The Shift
AVAILABLE SIZES:
Standard
- Image size: 37" x 42"
- Framed with a 3" mat: 48" x 53"
- Framed with a 5" mat: 52" x 57"
Large
- Image size: 56" x 63"
- Framed with a 3" mat: 67" x 74"
- Framed with a 5" mat: 71" x 78”
We ship worldwide and use a multitude of providers to safely deliver your masterpiece. Domestic delivery and installation may also be available via Hilton Asmus Contemporary’s private art shuttle. Please inquire.
Road Trip
Utah, USA 2018
I have always been drawn to the John Ford scenery of Northern Arizona and Utah, the highlight of which has to be Monument Valley. I am clearly not alone in considering the view south from turnoff 13 on the way to Mexican Hat to be one of the most visually intoxicating sights in the US. It was, of course, used in Forrest Gump and then provided the front cover to Ridley Scott’s Thelma and Louise. The US have taken ownership of the term “road trip” as explained succinctly by this stretch of tarmac. It’s truly an iconic and timeless vista that shouts “The Wild West”.
Gladiator is probably Ridley Scott finest movie and I have watched it over and over again. Meanwhile, Thelma and Louise is rightly one of the most lauded road trip movies of all time. About a month ago, I picked up the DVD box and had a moment of inspiration. Their use of the convertible car and the head on angle offered a totally different perspective on Monument Valley.
Taking my pre-conception through to reality last Wednesday morning was no small task. I want to thank Brawler Productions in LA for collaborating with me and helping secure exclusive use of the road at the key time, around 7.40 am. It’s a busy road and the Utah State Police were fantastic. @JosieCanseco played her role brilliantly – it was not easy to look that glamorous and in charge with a wolf sitting In Thelma’s seat. It is no surprise that Victoria’s Secret has booked her for its latest show in NYC.
We arrived on site two days before the shoot as we wanted to be in control of everything within our control. I can’t remember ever pondering more over camera settings and lenses. I knew I would have a generous amount of light to play with at 7.40 and we had to use it well. The big variable was the wolf’s behaviour – the light gets too harsh from about 8am and therefore there was only a small window to get the job wrapped. It was tight, but we did it. All in all, it was a great team effort in a fairly remote part of the American West.
We showed this picture for the first time in Dallas last night and the reaction was huge. It is a very special image and I think we nailed it. Thank you, Josie, you were fabulous.
AVAILABLE SIZES:
LARGE - Edition Size: 12
- Image: 56" x 79" (143 x 201 cm)
- Framed: 67" x 90" (171 cm x 229 cm)
STANDARD - Edition Size: 12
- Image: 37" x 52" (94 x 133)
- Framed: 48" x 63" (122 x 160 cm)
We ship worldwide and use a multitude of providers to safely deliver your artwork. Domestic delivery and installation may also be available via Hilton Contemporary’s private art shuttle. Please inquire.
How the West Was Won
Nevada, 2019
The Harley-Davidson is a heavy- weight brand – like Coke and McDonalds, it was integral to the flourishing of the American Dream. The brand is emblematic of the post 1945 roll out of the US highway network that offered the American population the freedom to travel for travel’s sake. As Robert Louis Stevenson said: “I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel’s sake. The great affair is to move.”
My preconception was that if we were to use Harley-Davidsons for our “Road Trip” series in America, we needed a visual template that was “bad ass” from every perspective. We could not do this is in a half-hearted way – there was a responsibility to kill it.
All the bikers clearly had to be dudes and my preference was for the bikes themselves to be from the late 1930s through to the 1970s. I wanted choppers that aficionados would recognise and celebrate as I was determined that seasoned bikers could love the image as much as my followers. My hunch was that this might be the first and only time that these two demographics would meet. There was a required level of authenticity and attention to detail, but nothing insurmountable. My production team – Brawler – is first class at looking after that and indeed sourced the famous 1936 Knucklehead Chopper and a 1946 Harley Davidson sidecar.
The location was key. We had to find somewhere that complemented the bikes and romanticised the freedom of travel that the Harley-Davidson brand evokes. This instructed to- wards depth in the image, as the longer the road, the more emphatically it conveyed the sense of a journey. My intuition was also that this was a shot that needed to be in California, or at least in John Ford’s American West, as the topography and sense of place reinforces the brand.
The creative prompts were movies like Easy Rider – the classic 1969 Dennis Hopper lm starring Peter Fonda. America is the home of big scenery and we needed big scenery. Our internet trawling finally led us towards the Valley of Fire in Nevada – a remote park one hour’s drive north east of Las Vegas. It had depth and the moon like rock structures either side of the road continually drag the eye back to that road. If any vista could be described as “bad ass”, this was it.
