"It’s Not Such a Sin Anymore To Be a Girl": Harley Weir : 4 Talks About Her Recent Work

 

In an excerpt from Plaster Magazine, Harley Weir talks about her love of Nobuyoshi Araki and the Pre-Raphaelites, and that time she nearly interned for a female pornographer
 
This excerpt is taken from the fifth issue of Plaster Magazine.
 
The first time I spoke with Harley Weir on the phone, she had just been caught in a giant hailstorm. It was the middle of July, and she was in awe of the size of the hailstones. Eager for me to see, she picked a few off the ground and took a quick iPhone photo of her clutching a collection of them. However, what struck me from the photo she sent to me wasn’t the hugeness of the golfball-sized hail, but how beautiful the image was. I could not figure out how she had managed to take something so simple and turn it into something so ethereal, so recognisably her, when the photos most people take on an iPhone look as if they have been captured on a drunken night out.
 
But, then again, she is one of the world’s most in-demand photographers, and that is what great photographers do: whether they are equipped with the best camera or just an iPhone, they are capable of translating their perspective of the world through an image. Harley has made a career that people twice her age couldn’t dream of, all because of her unique viewpoint of the world. She brings to life the intimacy of her subject, whether it is a giant piece of hail or an editorial for a leading fashion publication.

 
Today, I find Harley in her newly-purchased, Grade II-listed, 19th-century converted church in Faversham. The church has been converted into a beautiful open-plan house, with a marble kitchen, a long wooden dining table, and two large sofas which she proudly announces were purchased from eBay. There is no bed, but she points to where the altar should be and tells us that the bed is to go there. Even in her personal space, everything is perfectly curated, as if on the set for one of her shoots. A master behind the camera, she has agreed to be photographed for Plaster – something she seldom allows. One could sense her initial unease at being placed in front of the camera. However, any initial shyness evaporated as she began to feel more and more at ease, even, at one point, starting to direct the photographer to where the best place was to shoot, and calling him out for being too close. Then, once the shoot was over, it was my turn to listen as we sat down to talk.
 
Milo Astaire: Could you tell me about your upbringing? Where did you grow up?
 
Harley Weir: I grew up in deep south-west London. My parents gave me a lot of freedom growing up, mostly due to them being bohemian types but also because they worked hard and didn’t have much time to fuss. They both worked in the toy industry. My mum worked for Sindy doll. She used to mock up the dolls for the product design, paint their eyes, root the hair, and make tiny clothes for them.
 
MA: I imagine having creative parents inspired you to look at things slightly differently?
 
HW: I’ve been lucky to have always had art available to me. I remember the first time I saw what I thought was great art: it was a postcard up in my uncle’s houseboat of Hylas and the Nymphs. I remember being besotted by the image of the water nymphs gently dragging Hylas into this pond. It was calm but also very sinister. It’s very Pre-Raphaelite, and that was probably the first art object that I remember I found really, really captivating.
 
MA: Now that you mention the Pre-Raphaelites, I can see their distinct visual language in your photographic work, especially the models you use.
 
HW: Yeah, the influence is definitely always there. I think that’s probably partly due to where I grew up. It was very suburban, leafy, and full of soft nature like the images depicted in those Pre-Raphaelite paintings. People tell me I look a bit Pre-Raphaelite. Maybe that’s also why I connect to it, that very old-fashioned stereotype of beauty, Botticelli’s Venus etc, it’s an interesting starting point for commenting on current beauty trends.
 
MA: What else has influenced you?
 
HW: The Spice Girls were a great influence on my taste … unfortunately! I remember I used to collect Spice Girls posters, and I hid them in a secret closet. The Spice Girls were a big thing for young girls at the time. The first female heroes of my generation. It felt like a very strong movement, but looking back, maybe it wasn’t the best message for the youth of the time.
 
MA: You studied at Central Saint Martins?
 
HW: Yes, I studied fine art, but I would love to return and do it again. At the time, I was very possessed by the idea of being an independent woman, so I decided to begin working while I was there. I had a part-time job at a pub. Then I started working as a fashion photographer to pay for the course, which ultimately took up all of my time. It was actually an accident that I ended up becoming a photographer. Someone just asked me if I wanted to do a fashion shoot because I used to post my pictures online.
 
