Thomas Brown’s design-led, constructed imagery

Describing his practice as concept-driven, Thomas Brown is fascinated by form, structure and composition. His work usually involves still life, installation and the landscape, and he often collaborates with like-minded set designers, stylists and cinematographers. His commissions for Vogue, Wallpaper, The New York Times and Coca-Cola, among others, allow him to work on self-initiated projects that often attract further commissions from clients.

Brown, who studied photography at the Arts Institute at Bournemouth, was assistant to advertising photographer Dan Tobin Smith for several years, and in 2009 signed to Webber represents. He set up a studio in London two years later, which allowed him to “experiment, play and develop” his practice. “I have been really inspired by the upsurge in still life, installation and constructed imagery,” he says. “People definitely take more notice now, and there are more opportunities to share your work with a bigger audience.

“Work that may not have had a home before can now be seen by thousands of people on blogs and websites. This is incredibly motivating and allows you to be creatively free.”

Nominated for our ‘Ones to Watch’ January 2014 issue by Anne Bourgeois-Vignon, creative content director at Nowness, Brown has created a film for the website, and is rapidly building an impressive portfolio of moving image alongside his stills photography. “My work has grown in confidence and ambition. When you first start out, you are so scared of failing that you sometimes default to what you know, what you learned while working under others, which becomes ingrained. But after a while you release yourself from those binds and start to test yourself by working on bigger ideas that have high chances of exploding in your face… sometimes quite literally,” he says, referring to his movie, Pop Pop Bang, which he recently described as a mix of “film, photography and pyro”.

Find more of Thomas’s work here.

First published in the January 2014 issue. You can buy the issue here.