Vee Speers

Vee Speers' most recent work is The Birthday Party, a collection of portraits of children inspired by her daughter's birthday party. Having observed children playing at being adults, Speers imagined what characters they would create if they pushed their role-playing to imaginative extremes. In these photographs she has stripped away the idealistic stereotypes of childhood to question the adult idealisation of the ‘happiest days of our lives’. Revealing the duplicity of children, she captures them happy to experiment with imperfection and embrace the grotesque. Rather than smiling for their birthday photograph, children in these images explore a sense of danger and disregard for common social expectations. For this project Speers has experimented with combining traditional and digital techniques, shooting on 5 x 4" black & white polaroid film and in post-production adding subtle colour before making prints using the Ilfochrome process. Characteristics of these prints are high colour saturation, deep blacks and brilliant whites with optimum gradation from the brightest highlights to the deepest shadows. The resulting visuals appear neither black and white nor colour. For the past fifteen years Vee Speers has been based in Paris, working in fashion, photojournalism and fine art photography. She lives in the infamous red-light district of the rue St. Denis, an area that forms the backdrop for her Bordello series. Deriving her inspiration from the fin-de-siècle decadence of her surroundings, Vee photographs from an idealistic and romantic view but also engages the viewer in more than purely a narcissistic wander through the mind’s desires, creating “a visual celebration of the mystery of seduction.” Shooting in real bordellos and interpreting historical references simultaneously, she aims to use the idea as a juxtaposition “between genuine emotion and something more staged… a shift between the real and the surreal.” http://www.veespeers.com/