David Sims Has Shaped Fashion Photography for Decades. He’s Finally Ready to Look Back

“I’ve always had a resistance to looking in my own archive,” says the photographer David Sims. “It’s a very dark and forgotten place. And seeing it en masse, it just became clear that this person”—i.e., himself—“was in a state of mild psychosis.” In fact, studying the torrent of photographs he has taken since the late ’80s felt so unnerving to the 59-year-old that he decided to give the exhibition it has yielded the title “The Hamster Becomes the Problem.” “If you’ve ever owned a hamster, you’ll know that they keep chewing on the cage bars and running on the wheel,” Sims says. “Eventually this delightful, cute, furry animal becomes a torment.”

Sims might have found looking at his old work tormenting, but few of the visitors to the Marta Ortega Pérez Foundation, in A Coruña, Spain, are likely to. “The Hamster Becomes the Problem” seems set to reveal to a wider public what insiders have always known: that Sims is one of the best fashion photographers of all time. “He doesn’t just define a style—he builds a character,” says Fabien Baron, the creative director who gave Sims an exclusive contract at Harper’s Bazaar when the photographer was just 26. “He’s learned the craft so well that he can do anything. In his use of light, he’s the most impressive photographer—and I’ve worked with them all.”

Many of Sims’s photographs convey a feeling that we know the person being depicted, or someone very much like them, perhaps from school or from the fuzzy depths of a long-ago late night. “He created characters and stories that were immediately identifiable to lots of people growing up in the 1990s and 2000s,” says Charlotte Cotton, the exhibition’s curator. “In 1997, he said to me, ‘I want to create the visuals of our time.’ And he’s done that.”

Given the consistently high quality of his work, it seems strange that Sims hasn’t had a full solo exhibition or monograph before. In 2000, he published Isolated Heroes, a book of extraordinary portraits of models taken backstage at a Raf Simons show, which commands huge prices on the resale market today; and in 2013, a touching exhibition named “Bowievirus,” in which a group of skinny male models embodied the Thin White Duke, was shown at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London. But Sims has disseminated most of his work specifically through magazines. Before the Internet existed, that was how he could reach people in places that weren’t cultural hot spots like London or New York—people like his younger self.

Sims grew up in Sheffield, in the north of England, though his family’s roots are in Liverpool. His father sold contraceptive pills to pharmacies (“I always used to say that he was a drug dealer”), and his mother was a secretary. His extended family were musical—he remembers them singing together on Sundays in the pub—while Sims was an avid reader of music magazines about cult figures such as Iggy Pop, his hero. For the photographer, music is still essential on a shoot to conjure up the character and image in his mind; for years, he even employed his own DJ for that purpose. “There has to be a moment when the right song comes on,” he says.

Sims, who admits that he was “opinionated and frustrated” as a teenager, was hugely unpopular with his teachers. The head of his high school art department wrote to a college to which Sims was applying, warning them that Sims was the worst student he’d come across in 30 years. “When I tell that story, it’s like I’m taking pleasure in it,” Sims says. “But it was devastating.” Things clicked when he was offered a job in a photographic darkroom in his hometown. “I thought almost immediately, I’ve got this. I know what I’m doing. It was the first thing I’d been asked to do that fell into place, and I ran with it.”

Entirely self-taught, Sims learned photographic and developing techniques—“trying to produce the perfect negative”—and immersed himself in the medium’s history, studying masters such as Irving Penn, Richard Avedon, Robert Mapplethorpe, and the great war photographer Don McCullin. He moved to London, started working as an assistant to more experienced photographers, and quickly fell in with a fashionable crowd. “We were friendly with a few pop stars, so life was quite exciting,” Sims says. “I remember being ushered into clubs just because we were with Boy George.”

