Jonathan Anderson began working with Benjamin Bruno almost 15 years ago. Having met the stylist in a showroom shortly after Anderson had graduated and launched his own business, the duo quickly formed a deep and intuitive creative bond that has since become the foundation of much of the designer’s prolific output: at his brand JW Anderson; during his 11 years at Loewe, transforming the Spanish leather-goods house into one of the most exciting and zeitgeisty brands around; and, just shy of a year, now at Dior. Theirs is a dialogue propelled by a rigorous and mutual challenge: to conjure newness through image, and to tap into, as they put it, ‘the psychology of the house’. The resulting work – mainly catwalk shows and campaign imagery – has been cultural, coded, sometimes obscure, and occasionally full of contradiction. It is widely regarded as some of the most memorable of recent times.

Renowned photographer David Sims became a recurring part of their image-making team later in Anderson’s Loewe tenure, in 2022, and has been fundamental in shaping Dior’s new aesthetic. Having emerged as a photographer in the late 1980s, Sims quickly established himself as one of the industry’s leading creatives, with a style of imagery that was often stark, full of street-y attitude, and a precursor to the grunge aesthetic that soon characterised the early-1990s era of fashion, style, music, culture and youth. As such, brands and magazines came calling, eager for him to elevate their image by showcasing his work. Sims’ style, attitude and output have evolved and shifted in the decades since (he’s now widely acclaimed for his technical prowess and the sheer breadth of his photographic repertoire) and he’s arguably more in demand today than ever before.

For the final chapter of System’s series of conversations with Jonathan Anderson, we invited Bruno and Sims to speak with the Dior creative director about their close collaboration and the intense pace and volume of image creation that’s now required of them.

Jonathan Wingfield: Jonathan, when you first arrived at Dior, how did you begin considering the role that image and photography would play?
Jonathan Anderson: You’re trying to strike a balance between putting out imagery that is precise about where you think Dior can go, and at the same time not closing yourself in. That’s why, at the beginning, we put out the Warhol imagery of Basquiat and Lee Radziwill, because they express a mood and a psychology around what we’re doing. From there, it allows us to build on things.
Benjamin Bruno: The first task we had in mind was to reset the brand, to rewire the psychology of the house. Dior should be about a youthful, French aristocratic sense of style. But image-wise, as an aesthetic embryo, we used those specific Warhol Polaroids as a first scent of what the brand could build upon. The logo made sense on these people, no matter what era, time, age, or background. It was too early to pretend to know what the Dior image should be, and this gesture just felt right, fresh, and relevant. It’s as if you were taking off the parquet of a house and laying another reclaimed and gorgeous one that establishes new foundations. 
David Sims: Jonathan was really clear. He said what would be needed was a different language, something very distinct from what we’d been creating in the past [for Loewe or JW Anderson]. What Jonathan does is create a universe, and without sounding falsely modest, I just add to that in part. I want to be able to interpret things which aren’t necessarily verbalised, things that we discover by just getting stuck in and doing it. That’s how it felt when we got started with Dior – it was a discussion more around values than it was any photographic style or visual direction.
Jonathan: When you have a brand like Dior, you have to try to carve out the values that you want to bring to it. Is it about relationships between women? Is it about a relationship between the Dior man and the Dior woman? Where is Christian Dior today? It was very important that we brought something more empathetic, so, while speaking with David and Ben, you’re trying to work out how to tell that through the characters that you’re using: the casting, the image-making, the interconnection between the photographic lens and the character. So that the customer looks at it and, even though they don’t have the word in front of them, they just feel it.
David: By and large, campaign imagery takes up real space. If you go anywhere in Paris, you see that, right? But it can also be a liminal space, one that can be transformative, but which ostensibly draws people towards an idea. And that language comes primarily between Jonathan and Ben. I’m trying to sit in front of those ideas and create them through the mechanism of photography, but I’ve got to be able to feel it spiritually as well. And Jonathan is particularly good at expressing that sort of spiritual value, which I know could sound absurd to some people, but for us, that’s a very real thing.

The work the three of you have produced together obviously predates Dior. Was there a conscious decision to establish a distinct photographic language for the house? 
Benjamin: When it came to choosing the creative voice, the lens, the storyteller with an infinite ability for characterisation, David was the one. Simply because we go back a long way together, and essentially because of his creative agility, lighting genius, relentless quest for ‘accidental’ perfection, and his rare humanity. There is an almost orgasmic, unfulfilled quality in his working process; he never gives up searching and questioning, as if each picture were the last one he would take. Because my editorials are only shot with him, and because we created that big body of work for Loewe together, we just knew that the visual vocabulary for Dior would have to be unique and drastically disconnected from our previous adventures. And then, by figuring out and endlessly finessing who the new Dior woman is, who the new Dior man is, and what the house of Christian Dior is today, we just create intuitively. We have a mission to create desire, to weave pragmatic daydreams, and to sell, but the storytelling, the characters, and the world the brand lives in, is an absolute playground for blossoming freshness. It’s like growing new burgeons of freedom from a plant that has been sitting in a beautiful antique flower pot.