MA: Where did you post the pictures?
 
HW: Flickr.
 
MA: Oh … we are going way back! Does Flickr still exist?
 
HW: I think it does, but I don’t really know what it’s for. I don’t know who is using it. Someone must be! Anyway, someone saw my work on Flickr when I was 17 and asked me to do a fashion shoot, and I was like, ‘Yeah!’, and they told me they only had a budget of £300 and I was like, ‘Oh my God, I’ll do anything for that much money!’
 
MA: Did you pocket the budget?
 
HW: Of course! I spent £5 on a train ticket and £20 on film and pocketed the rest.
 
MA: Was there a lightbulb moment when you thought, ‘I can make a career out of taking these photographs’?
 
HW: I think I was so busy that I didn’t really have a chance to realise what I was up to, but I was really grateful.
 
MA: Was there anything in your work that you felt you wanted to explore or say when you were starting out?
 
HW: I think fashion photography can be a really interesting way of understanding the woman. I was intrigued and excited about learning about female desire through my work. In the beginning, when I first started, I primarily took photographs of guys. Most of my projects consisted of photographing men in archetypal female situations, men as Ophelia or Venus for example.
 
MA: What photographers’ work were you looking at during that time?
 
HW: Araki. I used to love Sally Mann and Peter Beard. Beard was my first love. My dad would read his books to me when I was a kid. I found it strange that fashion from the outside was such a female-looking world, yet, so few women were behind the camera.
 
I really wanted to intern for a female pornographer at the time and was really excited about that, but it didn’t happen. On her website, she claimed to be the only female porn director in the UK and I thought ‘how can that be?’ I was interested in the idea of understanding my desires because there is definitely a point where, as a girl, you look around, and you realise everything you’ve ever read was written by a man, or every porno you’ve ever watched was directed by a man, every film ... and you are like, ‘Oh shit, what do I desire? How can I know what I desire if everything I’ve ever looked at has been made by a guy anyway?’ So I think it was an interesting time in fashion for me to do my thing and figure out what I desired and if I could ever know what that was or is.
 
Harley Weir on Pornography, Female Desire and the Spice Girls. By Milo Astaire. Another Magazine, September 23, 2022.

The photographer has published her first ever self-portrait series – here, she discusses the otherworldly allure of sex dolls, being enlightened by porn, and why she chose to turn the camera on herself.
 
Harley Weir has been on Instagram for around a decade – but she’s never posted a selfie before now. “I just never wanted people to judge me before they judge my work,” she says, explaining the aversion to sharing photos of herself over the phone from New York, where she’s recovered from jetlag just in time for the start of fashion week. “I’m not necessarily a purist but I wanted my work to speak for itself, and not for my image to speak for itself.” In her new Beauty Papers photobook, however, the two are unavoidably intertwined, as the photographer turns the camera on herself for the first time.
 
Of course, flicking through a book from one of fashion’s foremost photographers – whose personal work often exists at the borderlines of the sensual and the grotesque – is a far cry from scrolling down your social media feeds. For one, Weir herself is often hidden behind a hyperreal rubber mask, an uncanny second skin, or layers of make-up that achieve a similar effect, smoothing out her features to a Barbie-like sheen. In other images, meanwhile, sex dolls take her place in front of the camera, dead-eyed or dripping with fake tears (the book itself is dedicated to “all the dolls in the world”).
 
These contrasting images – the real versus the fake, the comic versus the erotic, “pantomime feminine” forms versus “real” bodies with fat rolls and loose tampon strings – are all a part of modern-day beauty, explains Weir. To illustrate the point she sends a quote over text, by the late French philosopher George Batailles: “I believe that truth has only one face: that of a violent contradiction.”
 
