The Lavender Princess

‘The Lavender Princess’

‘A Listless Dawn’

‘Portrait Of A Princess’

It is so hard to begin to write down what the lavender shoot meant to me. It felt like the hardest day of the series to date and I suppose that is mainly true because it was in fact the first day on set. I want to write this honestly, and maybe that’s going to be a little embarrassing as I know that the people involved will be reading this, but at least now it’s all done I can finally admit how absolutely terrified I was.

It’s easy to laugh about it now, but at the time there were points when throwing up with nerves was a realistic option. The whole idea began at the end of June, the concept of ‘Wonderland’ didn’t exist then, I hadn’t planned the project or even had so much as a title in my head. I just felt a need to begin something new and bigger than I’d ever done before. I needed something magical, something colourful, and in truth, something to create a more beautiful existence than the sadness in my everyday life. I had remembered a lavender farm I used to pass by a couple of years ago and decided to go back and take a look. It was by complete coincidence that once I managed to find the old path I discovered the fields in full bloom, at the height of their season! Full of excitement I had left my card with one of the farm workers, and went home to write my first ever letter begging for a contribution to the project. A few emails to the lavender farmer later, it seemed that he had been constantly bothered by local photographers asking to use his land for free. My requests, ‘Can I use your field, and can you give me a load of free lavender?’ began to sound equally rude. I felt my chance disappearing before I’d even started. However, I was lucky. After the farmer had looked at my work online, he agreed that we could use the field for a few hours before the public were allowed in each morning at half-past nine. But there was one big problem: the entire crop was going to be cut in two weeks! My stomach twisted and heat rushed to my head. I had only two weeks to find a model, meet Elbie for the first time in real life, finish my research, come up with a theme, an outfit, make props, and find a team of friends to help. It was ridiculous but I had no choice, and so the date for the shoot was set for dawn on 19 July.

I know some people may be reading this and thinking I’m making it all sound rather melodramatic, but for me this was a big deal. In all honesty I have always been nervous about working with others because I have little self-confidence, and I suppose I didn’t want to be found out as a ‘fake’. The fact that I still don’t know what half the buttons on my camera do, and I had never hired a model or worked with a make-up artist before made things pretty daunting. I was worried it would all end up looking home made and unprofessional, but I’d reached a point where I simply couldn’t carry on taking endless self-portraits and random street pictures. I needed to see what would happen if I tried my absolute hardest. It was time to step things up, and so I posted a casting call on a modelling website, and sat back nervously waiting for a response.

Next, I had to think about props. The farmer said we could have ten enormous bundles of lavender to help, and I bought an old seventies wicker chair from eBay to customise into a flower throne for the model. I began work on designing a dress, and researching what kind of mood and themes we could build on. I made a storyboard of my favourite pictures, paintings and movie stills, and came up with the idea of using coloured smoke and powder paint to add a more magical feel. I finally met Elbie in person the Sunday before the shoot, and we spent the entire day working on the lavender throne. It took six hours to cover less than half the chair, at which point we realised that almost none of the props could be made in advance: the fresh flowers would die and fade before we had time to use them. So we abandoned the chair and planned the hair and make-up instead. This meant we only had the following Saturday to make all the props before the Sunday morning shoot. Elbie and I spent the next week emailing updates back and forth constantly while she spent her lunch times visiting theatre make-up shops, and I spent my evenings, sewing and spray painting parts of the dress. We had so much to do it was overwhelming, and just as things couldn’t get any more stressful, our model dropped out of the shoot with just days to go. I posted another casting, and by now was beginning to feel seriously out of control with it all.

A week passed and I had managed to secure the help of a few good friends, a new model was booked and a van hired. The Saturday began with me racing to the farm at six in the morning to collect the last of the lavender, then to the shops for more spray paint, and an hour later I finally sat down to finish making our throne. As I worked in the garden desperately threading lavender together I realised how badly I had misjudged the time we had left. We needed to make a huge umbrella from wild flowers, the chair was far from finished, and the dress was still in pieces and needed to be fully customised. There were hair and make-up trials to be done, garlands to make … It was all far too much and I knew it. By ten o’clock my friends had arrived from London on the train, I grabbed three pairs of scissors and met them at the station. The first thing we had to do was steal enough Buddleja to make the umbrella. Buddleja is the flower closest in colour to lavender that grows wild and is big enough to cover large areas. It grew in great clumps along the train tracks, so we began hacking down armfuls of stalks every time the coast was clear. All the best flowers were way out of our reach, mainly hanging over the fence that separated us from the tracks. So we jumped and cut in vain, until in frustration Eva pulled down an entire bush, which we dragged back to the car squealing and laughing thinking we had more than enough. We were so, so wrong.

After stripping away the leaves and stems, the flowers looked tiny and wouldn’t cover a third of the umbrella. We returned and in desperation gave up waiting for people to pass and just pulled at the branches frantically. It took forever to collect enough, but we finally stuffed the car to bursting point and headed back to the house. It was now four in the afternoon and it had started to rain. The glue on the umbrella wouldn’t dry, which left the flowers impossible to stick on. The lavender throne was half-finished and the dress was still in pieces shoved in the corner. I went upstairs and sat on my bed panicking. Everything looked dreadful and I had no idea if any of it was going to work or be ready for the morning. I knew I was going to have to sew the rest of the dress by hand and I had already run out of my last can of spray paint. I checked my laptop, the forecast had changed to rain for the next day and we had only eight hours left until midnight, which gave us only three and a half hours to sleep until dawn. I felt sick: this was so embarrassing. The model would be arriving any minute, walking into this mad house covered in glue, flowers and insects, to have her make-up trial done between the oven and the dustbin in my kitchen. What had I done? I was completely out of my depth.

