Wylde Meets: David Newton
Interview by Amanda Carr
David Newton’s exquisite images, with their sense of witty glamour, have made him one of the most in-demand photographers in fragrance and beauty. Wylde visited David at his central London studio and home.
A quick scan of David Newton’s beautifully edited Instagram feed confirms that he is a master of visual storytelling. His editorial and advertising work with Dior, YSL, Tom Ford and countless other beauty brands, as well as for luxury magazines Vogue, Bazaar and Elle, offers up aspirational images that are deliciously slick yet often a little mischievous. This luscious, textural storytelling has us swooning and wanting to know more. Happily for Wylde, David agreed to some gentle interrogation.
The only thing I was ever good at was art. I have an affinity for visuals but I really can’t do anything else. I studied illustration at what was then Harrow College of Art, then worked successfully as an illustrator in the late 80s and 90s. When I was still at college, my final year project was to look at an area that was badly served by illustration. At that time classical albums were dreadful; it was often just a photo of the composer on the album, with nothing that told you anything about the music. So I went to Decca Records with my student portfolio and they loved it. I immediately got work creating classical record covers, so my degree show was made up of commissioned work, including a lot of Mahler.
Maybe working on LP covers helped me later with the Instagram format. You can now put portrait and landscape formats up on Instagram, but I still very much like working in the square format.
Back in the early 2000s I ‘discovered’ computers, which were becoming the big thing. Photoshop and scanners were an epiphany for me. The Coningsby Gallery in Tottenham Street held an exhibition of my scanning work and the art director of House & Garden magazine offered me the food page for a whole year based on t he strength of the show. Then Harper’s Bazaar commissioned me to illustrate a woman with her therapist on speed-dial, with her hand in thepicture. I knew this wouldn’t work on the scanner so I got a digital camera and taught myself how to use it from YouTube videos. I’m entirely self-taught.
It wasn’t a conscious decision to move into perfume and beauty. I just instinctively headed that way. I’ve never had a business plan; I’m led by art. I wanted to become the type of photographer whose work I was seeing in French magazines, people like Italian still-life photographer Guido Mocafico, who’s still my absolute hero for high concept but simple imagery, and Graeme Montgomery, who’s renowned for his luxury work. I absolutely love working in fragrance and beauty. I’m massively fetishistic about surfaces and textures. I love the sheen on a tube of lipstick or the card used for the box a fragrance comes in.
There’s often a ‘eureka!’ moment for me around the concept for an image. I get a lot of my ideas drifting off to sleep or laying in the bath, or sitting next to my washing machine when it’s on, which always makes people laugh. I discovered recently it’s all connected with being in a state of semi-consciousness, which unlocks the doors of creativity. Some people use drugs for that, but all I need is get into a half-conscious state. I’ve solved so many dilemmas as I drift off to sleep or sit in a darkened room with my washing machine rumbling away. Often an idea will work its way into a finished picture in my brain, so I know exactly what I’m going to shoot, so it’s helpful that there’s no distance between my home and my studio.
It’s so important to keep your mind open and be like a sponge. I feel sad when I hear people ask me where I get my ideas from, as if they are something you could find in a shop or into a gallery. It’s not outside of you; it grows from how and who you are, every minute of the day. It’s also very important to play. My Instagram account is 50% commissioned work and 50% me playing, often with my long-term collaborator, stylist and editor Bettina Vetter. It’s what I call my ‘open sketch book’. I’m showing my ideas.
I get so inspired by the shape and texture of the bottle, sometimes I haven’t even opened it before the image is finished. I went to the launch of the new Tom Ford Beau du Jour and loved the bottle so much I came straight home from the party and shot it, and I had it up on Instagram before I went to bed. Although I do actually love the fragrance, too.
With a brand like Serge Lutens, though, I smell every fragrance because each one comes with a complex and detailed back story which you need to pay attention to. I adore this perfume house because it cultivates its own wonderfully bizarre weirdness, which is an absolute dream for a photographer.