“It’s very confusing,” Weir continues. “Because at once I don’t agree with the oversexualisation, the overbeautification, the artificial elements of current day beauty, but I still follow that trend in a way. If you go on social media a lot, it’s very hard to move away from those wants and desires.” You only have to scroll down Instagram a few minutes, she adds, and you’ll come across hundreds of women (and increasingly men) whose appearances are altered in Photoshop or via cosmetic surgeries – sculpting the homogenised look that Jia Tolentino dubbed “Instagram face” back in 2019, with figures such as Kim Kardashian as the blueprint. Even if you recognise the idealised veneer, it’s hard not to compare yourself against this constant stream of images.
 

“Everyone wants to be desired,” says Weir. “So it’s a difficult one: you don’t want to be a part of something that you think is not quite right, yet you don’t want to get left behind. Especially working in the fashion industry, you’re inundated with images of beautiful people all the time. It’s a catch-22.”
 
Is perfection actually that sexy, though? This question is asked throughout Weir’s latest project, where airbrushed skin takes on an eery quality, and romance is found in upside-down kisses, bodies and faces smeared with glitter and grime. “I think there’s something in the grotesque,” she says, “and something in uniqueness.” Even for her, though, this realisation took time, arriving too late to stop her from removing a red, star-shaped birthmark on her face aged 16. “I thought I was absolute freak. I just wanted to look like everyone else.”
 
Watching porn was partly responsible for broadening Weir’s conception of what a body could look like, and for shaping her acceptance of her own body. “If you look in the right places for porn, you can see anything,” she says. “It personally made me feel more normal, because I saw all the weird things I thought I was.”
 
As in Father, the 2019 photo book that she billed as an exploration and worship of the male body, this new photo book takes a similar approach, showing us sides to sexuality that rarely break through to the mainstream. On the flipside, of course, porn can also be misleading, teaching men that women should look and act a certain way – these ideals are also echoed, in the pliant bodies and provocative angles of Weir’s sex doll images, or in her own contorted poses.
 
Over the past few years, Harley Weir has worked with some of the biggest names in fashion, film, and music. Just last week, Pamela Anderson, Doja Cat, Kyle MacLachlan, and more starred in the campaign she shot for Marc Jacobs’ AW22 Heaven collection. In a crossover with the Beauty Papers publication, Charli XCX posed with kitchen knives sticking out of her back. Taking her turn in front of the lens, though, the photographer jumped in at the deep end.

 
After several tries at shooting a photo where she hangs upside down, she says: “My eye actually burst, and then I vomited.” Another time, the thick rubber skin-suit she wore gave her a panic attack. Though she’s always been “quite sensitive” toward people’s needs on set, she says that this shed a new light on the physical challenges models face, and made her more grateful. “Even just standing upright, in a pair of extremely painful shoes and really uncomfortable clothes, is actually quite a feat.”
 
At the same time, switching between the roles of director and model – and delegating many of the actual photographs to assistants, make-up artists, and anyone who could pick up a camera – gave Weir a new sense of freedom. “I didn’t have to feel guilty,” she says. “If you’re a photographer, you’re always asking something of someone, which can feel dirty and sometimes quite grim afterwards. That transaction can feel weird.” Only having to worry about what she was feeling allowed her to push further, and dig deeper into stranger forms of beauty that might otherwise have been inaccessible. “I could be more free,” she says, “without having to worry about hurting someone’s identity. It was just mine that was there to play with.”
 

Harley Weir Beauty Papers is published by Beauty Papers and distributed by IDEA. Take a closer look in the gallery above.

Harley Weir’s uncanny nudes explore beauty in the age of Instagram. By Thom Waite. Dazed, September 13, 2022. 

 
Harley Weir Beauty Papers with Charlotte Cotton. Idea

As her new solo show Sins of a Daughter opens in London, Harley Weir talks about womanhood, vaginas and the “painterly” qualities of cum.
 
“There’s no designer vagina,” says London-based photographer Harley Weir, who is discussing a series of intimate images in her new solo exhibition, Sins of a Daughter, at Hannah Barry Gallery in Peckham. “They all look so different and they’re all beautiful in different ways.” Gathering together 30 of her photographs old and new – some of which have been abstracted and collaged over with household products and bodily fluids like cum, spit, pee and blood – these frenetic, highly emotional images draw on themes of inherited family trauma, sexuality, shame, motherhood and the knotty topic of desire.
 