Thankfully, when our model Natasha arrived, she was wonderful and found all the chaos exciting. Everyone soldiered on and by nine o’clock we somehow made a breakthrough and things miraculously began to look good. The umbrella looked quite amazing, despite the fact it was so heavy with wet glue that I could barely lift it above my head. The dress was finished and fitted the model (thank god) and we were now on to the finishing stages. By midnight everyone was exhausted, Eva and I sat in our pyjamas sewing the last of the Buddleja to the dress, while Matt worked on the garlands and Elbie finished preparing Natasha’s hair for the next day. We went to bed at twelve thirty.

At quarter to four the next morning Elbie was working on hair and make-up, while I got my kit together and started drawing sketches of how I wanted the pictures to look. I always do this when I’m nervous so I won’t forget my original idea when I’m on location. The boys loaded the van and by quarter to six we were late but on the road. I sat in the front seat and stared out the window willing the clouds to break, the sky was lifeless and overcast. I remember how I kept rubbing the ring my mother gave me for my eighteenth birthday, praying she would somehow fix the weather for me as I anxiously leant forward in my seat. Finally we arrived, unloaded, Natasha was dressed, and there it was: a dull, depressing field. Every time I had been to the farm in the past week the dawn had been magnificent – the flowers lit up like a sea of bright purple in the crisp early morning light. Now I stood and stared hopelessly at our dawn, it was dead, drab and the wind was picking up.

The first picture I had always imagined in my head was the umbrella scene. I had dreamt of a girl in a towering dress clutching a parasol made of flowers with coloured smoke pouring from the top. This was the one picture I really wanted to get, so I started jumping over the aisles of lavender searching for a spot that felt right. We convinced Natasha to balance on a stool, as the dress was nearly three metres long, and then set up a stepladder opposite her for me to take the picture from. I hadn’t realised during past visits that the field was absolutely swarming with bees, and unknown to me, Natasha had a genuine phobia of them. By now she was absolutely terrified. I was badly stung within minutes
and tried my best to hide my reaction and my rapidly swelling leg. It was a disaster: nothing looked right, even the dress hung limp and narrow. Everyone turned to me for direction, while I tried to remain calm and ignore the panic creeping up my spine. I decided I had to do something dramatic and quickly, so I grabbed a pair of scissors and to everyone’s horror slashed the entire back of the dress open, which instantly filled out and doubled in size. I forced myself to take some responsibility and told Elbie and Eva to get under the skirt and hold it out to create further volume. I barked at the boys to mould a smoke bomb to the top of the umbrella and get it lit, and then I climbed the stepladder ready to take the first shot, muttering under my breath… “Come on, come on, for god’s sake make this happen.”

Lighting the smoke bomb took several attempts, but just as it sparked and was passed to Natasha, the sun came out. It was still low in the sky but it lit her entire body with a soft warm glow. The smoke began to fizz and plumes of blue colour burst out from the top of the umbrella … and then the wind came. I could barely catch my breath; it was exactly how I had imagined it in my dreams. The skirt of the dress began to billow, and with a sudden gust it filled up like a giant circus tent! The boys started cheering while Elbie and Eva collapsed with laughter under the skirt. It was amazing and it was all happening at once! Natasha held onto the heavy umbrella, bracing the wind and I marvelled, mouth open, at how everything had completely changed in a matter of seconds. The smoke spiralled and danced, the dress rocked in the wind and I kept pressing the shutter – it was working, it was working!!

After we caught that first incredible picture, I felt anything was possible. We moved around the field setting up the different props and scenes and I quickly found my confidence as things fell into place. We ran over our time slot and ended up with the public entering the field and following us around to see what we were doing. Much to everyone’s delight we threw three kilos of powder paint over Natasha, which was an incredible thing to see in real life. The colour was extraordinary: she looked as if she had died right then and there in a cloud of purple, deep in the flowers. We ran backwards and forwards dragging props and buckets of paint and by eleven we had finally finished. We packed up the van, returned to the house, I made everyone bacon sandwiches and tea, and then drove them to the station to go home.

Later I staggered back through the front door and stood exhausted in my empty kitchen assessing the aftermath of the past few days. There was lavender everywhere, paint on the floor, bags of equipment and cups and plates stacked on every surface. I pulled the crumpled sketches I had drawn in a panic that morning out of my pocket, and smiled at them, smoothing the corners with my purple-stained fingers. We had done it, and it had looked good. I didn’t mess up, nobody knew how I had felt, and probably didn’t until reading this now. The relief was so acute I could have cried. I went straight to bed and slept until late afternoon, got up, cleaned the house and loaded the pictures onto my laptop. I immediately emailed Elbie the first raw shot of the smoke umbrella picture, it took my breath away and I couldn’t connect myself as being the person that had created it. In my heart I now knew we could do this again; it could only get a little easier after this. I thought about all the help my friends had given me, no one was getting anything out of it, yet they had still worked until midnight and been up with the dawn. It had been chaos, but wonderful chaos. I suppose none of us would have ever sat in a field at dawn with a lavender giantess and a smoking umbrella before that day, and that is what it was all really about – creating something magical for the absolute hell of it.

That is when things changed for me, and photography became more about the moment, the experience I shared with these people, rather than just the act of finishing the final picture. I was getting to do this for real and sharing it with equally passionate people. It felt good, and I felt closer to all of them for it. We had laughed ourselves stupid and we all looked like hell, but it had also been so much fun. A moment later my Inbox chimed and Elbie had replied with an over-excited email full of squeals and exclamation marks, ending with the words: ‘What are we doing next?’… and so it is fair to say that was when ‘Wonderland’ truly began.