Photographer Profile: Derrick Santini

Derrick Santini investigates themes of beauty and desire through lenticular photography. Once a technique used in novelty rulers, it’s transformed in Santini’s hands into a beautiful, magical trick of the light, as Lee Sharrock discovers

Derrick Santini fell in love with photography as a teenager in his hometown of Scarborough, when he began documenting life with his mum’s old Agfa camera. His passion was unusual for someone so young, and pre-dated our over-sharing social media age where everyone is a photographer, and teenagers capture everything on their smartphones to tweet or share for a fleeting moment on Snapchat. Santini’s obsession with photographing his surroundings caused some of his friends to ask him why he couldn’t “just chill out and live things instead of always taking photos”.

Fast-forward a few decades to the Instagram era, and that obsessive nature, combined with a BA in photography at the acclaimed London College of Communication, has paid dividends, with Santini enjoying a successful career in fashion, reportage and portrait photography.

In recent years he’s refocused his talent onto fine art photography. When shots meets Santini in his East London studio, he is deep in post-production for his latest series of lenticular prints In Your Mind, buzzing with frenetic creative energy as he talks about his new series, inspirations and love of the technique of lenticular photography.

The lenticular process has been around since the 1940s and, as Santini explains on his website, “involves photographing a sequence of still images of live models, which are layered and printed using a special technique, then placed under a thin ribbed plastic sheet which acts as a lens, thus revealing the full animation within and enabling it to spring to life and move with the viewer, creating delicate and hypnotic animations with an illusion of depth and space.”

Turning novelty rulers into art

Santini has captured the essence of some of the most iconic contemporary models, musicians, artists, fashion designers, actors, writers and taste-makers of our age, including Yves Saint Laurent, Alexander McQueen, Helena Bonham Carter, Gilbert & George, Dame Judi Dench, Lily Allen, Zadie Smith, Idris Elba and Suki Waterhouse. As a commercial photographer he has shot campaigns for brands including Apple, Reebok, Firetrap, Nike, K-Swiss and Asics and his love of fashion has been rewarded by commissions from Esquire, US Vogue, Marie Claire and iD.

However, creating fine art and making his mythological visions come to life with lenticulars is his true passion. Santini started experimenting with lenticulars about eight years ago, gaining the attention of the art world. In 2006 he created three lenticular images of actress Gwendoline Christie (before she found fame in Game Of Thrones). They were exhibited at Rendez-Vous in Paris, a prêt-à-porter salon fusing film, fashion and art.

Santini originally came across the basic form of lenticular photography (or ‘flicker pictures’) as a child growing up in Scarborough, in the seaside arcades, in the form of novelty items such as rulers showing dancing hula girls: “I loved lenticulars as a kid, like the rulers and pens. Their naivety reminds me of seaside humour.”

He has taken lenticulars to the next level, creating animated loops from selects of his photos in Photoshop: “Invariably I’ll make up a sequence. It’s like stop-frame animation that I create in Photoshop. I create an image that’s a composite of all the shots put together. Then when you put a lens on top, it knocks out the other frames and you see one at a time. The lens realigns it.”

In 2010 Shoreditch’s Neu Gallery gave Santini’s lenticulars their first London show, I Love You, I Want To Fuck You, and in 2012 Santini created the series Metamorphosis for London’s Scream gallery. The exhibition brought complaints from the Metropolitan Police after Santini’s lenticular of a naked woman in a compromising position with a swan caught the eye of a policeman passing the gallery in genteel Mayfair.

Santini went to great lengths to achieve realism in this reimagining of the Greek myth of Leda, seduced by Zeus in the form of a swan, using a real live swan in the shoot. Although the story had inspired many classical and Renaissance painters from Rubens to Michelangelo, Santini’s version was a bit too much for this particular bobby, who sent colleagues to demand the picture be removed as it “promoted bestiality”. The gallery was saved from having to put up a fight, though; the exhibition was ending anyway.

Santini found the controversy amusing. He explained how much trust was involved between model and photographer on the shoot, and the difficulty of casting: “Most of the girls thought I was mad when I told them my idea about the swan. Then I found a French philosophy student who knew the story and loved the idea.”

Santini is a romantic whose work is infused with influences from mythology, poetry, nature and a classical appreciation of the human body. In Metamorphosis and his new series In Your Mind, Santini addresses issues that have preoccupied mankind and influenced artists for centuries, exploring abstractions such as ‘the colour of love’ in his latest work.

For him the lenticular process provides a bridge between fantasy and reality: “These series have their roots in mythology, fantasy and good old folklore, and are a culmination of long harboured ideas based around people, animals and birds, and the metaphysical world that binds these creatures and characters – in lore and in reality, especially in the place where they intersect and cross over. Creating photographic lenticulars to tell these stories brings these ancient notions to interactive life.”

The inert desire of all mankind

For In Your Mind Santini spent over a year shooting on location in the sea off Mallorca, and at a less exotic East London swimming pool, followed by six months in post-production. “The colour thing was a big deal, breaking down light into the spectrum.” 

More than half of our body is made up of water, so by shooting in water Santini is looking deep into our physiology. The lenticular technique lends a fluidity that enables Santini to turn a model into a mermaid gliding effortlessly through water, or a naked sea nymph looping the loop like the Oceanids of Greek mythology.

These primordial images examine the base instincts within all of us: desire, love of life, and fear of mortality. Santini sums up this quest to look deep into our psyche with his photography: “An inert desire in all mankind is to prove that we existed, and in a way photography could have been invented to do just that.”

In Your Mind, 11-22 June, pertweeandersongold.com