Weir is responsible for era-defining fashion images that include Young Thug in a Molly Goddard dress for Dazed, or Klara Kristin’s much-debated ‘up-skirted’ Calvin Klein campaign shot, but this exhibition shows an artist running amok, unfettered by budgets and collaboration. “It’s difficult when you’re working with people,” she explains. “In my personal work, I can get closer to the truth.”
 
Dear mother – a darkly-lit image of a woman with her legs splayed apart – recalls Gustave Courbet’s controversial 1886 painting L'Origine du monde, but Weir zooms in further, giving an almost microscopic view of the vulva. These vagina pictures hang next to images of a lactating nipple and a breastfeeding baby, throwing the very notion of the Madonna-Whore complex into disarray. Elsewhere, pop culture icons like Avril Lavigne and Kylie Jenner appear subtly in the work; “[they’re] the girls of this generation,” says Weir, citing the dulling effect of constantly being on social media. “There is beauty in everything, and everyone does have a beautiful side and a grotesque side,” she says. “We only see that one side, that beautiful side – especially with social media.”
 
Here, Weir talks about the line between pornography and art, why we must learn to love our vaginas, and the reality of working in the fashion and art industries as a woman.
 
Violet Conroy: How did the idea for the show come about?
 
Harley Weir: I was thinking about bloodlines, the inherited weight of gender, things that get passed down from your family like trauma, illnesses, or general upbringing. The title Sins of a Daughter comes from the saying ‘sins of the father’, which stems back to a previous book I made called Father, which was a series of male nudes exploring the female gaze and desire.
 
VC: Do you think of yourself as a fashion photographer first and an artist second, or is there no distinction between the two?
 
HW: I dislike labels, they hold us back from doing what we want. I feel very fluid, but there’s not really a good definition for such things. I’m comfortable though with whatever people want to call me at this point.
 

VC: Do you approach the two modes of working in the same way? Or does your personal work allow you to tackle themes that maybe your fashion stuff doesn’t?
 
HW: It’s always a huge collaboration when you’re doing a fashion project. There are hundreds of people on set – you’re not alone. With fashion, it doesn’t really feel [like it’s] my own, because I wouldn’t necessarily share my inner thoughts with people I don’t know very well.
 
My personal work feels quite different. Often it’s abstract and without people, because I don’t feel 100 per cent that anything is fully mine if it’s a picture of someone else – that’s a collaboration. It’s difficult when you’re working with people; it’s important to respect them. I don’t want to make anyone feel bad about the way they look in an image, [but] that’s not the truth. In my personal work, I can get closer to the truth.
 
VC: Some of the pieces seem to tackle sexuality and shame. Has making these images allowed you to work through your thoughts about these things?
 
HW: Yes, it has. I overlay or paste on a lot of the images; they’re hardly visible in the finals, and are almost like secret, cathartic symbols of such thinking. I almost find it like art therapy. There’s alchemy in the darkroom, it’s completely black and I’m experimenting with waste products, whether it’s bodily fluids or wasted beauty products I take from my bathroom cabinet. It’s very physical in the dark, and there can be a real abstract feeling. When you have no other senses, your mind can really unravel. I get really heightened emotions when I’m in there.
 
We have so much stimulation constantly, social media is always in our faces. We’ve always got our phone to pacify ourselves. When you’re completely in the dark, your mind has time to run wild. I feel like a lot of thoughts and things like that will come out when I’m doing those things, and I think they really look like that feeling when I see the final result afterwards.

 
VC: What inspired you to use bodily fluids?
 
HW: It felt quite natural to start experimenting. Originally, I wanted to see what cum looked like on photo paper if it was left. That was the first one I did, when I made the book Father. I was trying to make a cover for the book, and I wanted it to be bodily fluids, then I put it into the processor and I realised it stained it in a very painterly way.
 
VC: What about the vagina images?
 