And so it was that the crew assembled in the modest “Breaking Bad” village of Overton, Nevada last Tuesday night – the bikers from California, my usual five wolves from Montana and of course the delightful Bryana Holly – who agreed to come and work with us on this assignment. I think she might have been used to slightly nicer accommodation, but it was a joy to work with her.
Photography can o en be about maths as much as it is about inspiration and my deliberations on site the previous day were all about the need to compress distance, but also offer decent depth of field. The lens choice – my old reliable 85mm was key – nothing else in the camera boxes worked.
The result is a blowout image and I think everyone involved should give themselves a pat on the back (and that is a big number of people). I look forward to Harley-Davidson’s reaction. It really is a monster of a photograph – far better than I had hoped for. I looked at it in LA for at least an hour on Friday.
AVAILABLE SIZES:
LARGE - Edition Size: 12
- Image: 56" x 76" (143 cm x 193 cm)
- Framed: 67" x 105" (171 cm x 267 cm)
STANDARD - Edition Size: 12
- Image: 37" x 50" (94 cm x 127 cm)
- Framed: 48" x 61" (122 cm x 155 cm)
We ship worldwide and use a multitude of providers to safely deliver your artwork. Domestic delivery and installation may also be available via Hilton Contemporary’s private art shuttle. Please inquire.
Drive
Montana, USA
This photograph, taken high in the mountains of Montana, offers strong clues as to why Cara Delevingne is a global superstar. She has the eyes and the face to steal most scenes and the intelligence to play a prescribed role. There is nothing I would change in her look in this vignette. It is a perfect combination of purpose and rather unhinged menace. She can do this as easily as some people flick a switch.
Chief John Spotted Tail of the Lakota tribe was an excellent foil for Cara and they work well together. He is revered locally and it was an honour to have him on set. He brings a further edge to an image encapsulating my read on the old Wild West: a place of guns; trouble in hard drinking saloons; occasional bad weather and maverick characters. No wonder Westerns have a film genre to them selves – it is too rich a seam in the material to have to share a category with anything else. To go “West” was perhaps the greatest adventure story the world has ever known.
AVAILABLE SIZES:
LARGE - Edition Size: 20
- Image: 56” x 96”
- Framed: 71” x 111”
STANDARD - Edition Size: 20
- Image: 37” x 64”
- Framed: 52” x 79”
We ship worldwide and use a multitude of providers to safely deliver your masterpiece. Domestic delivery and installation may also be available via Hilton Asmus Contemporary’s private art shuttle. Please inquire.
The Break Up
“There are a number of very special locations in Monument Valley, but so much depends on the time of day and the position of the sun. It therefore takes time to location scout as there is only one place a day that can be explored at 5pm or 6pm. The grandeur of the place is intoxicating – it is an artist’s dream and it pays to take one’s time. Access to this particular look out point on the Utah side required consent from the Navajo Indians, but the red tape is worth it because it offers the quintessential Wild West view. We were shooting right on the edge of the cliff – have a look at the behind the scenes video we produced for the shoot.
There were easy parts to getting this image – the light we knew would be at its most dramatic around 5.30pm and getting the Chevy in place just required a good off road driver – anyone really other than me.
The hard part was to capture any brief moments of true interaction between Josie Canseco and the wolf. I have worked with this wolf – Crocket – before and he can be quite chilled, but gettingthem to face each other – as if in a deep and intense conversation was a tough brief for Crocket’s handler. Then again all we needed for the killer vignette was one second of luck and eventually, as the light started to fade, we got it. Josie is a world class Victoria’s Secret model and it shows. To play that role next to a wolf in the front seats of a car with a 2000 feet drop behind you is not a normal day’s work. Luckily neither Josie nor the wolf put the car into reverse.” – David Yarrow
AVAILABLE SIZES:
- Large: 67 x 95 inches(Edition of 12)
- Standard: SOLD OUT (Edition of 12)
We ship worldwide and use a multitude of providers to safely deliver your artwork. Domestic delivery and installation may also be available via Hilton Contemporary’s private art shuttle. Please inquire.
Indecent Proposal
Montana, USA 2020
AVAILABLE SIZES:
- Standard Framed size: 48 x 67 inches
- Large Framed size: 67 x 95 inches
We ship worldwide and use a multitude of providers to safely deliver your masterpiece. Domestic delivery and installation may also be available via Hilton Asmus Contemporary’s private art shuttle. Please inquire.
