An artwork made with the body is something else entirely, and that’s what I strive for with every shoot.
My name is Dan Ormerod, a fine art photographer working with the nude figure. This should not need saying, but none of these pictures are artificially generated.
I found this way of working during a portraiture course, almost by accident, and it completely energised me in a way nothing else had in a long time. It was working with the subject, the exchange between us in the room, that pulled me in. Light became the tool I reached for to shape that: how a single shift in shadow could reveal one part of a person and conceal another, and how that choice, not just the body itself, is what actually makes the picture.
Every shoot is a chance to build something authentic, through light, through direction, through atmosphere, so that what ends up in the frame is chosen rather than incidental. My approach to this has come from practice: every shoot offers something new, and it’s that accumulation my work is actually built on.
None of it happens alone, though. The work I’m proudest of has always come from a genuine collaboration with the subject, something neither of us could have made without the other. That collaboration is as much the subject of my work as the body is.