Alva Bernadine was born in Grenada, West Indies and moved to Britain at the age of 6 to London. Bernadine became seriously interested in photography at the age of 21. His first pictures were of London tourist spots and the next year he started practising his present style. Bernadine is self-taught and has never been an assistant. He has worked mainly in the editorial field for the last 38 years completing projects for numerous national magazines and has had many profiles of his work in countries such as France, Spain, Italy, USA, Australia, Germany and, of course, Great Britain.
Bernadine won the Vogue/Sotheby’s Cecil Beaton Award in 1987 (a prize for young photographers) for her series of shoe pictures entitled ‘The Fetish’ and in 1997 and ‘98 was nominated as Erotic Photographer of the Year in Britain and won in 2002.
The first book of his work, Bernadinism: How to Dominate Men and Subjugate Women, was published by Edition Stemmle in 2001 – he has published two more since then. The latest is entitled Twisted, The erotic photographs of Alva Bernadine.
In recent years Bernadine is also making videos bringing his still images to life and other experimental short films.
Self-taught or art school?
I was self -taught and was never an assistant either. I first became seriously interested in photography at the age of 21 in 1983 and within 18 months I had acquired my present style. The first year I was shooting what might now be called Neo Pictorialism and by the next spring, I started sketching out some ideas and that easter, while taking a walk along the Thames, I came across the derelict goods yard next to Battersea Power Station. It was there that I put my ideas into action and acquired my present style. One of the first things I shot was a series of pictures of a Pollock pattern high heel shoe, with which I was later to win the Vogue/Sotheby’s Cecil Beaton Award. After that I shot for Vogue, Tatler, GQ, then Sunday Times Magazine, Telegraph Magazine, FHM and numerous other national magazines, mostly doing environmental portraiture and illustrative type imagery. A cover I did for New Scientist to illustrate telepathy in the early nineties, turned out to be their biggest selling issue up to that date.
At the same time, I was doing my personal work, seen only by me and a few friends. That was far more interesting to me. In 2001 I had my first book published by a Swiss publisher. It was entitled Bernadinism: How to Dominate Men and Subjugate Women. It won me the Erotic Photographer of the Year Award. The book was a great achievement for me because at the outset of my passion for photography, looking through all those books, I hoped one day I too would have a book and influence other people in my turn. After my book, I became more interested in pursuing my own work than having to tolerate the restrictions of commissioned photography.
If you could own one work of art what would it be?
It would possibly be Dali’s Metamorphosis of Narcissus. It is beyond me how he could hold an egg between his fingers and envisage it as the figure of a youth reflected in a pool. For years I had a big framed poster of it in my bathroom until the frame crashed to the floor destroying it. Years later I bought another copy, along with Autumnal Cannibalism. While they were still rolled up in a cupboard, waiting for me to do something with them, I had a leak from above, that destroyed them both.
My picture, The Equestrienne, in which a shadow is both the face of a woman and an equestrienne riding a horse at the same time, was inspired by Dali with a bit of Picasso thrown in.
How would you describe your style?
I call it Bernadinism. In the summer of 1987, I started reading about the surrealist and Dadaists. They both had manifestos. I wondered why people no longer wrote them and I decided to write one myself to make concrete my thoughts and approaches to my own photography. It was called: The Bernadinian Universe
The view from the Edge, The Artist as Megalomaniac
The chief tenets of Bernadinism are:
Astound
Confound
Provoke
Intimidate and
Gorgonise
My work is sometimes surreal, sometimes quirky, and sometimes weird. There is always an unusual event happening to claim the viewer’s interest, along with my use of bold colour. My website is called Bernadinism.
Can you tell us about your art process?
I get my ideas from looking at other photographs, looking at film, television, art, radio and walking through my life with my ears and eyes open.
My preferred location for thinking up ideas has always been sitting or lying on my bed. I generally do it early in the evening before I get tired or I will fall asleep. As a photographer, my main source of ideas is other photographs. I keep folders of pictures that I find interesting and sketchpads in which I jot down ideas. When I am in need of one, I start by flicking through these. Even if there are no ideas in them, I can adapt, the colour or atmosphere of a picture can help focus my mind. I might even start associating ideas. One thing will remind me of something else, which in turn will remind me of another thing.
Sometimes I might take two ideas and put them together. I once saw an illustration of a man lying on a tiled floor in a pool of blood. A couple of weeks later I saw a picture of an oversized paper boat floating in a street puddle. It immediately occurred to me I could float a paper boat in the pool of blood. It is macabre but could easily be the mark of a serial killer.
Is narrative important within your work?
I like to invoke narrative prompting you to imagine what came before or what is about to happen. In scenarios of darkling woods, eerie bedrooms, enigmatic street and mesmerising reflections, suspense and danger dwell. They are about not only desire but the problems that go with it.
For the picture of the woman strangled with the phone cord, I imagined the scenario to be a woman murdered by her deranged lover or perhaps a serial killer. He sits in a chair and arranges the contents of her handbag to create the face and contemplates the scene, while the phone gets louder and more irritating.
For part of my violence project, I experimented with narrative by photographing an event in several images and presenting them as a grid in the same photograph. In the most successful one, a woman is mugged on the bank of the Thames at Vauxhall. As the action progresses, the assailant’s face is always hidden by the trunks of young trees.
