Collaborating is at the heart of my practice,
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The world is fucked. Trump is president of the United States, Brexit is happening and that one meme of Theresa May dancing is still circling the meme-sphere. At this point I think we’re beyond a simple fix, but hey we’re not here to fix it.
DTRY SLK is a zine/collective that is just trying to help people make sense of it all. Whether your biggest fear is EU trade deals or trying to finally rid yourself of acne, this is space for you and people like you to open up, create things and share them without having the weight of ‘the industry’ on your shoulders. We don’t take ourselves too seriously and you don’t have to either. So rip it up, make a collage, stick it on your wall, burn it! (If you really want to...) Take our art and make it your own, it’s beautiful trash. It’s Dirty Silk. |
"We don’t take ourselves too seriously and you don’t have to either."
This isn’t to say that we don’t take what we do seriously, because we do (the dozens of calls to each other before a Pop-Up will tell you that); what we mean by this is that we’ve let our egos go to be able to work collaboratively. There’s no ‘I’ in team and they don’t exist in DRTY SLK either.
But now to talk about myself and my work for a minute.. I'm a self taught and self lead photographer/image maker. Pre-university, I was studying maths, physics, and chemistry, half aspiring to study engineering at Manchester or Imperial or something, but I somehow managed to get unto Media Communications at LCC with a Sociology A Level... Having basically nothing in my portfolio but a few images of friends at parties, I spent first year shooting people I met in my uni halls, setting up lofi photoshoots in my standard student room, collaborating with all these new people. During this year, I realised the importance of locality and community in trying to navigate London and its ever competitive, ever changing creative scene, themes frequently highlighted in almost all my creative projects.
This isn’t to say that we don’t take what we do seriously, because we do (the dozens of calls to each other before a Pop-Up will tell you that); what we mean by this is that we’ve let our egos go to be able to work collaboratively. There’s no ‘I’ in team and they don’t exist in DRTY SLK either.
But now to talk about myself and my work for a minute.. I'm a self taught and self lead photographer/image maker. Pre-university, I was studying maths, physics, and chemistry, half aspiring to study engineering at Manchester or Imperial or something, but I somehow managed to get unto Media Communications at LCC with a Sociology A Level... Having basically nothing in my portfolio but a few images of friends at parties, I spent first year shooting people I met in my uni halls, setting up lofi photoshoots in my standard student room, collaborating with all these new people. During this year, I realised the importance of locality and community in trying to navigate London and its ever competitive, ever changing creative scene, themes frequently highlighted in almost all my creative projects.
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Commercially, my work is aimed for publications/agencies such as Dazed, Another and Galdem. I think my work is very clean, but with many personal quirks. It’s all pretty personal since all are images of my friends and people I’ve met over the last few years, it feels like my photography has really grown with me through this defining period of my life. It feels like everything has come together perfectly for this DPS year. Now I’m looking for a mentor because everything so far has been self learned and initiated. It is mainly photography + moving image, my design work is in the early experimental stages, I’m using my collective DRTY SLK for that experimentation.
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With the collective's third Pop-Up sale being a great success, this time partnering with LCC's Darkroom Bar for the event, I have many more projects planned for this year, and collaboration is really at the heart of it all. Using the connections in music, fashion, and culture that I have already made these few years at UAL, I am able to get these projects out of the ideation/planning stage and begin making real work with real ideas. Having the opportunity and networks to be able to host the Pop-Up at the Darkroom Bar worked really well with what I wanted to achieve with the event; a space big enough to set everything up, still allowing free unrestricted movement for attendees to shop around and socialise, with their drinks! The DJs, myself and a Sound Arts student, were able to provide a vibe with the music, and we invited other students to bring their music and have a go. The whole event was a fun collaboration with LCC, students, and external guests.
Other really fun collaborations I've been involved with so far on my DPS journey: I've shot underground superstar, rapper Kish! twice for a clothing brand, producing some stunning images and video. These projects were really fun because the creator of the brand is a close friend of mine, and all of us involved in the shoot are deep into the UK underground music, DIY scene, so we had really interesting conversations on topics related to all that, conversations that are a rich source of research for contextualizing my works in progress.
Another fun collaboration has been working with online printing house Everpress, a community of creators dedicated to core community values, and anti waste. I've released some t-shirt designs with them in the past and recently I designed a hoodie to be sold on the site, a campaign that is currently running on there until the end of this month.
So collaboration, whether online or IRL, is very integral to my professional practice. Despite the word "professional" I don't see it as rigid and formal as that. Collaboration to me is more like working with friends but... working with friends as we all know is never as smooth as we initially expect. Navigating friendships and professional relationships with friends can be difficult but the 2 main things I've learned from all this experience are: Communication, communication, communication - clear and direct communication too. The second is the importance of laying out roles and boundaries very early on in a collaboration, and of course then being able to communicate when things change - and they will.
JIGGY MAG: http://www.issuu.com/JIGGYMAG
DRTY SLK INSTAGRAM: https://www.instagram.com/drty.slk/
CURRENT EVERPRESS CAMPAIGN: https://everpress.com/hyper-focus
INSTAGRAM: www.instagram.com/ubercapitalistdeathtrade/
DPS INSTAGRAM: https://www.instagram.com/daniella.oc.archive/
ONLINE PORTFOLIO: https://daniellac-archive.myportfolio.com
​Dani
DRTY SLK INSTAGRAM: https://www.instagram.com/drty.slk/
CURRENT EVERPRESS CAMPAIGN: https://everpress.com/hyper-focus
INSTAGRAM: www.instagram.com/ubercapitalistdeathtrade/
DPS INSTAGRAM: https://www.instagram.com/daniella.oc.archive/
ONLINE PORTFOLIO: https://daniellac-archive.myportfolio.com
​Dani
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