Introducing 'Pantyhose'; Premiering with Alessa Savage - NSFW - 8 photos - Part 1/3 (London, UK 2015)

For those who have been following me for a while, you may have seen snippets of a project called 'Pantyhose' over the years. In truth, I’ve been working on this project since 2010, but haven’t yet published it properly.

Someday in the future, I’ll write more about it in detail. But in essence, I’m not entirely sure I ever approached this project with the intention of publishing it — at least not after over a decade of creating it. It started out as something fun that I enjoyed experimenting with, and after so many years of not getting around to publishing it for various reasons, the fact that I hadn’t been sharing it started to feel stressful and overwhelming :)

As of today, I have around 70 sessions from 2010 onward — NONE of them fully published.

In the past few weeks, I decided to start sharing the entire collection, much like I’ve done with a lot of my work in recent years. This is a slightly different approach to how I usually work on projects. Typically, I’d create a body of work into a 'template', and only publish a small selection of 1–5 images from each session.

Over the past years, my process has become more improvisational. By sharing more images from each set, I can revisit the work after a few years, and curate a final ‘best of’ selection. It gives me the freedom to compile a unified body of work from the different sessions, which feels more organic. At least it does right now, these days.

I’m taking the same approach with Pantyhose because I’m realising that, otherwise, it may never see the light of day. Out of respect to the models who contributed to these experiments, I feel indebted to give them that recognition.

So here we go. This project began as an experiment in 2010, and today I’m sharing the first part of the first session, featuring one of my earliest London friends, Alessa Savage (IG, X), created in my London studio on November 26, 2015, with an anonymous male model.

Over time, I hope to refine the aesthetics of the project. Right now, think of these sessions as ‘work-in-progress sketches’ — a glimpse into my improvisational process, which I think is pretty cool and gets me excited to share it with you all!

And yes, I’ll also write more about the project itself — the how, and the meaning behind these photos (if there’s a meaning at all). Do they have meaning? To me, they surely do!

That’s all for now. I hope you enjoy it, and I thank you for all your support.

Ben 💞