A fashionista walks into the first frame lighting a cigarette. In the second she turns her head to observe a guy walking behind her who is obscured by a tree trunk. In the third, she feels the danger and turns her upper body towards him while still walking. He is obscured by the next trunk. In the next picture, they are having a fight as he tries to pull her handbag from her and she hits him with it and kicks him. All the time his identity is hidden by the third trunk. He pushes her to the ground and runs away leaving her in distress. This happens in 10 frames.
I have also experimented with video, making my creations move. My most successful ones were a series called Born with Three Mouths, for which I learned enough visual effects to achieve. They were of women with mouths for eyes. The three mouths moved independently. The first one was one minute long and went viral, with 7 million views on Youtube. In the second one, my favourite, a girl with a split tongue and braces talks about being a body art performer and sucks sweets and eats yoghurt with various mouths. They influenced a couple of music videos I saw afterwards.
Who are your favourite artists and why?
Magritte was one of the first influences. It was due to him that I first tried my hand at surrealism. I came across his work in a bookshop, while I was still doing my Neo Pictorialism, and was intrigued enough to think that I might like to try my hand at that. The next year I was ready to shoot and portfolio worthy pictures fell into place one after the other and by early autumn I was going around to see art directors with my work.
Guy Bourdin was also an early influence as well. It was his Charles Jourdan shoe images that first attracted me. I loved how he could always find compositional devices to keep his work novel.
I like how Salvador Dali mixed classicism with the modern art of his time. He was visionary and clever. Cleverness is usually frowned upon in art but I love it.
What or who inspires your art?
The internet. But it is both good and dangerous at the same time.
Where’s your studio and what’s it like?
I have never had a studio or ever wanted one. There is not much I can do with seamless paper and I am not really into the set building. I have hired them when needed though. I have always preferred shooting on location. I like to find a real place and extract or rearrange objects or furniture as needed. The setting is very important to me. Sets can’t give you the lived-in look I prefer. That is why I was an environmental photographer. I would be sent to people’s houses, places of work or hotels, where I would find an interesting corner or wall for the background of the picture.
Do you have any shooting rituals?
Ideally, I like to visit a place before I shoot there. I like to absorb the atmosphere and find the best angles. I stare through the camera and try to envisage what scenario can be acted out there.
The evening before a shoot I like to go through my ideas. I always go armed with more ideas than I can possibly shoot during the time I have. If something else interesting happens while I am shooting, I can pivot to that. But if I go empty-headed, nothing interesting ever turns up.
What are you working on currently?
The photographs shown here are from various projects over the years. I never actually finish a project but may add to it as the inspiration takes me.
What I am most excited about and mainly working on at the moment is my Ambigrammatic series. It all began when I joined Instagram. I would occasionally see upside-down selfies in my feed and would feel compelled to turn the phone around. There was never any real pay-off because they were just unremarkable photos. However, they brought back to mind a television programme on psychology, I had seen in the early 2000s. In it, a psychologist demonstrated that if you turned a photograph upside down but flipped the eyes and mouth vertically, no one would be able to perceive the change because of the way the human mind perceives patterns to recognise faces.
I first tried it on some existing pictures and put them on Instagram, so now there was a surprise pay-off to turning the phone around. They reminded me of the upside-down portraits of Georg Baselitz and the famous magazine cover of the graphic designer, David Carson. The trouble it was, it is very one-trick and you could get tired of it quickly. I like my work to have more layered meaning than that. Looking through one of my art books one day, I came across some pages on ambigrams. It was a Eureka moment.
Ambigrams are secret writing that can be rotated 180 degrees to read the same or something different. Also reflected as well. I started researching them and came across ambigram tattoos. Not only that but I became very interested in the types of sentences people had tattooed on their bodies, reflecting their emotional states as well as their aspirations and personality.
I now have a lot to work with and can have several tricks in the one picture. Not all the pictures are upside down by any means. For instance, I shot a girl standing next to a mirror with the word “Love” on her chest. It is so crafted, that in the mirror, it reads “Fuck”. So, “Fuck Love”. The word Love, in a different design, can also be made to read Eros and so on. There are so many possibilities.
The upside-down ones work well on a phone or on a page, where you can turn them around but on a gallery wall, where you cannot, they become more conceptual. They have a secret meaning that you cannot see. You could either stand on your head to decipher them or shoot them on your phone, but unlike the Instagram app, you first have to find the button that freezes the orientation of your phone or the image will remain upside-down as you rotate the phone.
Talking of Instagram, they deleted my account with its thousands of followers recently. They don’t like nudes on there and want to take art back to pre-renaissance in the name of family friendliness and, of course, profit. Although the nude has been the subject of art for hundreds, if not thousands of years, they don’t like it and their censorship is shaping what gets popular. Artists are either made to censor themselves or they will do it for them.
Where can we buy your art?
My work can be bought on my website. Buying directly from me means you can find out why I photographed the piece, or at least what I was thinking when I did. You won’t get that from any other source. They are available in 3 different sizes. Five editions per size totalling 15 prints per photograph.
@alva.bernadine
