Ren Rox is a London-based photographer originally from Spain, where she grew up on the beach. She shoots in a variety of fields: landscape, fashion and portraiture, as well as personal projects. She has also worked as a musician, a writer, and a press correspondent. Ren uses all-analogue material and creates dreamlike atmospheres that she achieved through experimentation via in-camera techniques such as double exposure or a combination of manual methods, ranging from hand painting to chemical damage.
How did you get interested in photography and why did you pick photography as a medium and form of expression?
I used to paint and draw as a child. I was obsessed with plastic arts but photography never crossed my mind. Some years later I bought an SLR, as a friend and I started doing “experimental” shoots of each other with intense colour lights and I found myself relentlessly studying photography books to improve.
“I never intentionally set out to be a photographer, at least not initially. It just happened.”
I was a musician in London and got a phone call from a prestigious magazine asking me to shoot a band who happened to be touring partners. I told them I wasn’t exactly a photographer, just a guitarist and singer with a camera, but they’d somehow seen my pictures laying around our record label’s office and were adamant I should do it. The band were living on a boat. There were swans, the sun was shining and I asked them to have a water fight, which made for some interesting situations. I shot four rolls. They went on to tour the world shortly afterwards and used my pictures as press shots. That’s how I officially became a photographer. From zero to being published worldwide in a matter of weeks. I’m still amazed at that chain of events.
I think photography picked me rather than the other way round. I never intentionally set out to be a photographer, at least not initially. It just happened. It’s something that makes me very happy and inspired by getting to see the world, meet people and discover all kinds of things in the process.
Can you tell us more about this experimental body of work?
This is just a selection of some of my favourite recent and not so recent pictures. I go through phases with styles but somehow it’s the more experimental pictures that I prefer to shoot and show. It’s what made me get a camera in the first place, all the experiments you can make with film, light and chemical manipulation. And the double exposures. It’s always been about the double exposures.
More on her website.