Do you recall seeing David’s work for the first time?
Jonathan: I knew David’s work incredibly well before I began working with him. A lot of his imagery really spoke to me because I thought it was very ‘purist’; the sort of images that get exactly what you want from fashion without it being about fashion. For example, the images for Guido [Palau]’s hair book [Heads: Hair by Guido] really stuck with me.
Benjamin: I’d probably say his pictures of Kurt Cobain in a Liberty floral dress or a tiger costume; his portrait of Kate Moss against a baby blue backdrop, with deconstructed short hair by Guido; or his Heads hair book images with Guido. You don’t forget a picture by David: they get embedded in your mind and in the collective unconscious because they are so graphic, uncompromising, rebellious, empathetic, forward-thinking and simply larger-than-life.

And now that you’re close collaborators?
Jonathan: Well, what I love is that David is a master at setting up an image – which is really about craft. He knows about every lighting and technical aspect of picture-making, which I think has largely disappeared [from fashion photography] today. So there’s a mutual trust in the collaborative freedom, and that’s very difficult today because I think a lot of people just turn up with an image of an image and are trying to recreate it. What’s really nice about working with David and Ben on this whole thing is you’re carving out something new because it’s about an instinctive feeling, it is not about a marketing decision.
Benjamin: I like how atomised David’s mind is, how curious his eye is, and how big his heart is. I can go anywhere with him – every aesthetic route, every picture is worth the journey. I like the quality in him of being fragile, of being vulnerable; it means you are real, you don’t act life, you live it.

How do you respond to that, David?
David: I can’t help but be deeply flattered. I think that the connective for us is that there’s a very specific type of ‘intelligence’ – call it craft, call it experience – which can be developed through different approaches. When we’re together, the flexibility comes from the assurance that we can rely on that ‘image intelligence’ to either move back to a place that is familiar and that offers a foundational outcome to what we’re trying to achieve, or to be free to surprise ourselves. It’s a clunky phrase, ‘image intelligence’, but it is apt.

Jonathan, tell me about the very specific role that Benjamin plays. It feels like such a key relationship and dynamic.
Jonathan: Ben is someone I trust implicitly. Ever since I have really worked in fashion, I have worked with Ben, and I like that he’s going to tell me the truth. He is the person who could destroy me in two minutes. And I quite like that. Ben, ultimately, is about image-making; that’s where he is very good. No matter if it’s building a look for a catwalk or building a look for a group of people in an image, Ben has this incredible ability to forge out a tension within what the character is. And so, on a shoot, I kind of vanish.

Because you’re no longer needed?
Jonathan: I have a weird emotional process because I’ve just done the show, and then we have to silmultaneously shoot the campaign and launch another show. So, it’s a moment where I’m letting go, and letting Ben enjoy it; where there’s an element of surprise, where you’re like, ‘Oh, this character has now evolved into something else.’ That is Ben’s magic.

You have previously said, ‘I need someone to work against. I have Ben for that.’ Tell me more about this tension.
Jonathan: Honestly, it’s like being in a relationship with someone. Creativity is a very, very complex thing. And when you’re doing something on the scale of Dior, the amount of creative output is huge. So you have to have a partner in crime who is able to keep a feeling of curiosity in order to find newness within every new collection that you’re kicking off. There are days when you are not aligned. There are moments when you’re completely aligned. There are moments where I’ll be like, ‘I’m not so sure,’ but then cut to a year later and we’re doing it. And that’s because Ben is a very good future thinker; he is able to push me outside my comfort zone. That’s really important, because if you didn’t have that, you could get completely lost in yourself and become quite repetitive.
Benjamin: Jonathan and I are like two parts of the same brain, or brothers. We are definitely in a relationship, in life and in creativity. We don’t need to talk much to understand each other, our brains and intuitions move at the same pace, and almost always to the same places. Where there is passion, there is conflict. If you care, you care. So yes, there can be friction between us, but because we have this common thirst for excellence, and because we love each other, it doesn’t really matter. He can boil at me with his eyes full of anger, and I can scream at him and slam the door, but at the end of the day, we are here to make things beautiful and a success, to make the people who trust us proud and happy, and we are here for each other too.

