting at Central Saint Martins, something about the shutter stuck and he was drawn back into photography while travelling for work. ‘It wasn’t very creative though, when you’re just documenting something’, he says, but ‘you can make something in the studio on your own’. 

When working on commissions for clients the process is often very collaborative, ‘you get a lot of people coming together for a fixed amount of time, and it’s really expensive, so you need to plan’, he explains, ‘but sometimes you can kind of improvise’. For his own personal projects though, Dan Tobin Smith stays true to his ‘no people’ thing. ‘You’re more in control of the outcome’, he says. This way of working harks back to the time when he first became immersed in photography. ‘Being in the studio reminds me of being in the dark room’. As a teenager when he would visit his Dad, a teacher of photography, he would disappear into the darkroom for days and nights on end in order to see the whole printing process emerge along with the morning light. ‘There’s a special feeling that you’re just creating something, it’s sort of meditative’, he tells us dreamily. And that applies as much to working in the studio as it does to those early, eye-opening days in the dark room. ‘When you’re in the studio on your own it’s got its own real magic to it’. 

 

It makes sense that an absorbingly hypnotic soundtrack would accompany this zen-like studio experience, with double-necked electric violin player L Shankar and the creatively choral Sacred Harp among favourites on Tobin Smith’s work playlist. Not that he can be pinned down to defining his taste with any particular style. ‘Music’s just this huge world for me, and there’s almost too much out there that’s kind of weird and good’. 

Given the super-focussed way in which Dan Tobin Smith enjoys working, it’s no surprise to learn that his number one activity away from the camera, apart from spending time with his one-year-old son, is target shooting, a practise involving shooting targets from various distances with an air pistol. ‘It’s a bit like photography in that it’s quite meditative, and a lot of it is to do with sight picture’. He continues, ‘it’s a very subtle thing that’s about aligning things in the right way, and it’s totally psychological, you have to get your head completely into that space’. Much like the mind space he strives to achieve alone in the studio, and in the calm of the darkroom before that, ‘it’s this amazing skill to be able to shut your mind off and just focus on one thing’. He admits that it’s a hobby that has itself something of ‘a weird reputation, especially in England’, but for him, ‘it’s a pure sport. It’s the most meditative sport out there’. 

 

As part of the Chelsea Fringe, from Saturday 17th May Tobin Smith will be showing a serious of work’s at Hackney’s trendiest brunch and wine spot, L’Entrepôt, that were created with an equal level of precision as would be needed for shooting a small and far-off target. ‘I’d seen a lot of people doing things with those old Masters paintings of flowers that are so well known, so I wanted to do something unusual’, he says of the set of floral photography he’s created for the exhibition. ‘I’d been taking pictures of this really angular steel with a flat sheen, which is totally different to flowers, and then I started looking at these paintings, that I knew really well, and sort of deconstructing the shapes I found in them’. He continues, ‘I just made loads of drawings on top of these paintings, sort of simple geometric shapes, and I just did it over and over again until I got the shapes I wanted’. Said shapes became a metal framing for the flowers that were subsequently photographed to make up the images displayed. 

The idea behind this was to deconstruct these natural shapes into something resembling readable data, ‘almost like those computers that use algorithms to recognise car number plates’. In doing this Tobin Smith was exploring the idea that everything, even in nature, can be manipulated and constructed. ‘I mean those paintings are not natural things at all’, he suggests. ‘They could be painted over a year, and they’re painting from drawings’. Like the flowers in the paintings which are specifically bred and mass produced, ‘most of what we eat is strictly bred. It might be organic but it’s still been bred by humans over the centuries’. By way of explanation, he tells us, ‘In the wild a banana is tiny and full of seeds, but I read that people have been breeding them for something like 7000 years. It’s amazing that we can invent something like that’. 

Not unaware of the irony of the fact that a series on this theme is being shown in an eatery which prides itself on using small-scale natural produce, Tobin Smith laughs. ‘I hope they don’t think we’re taking the piss!’.     

 

Still Life with Flowers by Dan Tobin Smith is at The Storeroom at L’Entrepôt, May 17 to June 17 2014. Free entry.