Yet, by the late ’80s, Sims was getting antsy. While he initially enjoyed the acid house scene, “that rave high suddenly felt way too chicken feed to me.” He thought that London’s excitement “had dipped a little bit—there was a resurgence of a more conventional middle-class influence in magazines. I thought, God, we’ve got to take back our ground here.” He found allies and collaborators in two like-minded stylists, Melanie Ward and Anna Cockburn, who had a similar iconoclastic urge to bring a new sense of realism to fashion imagery.

Baron remembers first seeing Sims’s early work when he was judging a photography competition in Monaco: “a bunch of pictures of guys and girls against a white background. Avedon-esque, but the spirit was more youth-based, punkish. There was an English flavor. They were in your face, but they had soul.” Magazines such as i-D and The Face started giving Sims work. “I had an Australian girlfriend, so I went to Australia for a month, which seemed an eternity at the time,” he says. “And when I came back, some pictures had come out and people were suddenly very interested.”

Sims was whisked to New York, where Baron and Harper’s Bazaar editor Liz Tilberis signed him, despite what Baron remembers as his grungy “yellow hair.” He started photographing supermodels and shooting major ad campaigns—“sucking on the corporate tit,” as Sims puts it today. “The thing that New York had that London didn’t was mounds of money. It was my first experience with that resource and what comes with it.”

It’s a mark of Sims’s independence that his work for big brands and big magazines was just as idiosyncratic as the pictures he’d made for himself. Pushed by Baron to photograph Linda Evangelista for Bazaar, Sims came back with a magnificently weird shot of her wolf-whistling. “He showed how you could maintain your integrity through these tiny little gestures,” says Cotton. More editorial and commercial work followed, with clients including Jil Sander and Helmut Lang—an image from a 1997 campaign for the latter brand, of a husky, topless young man wearing a cape, subverted both masculinity and fashion advertising conventions, and is now in the collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum, in London.

Nonetheless, Sims was burning out. “I’d driven my friendships too hard and exhausted them,” he says. When Jil Sander didn’t renew his contract, he decided to take a break, which lasted roughly three years—some of that period spent traveling with the barman of a pub in Devon, England, that Sims had visited while camping on a nearby beach. When he returned, fashion photography had moved from film to digital, and Sims was forced to follow suit. “I was horrified when it first happened,” he says. “I felt completely disoriented by it.” But he decided to experiment with the new medium, “to see the things that lay deep within it, and that’s when the psychedelic thing kicked in.”

As “The Hamster Becomes the Problem” will show, Sims’s 21st-century work often has a narcotic, dreamlike quality. Jagi is a 2019 image of someone standing at the top of what looks like the steps of a playground slide in a dramatically hued field, against a sky full of Turner-esque clouds. There will be an installation that focuses on his cousin Lee Armstrong, a Liverpool-based painter with whom Sims has “a degree of fascination…we’ve led these sort of quantum parallel lives.” In one image, Armstrong is topless, with closed eyes and an open mouth, which is colored bright pink, denoting some kind of ecstatic experience. Another room, Rave, contains hundreds of pictures and, Cotton says, is like “a fever dream.”

Sims’s work often digs into his memories of his childhood in the postindustrial north of England—barbed-wire fences, tower blocks, violently patterned wallpaper in council flats, people smoking dope while listening to Pink Floyd. He is still creating characters, but now he’s using his impeccable photographic techniques to venture deep into their inner spaces. “He’s not dialing it in, in any way,” Cotton says. “Helmut Newton, or any of those libidinously driven photographers, they go back to the same place every time they take a picture, like they’re pressing repeat. David doesn’t. It’s like you’re following a journey of a life.”

Sims says that his ultimate inspiration is his unconscious, and he hopes that his symbolism, though intensely personal, might nevertheless resonate with viewers. “I was looking at the archive and wondering, What the hell was I even thinking?” Sims says. “It’s a chimera—something you’ll never quite get to. You’re building a structure that will hold the illusion of your fantasy. Really, this show could have been called ‘Castles in the Air.’ ”

All images courtesy of David Sims.