Fern Berresford: fashioning a vision

Sometimes, after your first unexpected success – with awards and nominations to boot – what follows is not the expected trajectory to recognition and success, but years more of hard slog. You know you’re on the right path, it’s just that the route you’re on is convoluted and you keep looping back on yourself, like a figure lost in the fog.

My parents had gone to bed, I was 13, and [A Clockwork Orange] was on Film4. I’d never seen anything like it. The art direction.

So it was for photographer and director Fern Berresford, who knew early on what path she wanted to take, courtesy of her granddad’s habit of screening old movies on his home projector whenever she came round – the likes of Laurel & Hardy and other immortals of silent cinema. He taught her how to thread a projector and gave her her first camera, too – a Canon AE1 – which is more or less where her career path begins.

Above: Photography from Berresford's Time to Reign series. 

She also credits the influence of a hugely controversial film banned in the UK until the early noughties – a film you’d have to go to Paris to see if you were to see it at all. “It was A Clockwork Orange. The first piece of film that really caught my attention! My parents had gone to bed, I was 13, and it was on Film4. I’d never seen anything like it. The art direction...”

That was my first time working with a proper crew and proper actors, with a proper DP. I felt so in the right place.

Her career path since then has taken some twists and turns but now she’s where she wanted to be, working in Ireland with Motherland, Rakish in the US, and signed in the UK with Rogue and Academy, with a reel of advertising spots, music videos and short films to her name, as well as an arresting roster of in-your-face fashion photography, with their own inbuilt sense of narrative drama and visual impact reminiscent of the silent movies she watched with her granddad as a child.

Above: Photography from Berresford's series, For Dramatic Effect. 

After studying at Falmouth College of Art, she moved to London and took an entry job as a runner then receptionist at Diverse Productions, which made reality TV with Bear Grylls. All the while she was writing scripts, setting up shoots with friends, entering competitions and looking for that one career-making opportunity. That came at Therapy Films, with the support of Mark Denton and Sara Cummins.

Mark Denton taught me the value of a good idea, rather than just aesthetics.

“I didn’t know a thing about advertising at the time, and I just loved it there,” she says. “It was such a frenetic atmosphere, and there were constantly jobs in production.” She followed Denton and Cummins to Coy! Communications, where she worked as his creative assistant and directed her first proper shoot at the age of 23, for a Christian Aid campaign called Ctrl.Alt.Shift. “I wrote a short film called it Man Made, and shot it on 16mm. I loved every second of making it. That was my first time working with a proper crew, actors, and a professional DP. I felt so in the right place.”

Above: The World's Strongest Woman campaign for Allianz Ireland, directed by Fern Berresford. 

That first work won her a nomination in Cannes’ Young Director Award, and scooped Best Film at the Woman in Film & TV Festival. But building up a reel proved to be a ten-year slog. “The photography came out of how long it was taking to build up a reel,” she says. “I started work on some very low-budget music videos, like for a grand.” During that time, she also worked as Denton’s creative assistant, learning the ropes of advertising and some important fundamentals. “He taught me the value of a good idea, rather than just aesthetics,” she recalls. “The value of a really great concept at the heart of it.”

She turned freelance, working with directors on treatments and focusing on stills photography to get her ideas out into the world. “I saw photography as the same skill set as directing, bringing your idea to life, communicating that idea, building a vision, knowing how to practically bring that vision to life.”

I was trying to show a distinct style so you know what you’re going to get when you work with me.

After another self-directed apprenticeship in lighting, retouching and realising the visions she had in her head, she began calling up model agents and make-up artists and stylists to make work she’d send off to magazines.

Above: The Original Adult Soft Drink for Fentiman, directed by Fern Berresford. 

“Mark saw some of the work, and said, ‘I think I can sell this’. It was another outlet for telling the stories that were in my head, creating these characters. It was fashion, but I was also in advertising. I was trying to show a distinct style so you know what you’re going to get when you work with me. If it needs to be attention-grabbing, I might go for something punchy, in bold colours, with direct lighting, whereas if it’s more emotive, or character led, or the audience needs to connect in an emotional way, I’d go for something darker, with soft lighting and different casting. Creative styling always is centred on what the idea needs.”

I was half awake in the morning, I was thinking about the climate crisis, and the image of a ticking clock melting.

One of her first professional photography projects was Melt, six dayglo still-life images of an alarm clock, skull, headphones, camera, gun and toy soldier. Familiar but nightmarish. “They came to me when I was half awake in the morning, I was thinking about the climate crisis, and the image of a ticking clock melting. Then I thought about beauty standards for women – that was the skull. For the cameras, I thought about social media, and the lens we see everything through now. Each was a comment on different things happening in society at the time.”

Above: Berresford's photography, Evil Tea Lady (left), Brut (right). 

Other photography series followed, including Time To Reign, a photo series that comments on the cyclical nature of fashion and trends. It won her the British Journal of Photography’s Female Focus award. Another series, For Dramatic Effect (also a short film), features striking models in close-up, sporting bloody noses, shot against plain backgrounds in saturated colour. “I’m interested in art that is pushed, that has a strong style to it,” she says. “I loved the work of fashion photographer Tim Walker, and you may see echoes of his work in my characters. Though he uses a lot of natural light, and mine’s more punchy.”

I can see myself in [my work] now. It’s taken that time to find my creative voice.

She looks back on the past five years as the culmination of the graft she’d put in, working alone or with friends, doing her own retouching. Now she has a crew and assistants to help her make her visions a reality for clients. Visions that include the weirdly, wonderfully surreal Fentiman’s The Original Adult Soft Drink, that more than anything else, draws on those silent films on the projector in her granddad's home in Hucknall.