About Me
Isabelle Rutland is a fashion photographer based in Brighton.
Isabelle's work revolves around crafting alternative worlds, ones that flip our perspective on life and question our social norms. She hints at themes such as retro-futurism and surrealism, often looking to films and books for inspiration. There is honesty and humour throughout her work, which encourages the audience to become more reflective and curious.
At one time, there was a world where the people known as ‘The Happy Folk’ lived. A fictional world that Isabelle created that may not always be how it seems. In this project she delves into her fascination with the power of visual storytelling to create a world that transcends reality. She often shoots on medium format giving her work a blurred sense of time. Grain and light leaks in her images helping the work distinguish itself from reality and this distorted fictional society. She hopes to give the audience a light-hearted perspective on life into this parallel universe.
INSPIRATION
The Happy Folk
Isabelle's work is influenced by the techniques used by film directors and cinematographers such as Yorgos Lanthimos, Nicholas Roeg and Jordan Peele. The films she explored were ‘Dogtooth’, ‘The Lobster’, ‘Nope’ and ‘The Man who fell to Earth’. Isabelle explored how they used human behaviour and contradicting social structures, to paint their honest examination of this world. Especially just coming out of a pandemic, the strange lives these characters live are not so dissimilar to our own.
With an appreciation of the stylism of retro-futurism, Isabelle often inform similar aesthetic choices in my shoots. There is a deliberate blend of alien and dystopian worlds in my work to create a metaphorical link between the control exerted by alien beings in science fiction films, and the power dynamics and societal norms that influence our lives here on Earth.
MY WORK
PORTFOLIOS
DETAIL
The Lobster Dance
Isabelle takes prop references from specific scenes in each film. In The lobster she looked at Lanthimos’s contrasting dance scenes throughout the film. In the solo dance rave scene, the single characters are required to dance in the forests to electronic music through headphones, without any romantic contact. Isabelle wanted to work with Lanthimos’s use of dance and awkward gestures to portray the loneliness and lack of passion that comes with this eccentric and heavily controlled way of living.
“We all dance by ourselves. That’s why we only play electronic music.”
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