An Introduction

A bit of an intro to the owner of Picture Papers.

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Heya guys - as I mentioned on some of my Instagram posts I’ve decided to make this channel a bit of a mixed media outlet as I know everyone prefers digesting content in a different way. I’m personally a big listener, and am plugged in to a Podcast or an Audiobook for most of the day. Equally, some people prefer to read, so for most of the articles in Picture Papers., you’ll get both. Sometimes there’ll even be a video to watch, but depends how relevant that is for the content / how enterprising I’ve been that week. Ordinarily I’ll record the audio, and then transcribe, so don’t expect immaculate punctuation or grammar…

Anyway - I’m Alicia Waite, which I’m sure you know at this stage and I’ve been a professional photographer for about 4 years now. Given my age and that I’ve been working in fashion since I was 21, you could say I’ve come to it a little late in the day and that’s because I entered the profession a bit sideways; I never assisted or worked in a big studio, so I’ve learned things in an unorthodox order and manner. Personally I think this means I have a fairly unique view point on the industry and how you can work within it, but you can decide for yourself when you’ve read / listened to a bit more about it below.

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So, I’m 37 years old, I’m married to a lighting designer called Max, and I have two daughters who are 2 and 4 currently. We left London a couple of years ago after being there for nearly 15 years, to live in the English countryside, so now we’re about an hour outside of the city and travel in and out as we need. Sometimes it’s 4 times a week sometimes it’s none, so we get a pretty good balance. This year, after having my kids and slightly coasting along with work for a couple of years while navigating the two-kids-under-two, being freelance and moving house gauntlet, I decided to really push myself professionally, and find out exactly what I wanted my career to look like. So, 2023 has been the year I’ve tried everything. I’ve shot fashion, interiors, jewellery, beauty, and lifestyle. I’ve shot analogue and digital, moving image and stills, directed, self-shot, produced, and been a gun-for-hire. I’ve worked with experienced models, new faces, celebrities, talent, and influencers, as well as product, furniture and food and beverage. I’ve done stills portraits on a busy film set with two minutes to get my shot, and I’ve done reportage at glossy, high profile events. I’ve worked with an agent and without, and seen the merits of both. I’ve been flown overseas to Rome, Paris and the Greek Islands, and I’ve also shot at home, in my own house. I’ve had my first printed fashion editorial in a global magazine, had images in American Vogue, and my first two magazine covers. I’ve seen my work printed on billboards on the London tube. I worked with global brands like Tiffany & Co, but also with start ups and brands I’ve been collaborating with for years. And I’ve shot some of my heroes. Professionally, it’s been the best year of my life for sure. So, after all this trial and error, I’ve carved out a vision of what I want my career to be - for now at least. Next year, I’m sure, will be the beginning of a new set of trials, but this time you can come along with me - this Substack being one of them.

With Picture Papers, I want to be a window into the industry I felt like I couldn’t see into for so long. I want to show you the process, the nuts and bolts, and the details of a fashion shoot. I’ll be interviewing people from all angles of the creative process about photography and how they interact with this medium in their sphere of the industry. What they like in a shoot and what they don’t. What makes a concept work. What the moodboard looked like, what equipment was used, what lights, and what the post-production process was.

I think an important question to answer is how I became a photographer in the first place, and why I want to share this information with you guys. So here’s an attempt to explain my last 15 years in the creative industries and how I came to be a full-time photographer only 4 years ago: -

I come from a creative household - my mum was a designer for fashion brands when she was young, my dad was in the textile trade, and my brother and sister are now working in film production and costume respectively, so it’s safe to say it’s somewhere in our blood. My mum has every Vogue from the 70s onwards which I used to pretend were school books, marking every line of the glossy text like a teacher with permanent marker. She also has impeccable taste and a tailor’s eye for fabric and form which I think she must have passed on by osmosis to us all. Fashion and clothes were just always part of the conversation, for as long as I can remember. There were always piles of coffee table books lying around - I used to flick through Peter Lindbergh Images of Women and Mario Testino’s Portraits all the time, studying the colour, the texture, and the grain of the pictures. But - all those photographers were men, and basic as it may sound when I was 10 years old that meant fashion photography being an available option for a woman’s career just never crossed my mind. Annie Leibowitz, Corinne Day, Elaine Constantine etc just weren’t on my radar at the time, so I never considered it to be more than a fantasy job for people from another planet. I was good at writing at school so had decided I wanted to be a fashion journalist, and I chose everything from my GSCE’s and A-Levels to my English degree to get closer to that goal (I could have just done a short course and plowed myself into internships, but that’s by the by - hindsight is a great thing…).