HW: When I looked back at the vagina images, I thought, ‘Oh god, how expected of me to do vaginas again!’ But I still think that we don’t see them enough, because they’re so internal. As a girl you must use a mirror to even look at your own. We see the beautiful mound in art and plastered everywhere – but [the] open [part] is still quite unseen. I remember having to turn to porn when I was a kid to really see one.
 
When I took those images, it had a big effect on me because I’d never seen anyone’s vagina properly before. It was quite important for me to do that. I’m so thankful for the girls that allowed me to do it because it was really eye-opening and it made me realise that everyone is so different. There’s no designer vagina, we’re all so different and they’re all beautiful in different ways. And we must learn to love them.
 

VC: Do you think there’s a world in which pictures of vaginas, like the ones you took, will not be read as pornographic by people?
 
HW: It’s tricky. A lot of the girls who came to have their picture taken were very well-groomed, and I had hoped they might be a bit more realistic. I did wonder, ‘Oh, are these vaginas too beautiful?’ because I don’t want to give people the wrong impression. These people knew they were going to have photos taken of their vagina, so a lot of them were waxed or shaved, which could give them a more porno feeling.
 
VC: I loved the vagina picture with Avril Lavigne’s face superimposed on top.
 
HW: [Laughs.]. My first assistant Alexa was helping me late to print those, and we were looking through old images to overlay with the vaginas, and she was like, ‘How about Avril?’ I was like, ‘Hell yes!’.
 
VC: You’ve got these pop culture icons in the work, like Avril Lavigne and Kylie Jenner – what compelled you to include them?
 
HW: I go through old images I’ve collected, weekly newspapers, and make little piles with images that sing to me at the time, and those happened to be in there. I feel like they [Lavigne and Jenner] are the girls of this generation, I see their faces so often they are almost like a motif. It’s subconscious almost, but there’s also a fair amount of intent in there. Since I do it all in the dark and don’t use any glue, what sticks is almost like a tarot card reading.
 
VC: A lot of the work is about motherhood, with the breastfeeding images. What about this concept interests you?
 
HW: I mixed those images on the wall with images of vaginas because I was thinking of the idea of function, and those parts being functional rather than sexual. I thought, ‘Oh gosh, is someone going to feel uncomfortable that a vagina is next to an image of a breastfeeding boob,’ but I thought: no, it makes perfect sense. That’s what they were created for. We shouldn’t even really have to think about that, but we do.

 
VC: Is beauty something you’re still looking for in your work?
 
HW: Beauty, for me, is what draws people to an image and helps them listen. I would love for things to be less beautiful, but when you’re working with people it’s really hard. If you’re photographing people, it’s important to make them feel comfortable, or at least I think so. I love the work of photographers who really show the truth in all its grotesqueness, and I feel like I hold back from that because I care about the people that I photograph. I don’t want them to be disappointed or feel ugly.
 
If it was a better world, we wouldn’t mind about those things. There is beauty in everything, and everyone does have a beautiful side and a grotesque side. We only see that one side, that beautiful side – especially with social media. It’s complicated. Beauty is a big topic.
 
VC: What’s it like being a woman in the fashion and art industries now, and has it changed since you first started out as a photographer?
 
HW: It’s changed a lot. I definitely felt very embarrassed about being a girl when I was younger. I feel very comfortable being a girl now. I felt like I was disrespected, or that people didn’t or wouldn’t give me the respect I wanted as a girl sometimes. I feel like it’s changed a lot in a good way, and that’s really exciting.
 
“It’s Like Art Therapy”: Harley Weir on Her Provocative New Exhibition. By Violet Conroy. Another Magazine, April 21, 2022. 

Fashion photographer Harley Weir first got a hold of a camera when she was eight years-old. “My mum used to give me a disposable camera to take with me on school trips. I loved using it,” she tells me. “I think the first pictures I took were of some pigs that were having sex at a farm we visited. I have a vivid memory of it. The disposable was like my social media then.”
 
