Chloe Dewe Mathews
AGE: 29
BORN: London
RESIDES: London
EDUCATION: University of Oxford
CLIENTS: Harper’s Bazaar, HUCK, The New York Times Magazine, Riders,
The Sunday Times Magazine , Telegraph Magazine
AWARDS: BJP International Photography Award; Julia Margaret Cameron
Ne w Talent Award; Magenta Foundation Flash Forward
KEY LESSONS LEARNED: “You should show your work to as many people
as possible. Once you have a body of work you are pleased with, it’s all about
finding the people who want to publish it or spread the word, and sometimes
those people are not the ones you would expect.”
After graduating with
a fine-art degree from the
Ruskin School of Drawing
and Fine Art at the University
of Oxford, Chloe Dewe
Mathews worked in the film
industry for four years before
dedicating herself full-time to
photography. She spent two-and-a-half years assisting for
Zed Nelson and Marcus Lyon,
and then began focusing on her own work last year.
“When I first started shooting seriously, I tried out all sorts of
techniques, different cameras and lighting,” Dewe Mathews recalls.
“In hindsight that process gave me confidence in the way I currently
work: quietly, instinctively with natural light. I think I needed to know
that I wasn’t making those types of pictures because I couldn’t, but
because I didn’t want to.”
In 2010 Dewe Mathews hitchhiked for nine months from China
to Britain, “to get a sense of the gradual changes that occur as you
move from East to West,” she says. “I was looking for small stories
that spoke of larger issues, talking to as many people as possible
and following my instincts.”
The trip yielded, among other work, her widely recognized series
“Caspian.” The series focuses on the sanatorium town of Naftalan,
Azerbaijan, where people bathe in local crude oil to treat a range of
ailments; and on a group of Uzbek migrant workers, who are building
increasingly elaborate tombs for the new oil-rich middle class in
Kazakhstan. “I was interested to find and observe the subtle, less
expected ways in which both the landscape and way of life in the
region are changing due to the oil industry,” Dewe Mathews says.
“The series was shot on medium format, created to be printed
beautifully, to be inhabited and plunged into.”
In June 2011 Dewe Mathews signed with Panos Pictures, and her
“Caspian” series won several awards, including the British Journal of
Photography’s International Photography Award, which included a
show at London’s Foto8 gallery.
Dewe Mathews is currently developing her “Caspian” project
further in anticipation of an exhibition at 1508 London’s gallery
this fall. She plans to continue work in Central Asia and is also
developing a long-term project in Britain.
—Debra Klomp Ching