There’s often a sinister, multi-layered element to my storytelling too. I went through a phase of doing horrible things to lipsticks, slicing them with razors and so on. YSL Beauty told me, ‘We love it when you torture our products!’
Instagram has dramatically changed how I work. Sometimes I can get a commission and the whole job from beginning to end is done via e-mail without actually speaking to or seeing anyone. I no longer have an agent; I don’t need one because Instagram does the job.
For example, I’ve recently started to work with Sephora, who discovered me via Instagram. We’re doing a Mother’s Day story, which will be 10 images of perfumes, one bottle per page. They sent me a breakdown of what each picture needs to consist of, which bottle, what the inspiration is – since it’s for Mother’s Day they want soft lighting – and so on.
When it comes to a brief, I like being given a list of key words and an idea of what the picture is conveying. Sentences like: ‘For a woman who is very strong’. It’s very important to theme the whole story when it’s over a lot of pages, as it has to read well in the magazine. So I spend a long time thinking about connecting the images. A client will send the products, and for Sephora I’m getting the props, too. Then they leave me to my own devices. I might spend two or three days in the studio, working towards the finished image. Then I’ll send the work over.
We’ve all heard the line ‘never work with children or animals’ – but I do like to work with snakes. A friend of mine knew a slip of a girl called Lindsey, who owned a bright orange California corn snake called Molly. I thought, if this tiny girl has a snake and it’s called Molly, how hard can it be?
I’d never touched a snake before she came into the studio and I was definitely a bit anxious. She brought it in a cat box the studio and I was definitely a bit anxious. She brought it in a cat box wrapped in a blanket, but I just made a conscious decision not to be phobic. I felt I could go in two directions, scream and be primal or be professional and get on with it. Molly was easy to work with, though she did bite me. I’ve been bitten a few times by snakes but it’s nothing more than a little nip.
I discovered @smithys_reptiles on Instagram when I was commissioned by YSL Beauty to photograph Le Vestiaire des Parfums collection. For the fragrance Saharienne, I had one of my bathtime moments and imagined the fragrance bottle on sand with a snake. We used a baby black snake because it had to look nicely proportioned against the bottle. He was lovely to work with.
Instagram’s been very important to my success. I take everything on my studio camera and then load up the digital file on Instagram. I check who’s following me every day and I’m consciously friendly too, because I like interacting and the algorithms like it. I always try to respond to everyone who comments.
I’d reserved my Instagram handle (my name) early on, though I didn’t do anything with it until 2017. Ironically, I was quite anti-Instagram. I thought it was for teenagers, that I didn’t need to be part of a popularity contest and I hated the hearts and ‘likes’. But I wouldn’t be where I am today without it.
The Wylde Questionnaire
My desert island fragrance is… my current favourite, Tom Ford’s new Beau de Jour. I love fresh, green fragrances and this really is lovely, it’s taken over from Parterre’s The Run Of The River, which I’d probably still be using, but unfortunately I’ve finished the bottle.
My favourite smell in the world is… the smell of grown-up life. When I was a kid my parents used to love having parties, where the very adult smells of perfume and cocktails and food we never normally ate intermingled with cigarette smoke. They were the intoxicating combination smells of the adult world and the hallway leading to our living room would convey that hint of glamour, which I still love.
My favourite scented flower is… a head-to-head between lavender and rose. I’ve got an old lady’s taste in flowers. I was thrilled when Tom Ford brought out his Lavender Extreme recently; it satisfies my love of lavender but there’s something really modern there, too.
If I could only chose one fragrance it would be… YSL Jazz, which was my first fragrance. Things happened when I put it on; it got a response! Nostalgia is massively important to me.
The theme song of my life would be… my two favourite songs are ABBA’s Dancing Queen, which is absolutely the best song ever written and The Human League’s Don’t You Want Me. I just love them both.