The Getaway
Montana, USA
This photograph, taken high in the mountains of Montana, offers strong clues as to why Cara Delevingne is a global superstar. She has the eyes and the face to steal most scenes and the intelligence to play a prescribed role. There is nothing I would change in her look in this vignette. It is a perfect combination of purpose and rather unhinged menace. She can do this as easily as some people flick a switch.
Chief John Spotted Tail of the Lakota tribe was an excellent foil for Cara and they work well together. He is revered locally and it was an honour to have him on set. He brings a further edge to an image encapsulating my read on the old Wild West: a place of guns; trouble in hard drinking saloons; occasional bad weather and maverick characters. No wonder Westerns have a film genre to them selves – it is too rich a seam in the material to have to share a category with anything else. To go “West” was perhaps the greatest adventure story the world has ever known.
AVAILABLE SIZES:
LARGE - Edition Size: 20
- Image: 56” x 96”
- Framed: 71” x 111”
STANDARD - Edition Size: 20
- Image: 37” x 64”
- Framed: 52” x 79”
We ship worldwide and use a multitude of providers to safely deliver your masterpiece. Domestic delivery and installation may also be available via Hilton Asmus Contemporary’s private art shuttle. Please inquire.
Fargo
Montana, USA 2020
“A huge film from the wonderfully authentic Coen brothers and until I took this image, there was no photograph in my portfolio with sufficient symbolism to deserve the title. Out of respect to the movie, the title “Fargo” cannot be ascribed on a casual basis to any picture taken in the frozen north. It had better be punchy. But in Eastern Montana in a winter storm, we had two components here – a long straight road splitting the frozen prairies and also the possibility that I could make a narrative of sudden joy and happiness. On the day before the shoot, I wandered around the fairly run down outpost of Forsyth, Eastern Montana, trying to find another layer to the story. When I went to buy a drink, I found that I had run out of dollars so I nipped across the street to the ATM. As my dollars came out, I had one of my rare moments of inspiration – Fargo and its zany theatrical storytelling – we should use dollars flying around in the wind. The car passengers just stumbled across a frozen cash treasure trove – as seemingly happens regularly in this part of the world. Only one frame out of many worked, but that is all you need. The smile on the Tamaskan’s face is a bonus, but the connectivity between the two seemingly fortuitous travellers makes the image. If the parallel with the film holds true, they have taken on more than they could imagine in their worst nightmare.” – David Yarrow
AVAILABLE SIZES:
- Standard Framed size: 48 x 67 inches
- Large Framed size: 67 x 95 inches
We ship worldwide and use a multitude of providers to safely deliver your masterpiece. Domestic delivery and installation may also be available via Hilton Asmus Contemporary’s private art shuttle. Please inquire.
On The Road Again
Montana, USA
Once we found the caterpillar road that dissects this picture, I knew that we had the canvas on which to continue our road series that started in 2018. The area is so remote that we doubt it has been used as a film location before, certainly not with an American icon as the lead player. The only traffic was the occasional oil worker or perhaps someone that was totally lost.
The next big event north of here is the Canadian border and that’s some 300 miles away. It is not a place to run out of gas. Cindy makes the picture for sure. The styling is perfect and there is such a good energy, cowgirl chic in her manner. This was the intent in the preconception – the two companions were enjoying the freedom of the vastness of the American West. The sense of place is palpable. This is the America that so many know and love, with its long roads running to the horizon with either side exuding a simple sense of calm and solitude. No other country in the world offers road trips as visually rewarding as America and they are integral to the fabric of the American dream.
The snowfall the previous night added another layer to the narrative both on the road itself and on the prairies. We were lucky that the snow stopped and the light picked up. It adds warmth to an image already glowing with positivity and joy. Willie Nelson was surely singing “On the Road Again” on the car radio with the volume turned up to the maximum level. On the road again, Goin’ places that I’ve never been, Seein’ things that I may never see again, And I can’t wait to get on the road again, On the road again, Like a band of gypsies, we go down the highway, We’re the best of friends, Insisting that the world keep turning our way.
AVAILABLE SIZES:
LARGE - Edition Size: 20
- Image: 56” x 79”
- Framed: 71” x 94”
STANDARD - Edition Size: 20
- Image: 37” x 52”
- Framed: 52” x 67”
We ship worldwide and use a multitude of providers to safely deliver your masterpiece. Domestic delivery and installation may also be available via Hilton Asmus Contemporary’s private art shuttle. Please inquire.
