Though “Elephant Boy” was a success, when I got back to London, I was still flat broke, cycling around on my bicycle, renting a room from a friend in Hammersmith, and living on rice, some left over tomatoes and a couple of onions. Sure, I had the occasional home cooked meal at a friend’s house, but I certainly felt on edge. It was a weird time—here I was finally getting some attention, and though my career was taking off, yet I still barely had a pot to piss in!
Then one day, the telephone rang and on the other end was an advertising agency in Hamburg, requesting me to shoot a campaign for BMW. Me! How could that be? Before I had time to over think it, I was en route to Hamburg, leaving an all night party and going straight to the airport.
With a couple of hours to kill, I stopped into some generic diner, all the while wondering how the hell I’d ended up in Hamburg on a cold winter’s day, eating schnitzel and gunning to shoot a job for BMW. Again, no time to overthink. So I just went with it.
At the agency meeting, the art director came armed with a copy of Dutch magazine, opened it up to the “Elephant Boy” story and said he want me to shoot the car like this. Despite having no idea how to make a car look like pachyderm, I accepted.
This was my very first advertising job, and it was for BMW and I could choose pretty much anywhere in the world I wanted to go. We ended up shooting in Cadaques, Spain, home of Salvador Dali. I did my thing, everyone loved it and I was onto the next campaigns, which came from Diesel and Costume National.
Looking back, I realize I was so wet behind the ears then that I didn’t fully grasp just how big these projects were. I just did what I knew and it seemed to work. There have been many pivotal jobs in my career, but I would have to say that Diesel, Costume National and BMW were my first three big ones. And they all came so quickly, I really didn’t even have time to take everything in. After that, the campaigns I created for Puma were huge, turning into a four-year stint that cemented my career as a photographer and helped me relocate to NYC.
