
We first met Hayley not so long ago at the Ideas Tap photographic awards held in conjunction with Magnum photos back in September, where she was shortlisted along with 8 other young photographers between the ages of 16 and 30 competing for a dream internship with one of the world's most highly regarded photographic agencies.
Hayley's workreally stood out for its striking and arresting quality, reverence for traditional techniques and also the inspiration behind the project. Rather than risk reinterpreting her work, here's Hayley explaining it in her own words:
"These images focus on the idea of generational ambiguity, and the unavoidable effect of mass consumption (in terms of fashion) on today’s youth. As teenagers were only an ‘invention’ of the 1950s, adolescents of previous decades were far less amply catered for than today, and the minimal options in clothing made them extremely easy to categorize - for example: Hippies, Mods, Rockers, Skinheads and Punks. Caroline Evans states that Punk ‘was the last subculture that was, however briefly, oppositional’, and since then (in Britain at least) there have been no youth cultures or fashion movements with the power to define a generation. This project sets out to explore this extreme lack of visual coherence through photography, shooting a cross-section of young people in the manner of an image-based census. Mixing portraits of interesting and unusual individuals with traditional darkroom processes aims to create a strange atmosphere that shows how thanks to fast fashion and the removal of many social taboos (that prevented previous generations from expressing themselves), the young have lost the power to rebel, and drowned in nostalgia will become impossible for future generations to date.
The images are originally black and white negatives, which were hand printed using traditional darkroom processes. The colour was added later, painted on by hand, as was commonplace before the mass production of colour film in the mid 20th century."
Fantastic work from a very talented young photographer who we hope to see much more of in the future.
To see more from Hayley check out her blog and portfolio.