Miami Series

Miami series

1999 I arrived in Miami with three huge suitcases containing, two inflatable sex dolls (I always travelled with a spare) 100 plus rolls of Fuji 35mm film, lights, props and make up, as well as a selection of matching Topshop outfits-most of which would later be returned to the now much missed flagship store on Oxford Street.

I had persuaded the amazing Phil ‘Captain 3D’ McNally (who went on to work at ILM and Dreamworks) to help shoot me with his homemade stereoscopic camera.

We arrived, with only one room booked for a shoot, at the then Diesel owned Pelican Hotel on South Beach. I had persuaded them, via some pretty creative emails, to lend me any of their themed rooms that were available for an hour each between guest change overs.

In the first room, The Boudoir, we instantly blew all the electrics, but somehow still managed to scramble through 4 or 5 room shoots that day.

That first night we waited anxiously excited for the film to come back from the lab, only to find every roll had a devastatingly deep scratch through every single frame, due to a fault on the processing unit. Photoshop wasn’t an option then for stereoscopic viewing as the original slides are used in the viewers. So needless to say the next day we had to reshoot everything, plus that days schedule.

All 8 set-ups were shown at my first solo show in London Standpointgallery later that year. The brilliant Mike Taylor generously allowed me to create a fake wall in the gallery with the viewers hidden inside so that visitors had to bend forward to peep ‘inside’ the rooms.