If you haven’t heard of Weir, you’ve at least seen her work. The Southwest London native has lensed the likes of Young Thug, Bjork, and Rihanna for Dazed, Greta Thunberg’s famous i-D cover, Bella Hadid for LOVE, and Pharrell for Humanrace. That’s just a selection of the 30 year-old photographer’s heavy-hitting portfolio; Jacquemus, Helmut Lang, Charlotte Knowles, Stella McCartney, and Calvin Klein have also enrolled her to snap their campaigns, and most recently, Gucci x Balenciaga.
 
Sins of a daughter, which opened on April 9 at London’s Hannah Barry Gallery, is Weir’s first solo exhibition since the Covid-19 outbreak. “It’s interesting to go back into that mindset of where I was two and a half years ago and revisit those feelings and thoughts,” she says. It’s nearing 10 o’clock at night for Weir, who’s busy with the finishing touches of her show ahead of its opening. “I’ve been doing last minute printing, some things didn’t fit into frames properly, the usual. So manic.”
 
Showing almost 30 new collages and archival images, Sins of a daughter is a revealing look into Weir’s most intimate and private photographic experiments. The featured archive dates back to 2008, when teenager Weir first started taking photos of her friends and sisters. “They’re quite abstract images. Some of them come from a previous project called Father, a book I made with a series of male nudes. There’s also a series of vaginas in the show, very close up and personal, quite intense. It was very much about my desire as a woman, like, ‘What do I desire?’ I wanted to figure that out, so a lot of it is coming from that angle.”
 
In a late night interview, the artist walks us through her creation process, her obsession with the body, and what she does want as a woman, for now.
 
What can we expect to see from Sins of a daughter?
 
HW : Photographic collages. They were made originally by experimenting with body fluids. I put the fluids on photo paper, which is then left to cook. It changes the chemistry of the paper and brings out certain colors or removes things, darkens things, almost like a form of painting, but with alchemy. Strangely, everything I have used from then on is a waste product of something. I use a lot of outdated beauty products or health foods, for example. Ingredients are things like perfumes, contact lens solution, ingrown hair solution, moringa powder, spirulina.
 
When you say body fluids, what kind do you mean exactly?
 
HW : Spit, pee, cum, blood. But they go through processes and become properly cleaned and fixed so only the marks remain. I didn’t use any body fluid since lockdown because it felt weird, since everyone was hyper aware of cleanliness and things like that. It changed the direction a little bit, and I ended up working with things like super foods, which is interesting because they do have a super odd effect on the paper. It feels very prehistoric experimenting with alchemy in the way that I do. like when people were exploring the natural world for ways of doing things, like octopus ink for writing. Usually I will start with an analogue image or collage of different images on the same photo paper. I do it all in the dark, so I don’t know exactly what I’m doing. Very much like a witch [doing] a ritual in the dark with these potions.

 
What’s the meaning behind the show’s name?
 
HW : It’s from the common saying, “sins of a father.” In this case, I think about the idea of inherited sins, of what has been passed down through my gender from history. In a personal sense, thinking about what you inherit from your parents and what they feed down to your bloodline, what they gave you and what you carry, past traumas and sins. When I say sins, you could put it another way and say “history.” Not necessarily bad things.
 
Photography is very much collaborative, whereas art – especially your method of creation – seems more personal.
 
HW :  I don’t think an image necessarily belongs to me if there’s someone else in it. My personal work is abstract, without people, because it feels wholly mine. With other work – especially my fashion work – it’s always a collaboration. There are hundreds of people on set. How much of yourself are you willing to show and share with strangers? Personally? Not so much.
 
You go from photographing mega celebrities, then regular people on the street. How do you bring out that intimacy from strangers?
 
HW : I love to photograph people who love to be photographed. When I was younger, I was sometimes photographing people that really didn’t like to be photographed, and the exchange was very awkward and bizarre. I like to go with the flow, with the feeling, and if someone wants to be nude, then it happens.
 

 
A lot of your work seems to focus on the human form, especially the female body. What’s your fascination with that?
 