Come 2009, I was a student, in my third year, and was visiting my sister in London. We went shopping on Oxford Street, and when we were in Gap, we saw a tiny tortoise-like woman in glasses racing around the shop scooping up clothes by the armful, shouting orders at the shop staff, and generally causing a ruckus. On closer inspection, it was Hilary Alexander, one of the most famous fashion journalists of that time, and some might say, something of an institution. I’d seen her column in my parents’ newspaper throughout my teens and knew that if I didn’t say anything to her, my mum would kill me. So I stumbled over to her in a daze and asked if I could email her to ask her advice on making it in fashion journalism. She thrust a card at me with her assistant’s details on and barked, ‘just do an internship or something!!’ and then plowed off towards her next shop, leaving me terrified but exhilarated. I would soon learn hat was the effect she had on most people, because I did email her assistant (shout out to Olivia Lidbury - an amazing journalist to this day), who signed me up for an internship on the Telegraph Fashion desk starting that summer, and thus my fashion career / baptism by fire would begin.

That internship would turn into a job and start a 10-year rollercoaster ride through so many parts of the fashion industry I feel like I’ve tried pretty much everything once. After years at the Telegraph under Hilary and then Lisa Armstrong, I actually realised journalism wasn’t for me. I didn’t have the right training (should have done that course!), I was bored with churning out news stories and galleries to get clicks. And actually, it didn’t come that naturally to me, which came into sharp relief when I hired one of my interns, who was named Ellie Pithers. When I saw the ease with which she tapped out beautifully written feature after feature, I knew I was in the wrong job. (Needless to say, Ellie went on to become Vogue’s Digital Features Director, and is still a Contributing Editor today so I could obviously spot the talent - I just didn’t necessarily have it myself.)

After being made redundant - a blessing in disguise but obviously painful at the time - I applied for a short social media contract at Elle UK and spent 6 months attempting to cajole a strategy into their Twitter and Facebook accounts when the world of social media was changing on the daily. Meanwhile, my friends, who weirdly all ended up in fashion in some capacity, were finding their own feet in the industry, launching clothing labels, starting blogs, and testing out this new channel called Instagram. So I decided to apply what I had learned at Elle to younger brands, helping them navigate social media, identifying people who looked like they were going places, and gifting them various products from friend’s and acquaintances brand’s to chat about on their Blogspots or in Valencia-filtered Instagram pictures. We were all learning on the job, muddling our way through in our mid-twenties, faking it until we made it.

But then one of those brands, a mid-price Swedish-English watch company, started to take off. Like really, really take off. I was working there two days a week, then three, then it was just all-hands-on-deck, quit-your-other-clients-as-we-need-every-minute-you-have kind of thing. I worked there for 5 years, filling in the creative gaps in the team wherever it was needed. I helped with gifting at the start, then had a year doing PR, travelling to New York, Sweden, Denmark and Berlin to meet key members of the press, and organising promotional events, like a branded Boiler Room and glossy fashion week dinners. Then I moved onto the content strategy, organising and producing the campaigns, directing films, commissioning content stories, and publishing a biannual magazine. Honestly, it was epic. We went from 3 of us packaging up watches in a cupboard in the Ugli Building (not kidding that was the actual name), to turning over £10 million at Christmas two years later, from a cool open-plan office in Covent Garden with 40 staff. After 5 years, I was Head of Content, managing a creative team of six people, editing my own branded magazine, and considering the next stage of my career. The brand was turning to a more product-focused strategy, and all I cared about was the creative - it was time to move on to the next thing.

So, I did the same thing again: I left a big company to work with younger brands on my own, using everything I’d learned at the watch company to aid the growth of these up-and-coming labels who had been started by friends, contacts of friends, and then contacts of contacts of friends. Putting together creative strategies for people who had no idea about social media and educating them on what good photography can do for selling a product. I bought a new camera and started to shoot the stories I was pitching by myself - cutting out the middle man. A few months later I bought another, better camera, and then new lenses, and kept on leaving the strategy part of these projects until the bitter end of the deadline day because I’d been embroiled in Youtube learning about how to achieve maximum bokeh, what settings would get the right amount of motion blur, how to get rid of a plug socket in Photoshop etc etc. It became an obsession - I wanted to know more and more and more about the art and process of photography, and that curiosity hasn’t left me until today. I decided to do only photography during the first lockdown, announced it on Instagram, and haven’t looked back since.

3 and a half years after that, and my photography and I are still a work in progress, but I do feel like I’m at the end of the beginning in that I know what I love, what energises me and what I want to do more of, and I want this channel to be something that helps other people find out the same. I’m not the finished article, but I’ve come a long way, and though I’m a huge believer in experience being an unbeatable tool for learning, I might have found my way here a little earlier in my life had there been a channel like this to refer to.

With that in mind, please do share, forward on, or recommend to anyone you think might be interested in, or is even dabbling with, the idea of embarking on this career. Hopefully, it can be the tool for them which I didn’t have.

Equally, any questions, ideas or suggestions all welcome in the comments or, if you’re a Paid Subscriber you can hop over to the private chat and ask me anything over there Thanks for reading / listening if you got this far. Looking forward to sharing more :)