Hip Hop, Ice Cream, and Generous Light

The photographer who makes it look easy is doing the most difficult thing. Chris Heads—based between Milan and Paris, with credits in Vanity Fair, Elle, and Glamour—makes it look very easy, which means he’s working harder than his images let on.

The subjects help. Kylie Minogue in his hands has a warmth that a lot of fashion photographers actively resist, the softness of a person rather than the armor of a celebrity. Kelis, before the pop market decided what to do with her. Devon Aoki at an angle that makes you understand why anyone ever put her in front of a camera. What connects all of them is a quality of attention—the feeling that Heads is genuinely interested in the person in front of him and not just executing a layout. That interest translates. You can see it in the photographs.

His self-described passions are hip hop, ice cream, and sunshine, which tells you exactly what kind of energy he brings into a room. Not the cold precision of high-fashion photography, not the deliberately difficult aesthetic of art photography—something warmer, more afternoon-feeling, the kind of image that makes you wish you’d been in the room when it was taken. For magazine work operating inside tight editorial constraints, maintaining that warmth is harder than it looks.

What I keep noticing is the light. Not dramatic, not architectural—just generous. The kind of light that makes skin look like it belongs exactly where it is. Somebody taught him that or he arrived at it himself, and either way he’s using it correctly.

The fashion industry produces a lot of photographers who are technically perfect and emotionally inert. Heads is the other kind, which is rarer and consequently more interesting. The bio says Milan and Paris; the photographs say somewhere sunnier.