HW : As a woman, every film you watch as a child – less so now – but when I was younger, it was likely directed by a guy and the woman is likely, usually a sassy whore. Women are very sexualized. Their bodies are always on show, and they’re a love interest for a guy. Having that focus on the body is probably subconsciously from my upbringing, and having watched so much media applaud or obsess with the female body. It’s ingrained that I would naturally be interested in the body, because that’s what it felt like people were interested about me when I was younger. Guys would say, “Oh, you have a nice ass,” or “Your boobs are too small.” It was always about the body. I don’t remember saying I wouldn’t go out with a guy because he didn’t have a six pack. But you know, at school, kids are cruel.
 
Originally a lot of my photography was of the male nude. I found some really old pictures I took of my first boyfriend when I was around 16, that continued in a diary form. I used to post some of them on Flickr, and that’s where it all started. People started asking me to do photography professionally.
 
 
When you do photograph the body, sometimes you zoom in so close into certain details – There’s a sense of childlike innocence, but it can also be a bit uncomfortable, grotesque even.
 
HW : I like things to be direct and I feel like when you have a tight crop, the message is clearer. I don’t find things very grotesque. The pictures I show I find to be very tame and cute. I have a tendency towards the grotesque, but I don’t show [them] because I don’t think people will respond very well to that. My level of grotesque, my grotesque-dar is very skewed. With my fashion work, I’m always so worried about who I’m photographing, I don’t want to show them in a bad light. I want to be sensitive to [that] person’s feelings. It does hold me back, because I do want to show people in their more true, grotesque light but Im still too conscious of myself and of others.
 
I have been experimenting for this show, taking very grotesque pictures of myself, but I couldn’t actually bring myself to print them or put them on the wall. It felt too invasive. But definitely, the images I like of other people’s work are quite grotesque and I envy those that have the [courage] to show things in their true grotesque light.
 

 
You also run an Instagram account documenting of photos of trash. What’s that about?
 
HW : I think fashion gives you a real need to, when you see that side of things, it makes you feel very privileged and gives you an empathy that needs to have an outlet. The ever-increasing worry about climate change and how we’re destroying the planet drew me to that. I wanted to protest with these images in a way, [and] just be aware of the issue.
 
 
I read that you collect vintage Issey Miyake and Jean Paul Gaultier. What is it about those designers that you like?
 
HW : I’ve been collecting [them] since I was 17 when eBay was amazing. I have a pretty damn good collection of about 30 pieces from [the] eBay era where you could pick up a full dress for 20, 40 pounds. I particularly love the Guest Artist Series [by] Issey Miyake when he collaborated with artists. And Jean Paul Gaultier, I find his clothes to be artwork. He’s also very obsessed with the body and his work is like wearable art.
 
Weirdly, I had a lot of years where I wore absolutely no fashion whatsoever. In my teens and early twenties, I was really into fashion as works of art and I used to spend a lot of time getting dressed and wearing crazy clothes. After about 21, and I left for university, I became brown mouse and didn’t spend any money on clothes. I spent everything on photography. I didn’t go shopping for years until I was about 28. I wasn’t interested in the way I looked and I didn’t want to stand out or look pretty. I didn’t want people to judge me for being a girl. People would always be like, “Oh, can you fix the music?” No one ever assumed that I was the photographer, so I wanted to be very serious and dress appropriately. For years I cut that side of myself out, but I’m back to it now. I’m getting all my Jean Paul Gaultier [and] weird stuff out and having a good time with [them] again.
 
 
What was the cause of this sudden change?
 
HW : There’s been such a big culture change. I was ashamed to be a woman when I was younger, I didn't think people would take me seriously and now I’m not ashamed to be a woman anymore. There’s been a huge change in society’s view of women and it’s not such a sin anymore to be a girl. When I was in my twenties, it felt shameful to be girly or wear pink. Now everybody’s much more girly-obsessed and it feels like I don’t have to be shy about being a girl anymore, coming to set wearing a skirt, looking like I give a shit. Why not.
 
 
Sins of a daughter is on view now through May 7 at Hannah Barry Gallery, London.

Spit, Pee, Cum & Blood: a Glimpse into Harley Weir’s Most Sinful Desires. By Elaine YJ Lee. Highsnobiety, April 18, 2022.