He’s a highly sought-after fashion and portrait photographer, but there’s a lot more going on in August Bradley’s photos than models staring vacantly into the camera. The Los Angeles-based Bradley calls himself a conceptual photographer,  and his work brims with captivating ideas and surprising, contrasting juxtapositions that always suggest—if never straightforwardly tell—a story. In his photos, something always seems like it’s just happened, or is about to happen, or is already happening somewhere right outside the frame.

Like any good storyteller, Bradley chooses his settings carefully. In his fashion series “Ghost Stories,” for Runway Boutique in L.A., he brought traveled to a ghost town at the California/Nevada border to produce a set of spooky, evocative images of fashion models set against decaying rooms and falling-apart houses.

Bradley uses dramatic lighting and heavy digital retouching to give his photos their signature unreal, almost hyperreal, painted effect. Bradley has said he’s more influenced by painters than photographers in terms of light, mood, and color tones, as well as authors such as Thomas Pynchon and David Foster Wallace.

His work for the 2008 Hasselblad Masters book shows Bradley at his best, in a set of portraits that blend a range of clothes, objects and setting from a diverse palette. They look somehow Elizabethan, noir, and carnival sideshow all at once, with strong hints of an underlying symbolic language like that found in formal Baroque portraiture.

It’s an almost impossibly accomplished style for someone who’s only been a professional photographer for four years—although, as Bradley points out, his mother was a photographer and he practically grew up in her studio, doing lighting on her shoots since early childhood.

Bradley was a marketing strategist for consumer brands like Gap, J. Crew, and Crate & Barrel before he tried making a career of  photography, starting as a travel and adventure photographer before moving into his current conceptual realm.The world is taking notice of his fresh and original vision. Press coverage, awards, and clients are lining up at his door—even Kanye West namedropped him on his blog recently.

The attraction is easy to understand, if hard to define. Nothing looks like what you expect in an August Bradley photo. He takes you outside the everyday, into a vaguely familiar but strange and thrilling place. It’s sort of what fashion is meant to do at its best, as is art, and both of those worlds overlap in front of August Bradley’s lens.

To see his full range of work, log onto www.augustbradley.com

WORDS TM  |  IMAGES courtesy of www.augustbradley.com

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