Photographed by Bil Brown
Styled by Britton Litow
Written by Bil Brown and Yasmine El-Azzeh
Hair: Eddie Cook at Forward Artists
Makeup: Francie Tomalonis at The Visionaries Agency
Flaunt Film and Director of Photography: Alexander Thomas
Photo Assistant: Miles Bitton
Styling Assistant: David Gomez
Flaunt Magazine. Chloe Cherry. A shoot by Bill Brown. I was behind the video camera — and the result is something that sits exactly between fashion editorial and moving image.
“Shooting alongside a photographer of Bill Brown’s caliber is its own kind of education. The stills set a visual standard that the video had to meet on its own terms — not replicate, but rhyme with. Chloe brought an ease in front of the lens that made the dreamy, atmospheric quality of the footage feel inevitable rather than constructed. These are the kinds of projects that remind you what the camera is capable of when everything else in the room is also operating at its highest level.”
A Quest For Fire was a Flaunt Magazine spread photographed by Bill Brown, and I was brought in to shoot the video component — a hybrid piece that lives alongside the stills rather than documenting them. Chloe Cherry is a subject who understands the camera intuitively, and shooting her across outdoor landscapes and urban environments meant working with that presence rather than around it.
The video moves the way the editorial breathes — unhurried, atmospheric, dreamy in the specific way that high fashion dreams: with an edge underneath it. The locations do real work here. Natural landscape and urban texture in the same piece creates a kind of friction, a subject who belongs nowhere and therefore belongs everywhere. The goal was footage that felt less like behind the scenes and more like a parallel world to the photographs — images in motion that could stand alone.
Behind The Scenes
Half a day, a small crew, two locations — the kind of shoot where everyone present is there because they’re exactly the right person for the job and nothing else. Working alongside Bill Brown meant that the set had a clarity of vision from the top down; when the photographer knows precisely what they want, every other department finds its footing faster.
My job was to move through that environment with a video camera and find the moments that existed between the stills — the exhale after the frame, the walk between setups, the quality of light that the photographs would capture one way and the video could capture another. A small crew on a shoot like this is an asset rather than a limitation. Less noise, more presence. Half a day with the right people in the right locations is plenty of time to make something worth keeping.