Does that resonate with you, David?
David: Deeply. I mean, neither Ben nor I are shouldering anything like the kind of pressure that Jonathan must be under, and I think he handles it superlatively. There’s obviously a lot of trust between Jonathan and Ben, and I hope that Ben trusts me enough to be able to bring these ideas forward, because they’re precious to him. But what I read in Ben is a kinship: I feel a definite desire to support him in his exploration of this inner creative self. Being creative, and going through a process in your head, can be isolating, and Ben probably knows that that exists in me too. But as a photographer I can help to manifest it, which I think is a worthwhile exercise.

Jonathan often references and considers different notions of time and history; like the campaign shot in the Comtesse du Barry’s Pavillon de Musique. What role does source material or the broader idea of history play in your work? 
Benjamin: I respect history, but I don’t like dust. So I can admire a magnificent dress or a coat, but then it needs to be dismantled to give birth to newness. I like and admire the codes of a fashion house in small doses, but I love extracting relevant details from a piece of clothing and then transfiguring, bending, reinterpreting, mocking, and morphing them into a contemporary, fresh version that smartly winks at the past.
Jonathan: For me, the historical context is just about the psyche of something. Shooting at the Comtesse du Barry’s house brings up many possibilities. It’s a building of sheer modernity – probably one of the greatest pieces of French architecture – and I think some people would struggle today with trying to create modernity of that power. It’s kind of like facing up to Goliath. You may not get that from the pictures, but it’s all those layers that are important in brand-building. It’s saying, here are the adjacencies that I want in French culture, with a French institution. But by the time you go to shoot there, and get inspiration from it, and throw a lens on it… It morphs into something else. That’s where newness can be found, because it’s not becoming overly prescriptive.

Photography plays such a powerful role in creating legacy for a designer’s work. Yet the pace and volume of image creation is more intense than ever. How are you affected by this tension?
Jonathan: We have to produce a lot of imagery because fashion is a bigger business than it was in 1956. And I think there is both a reality and a non-reality of what image is today, and of why we do it. That’s what I find exciting in fashion because we look at it sometimes through jaded eyes. We all see more imagery than ever before, everyone’s an expert; but at the same time, there is always newness to be found when you put three or four people around a table and then you shoot something, because it will always be a different time and moment.

David, how does this intense pace and volume affect your working methods?
David: It’s incalculable, so I try not to think about it. Although part of what I’m commissioned to create is volume, so you have to deal with this amplification because without it, you don’t exist to the majority of people. It’s about trying to reach that scale while retaining some degree of the DNA of your creativity from its origin point. And that’s proven to be really difficult. We’ve had to develop totally different approaches. Digital has become a huge part of that, but people still want to see photography that, in some cases, is almost aping a very analogue approach — trying to do as much within the camera as possible, not relying on software to add or smooth over certain aspects of the work. So we try to keep it as organic as possible, knowing full well that we have to come away with a huge number of images in a very short space of time. But I’m not going to deny it, I think I’ve become slightly attached to that pressure. I like how quick we have to be. Because it stops the sort of ponderous, self-involved nonsense that used to go on around images, people taking it far too seriously. Of course, we take it seriously, but sometimes we can get trapped in a fantasy of our own brilliance. And when you’re challenged in the way that we are now, you’ve got to just roll your sleeves up and get down and dirty with it. And I quite enjoy that.

Has the aspiration of each single image changed now that it exists as one image among so many others?
David: I’ve played with pluralism because I increasingly felt that there was too much energy and too much focus on creating ‘definitives’. And I had this nagging sense of ‘all that is being lost’. So I think I am aiming at this person who is not kind of standing back and admiring just a single picture. What I want them to do is walk away with some feelings from a collection of images. This is why I’m such a fan of Wolfgang [Tillmans], because there are so many images talking to each other so wonderfully in those shows he creates. You still walk away with a feeling. Let me be clear, I don’t think I moved in any direction as an outcome of seeing Wolfgang’s work, but I think I’ve evolved in a certain direction because I’m such a fan of photography and the vibrant culture[s] around photography.

On one hand, you’ve got a carousel post of 20 images existing within the deluge of Instagram, and on the other there are entire building façades that have become billboards for one single image.
David: I think that covering buildings is quite an interesting situation. The scale of it, how huge they are, is really impressive. And I think you mustn’t forget the power of the logo, it’s what qualifies a lot of images in people’s minds. I don’t think sometimes the imagery without the logo would be nearly as impactful. Maybe that’s why a single image printed that large and occupying a whole building front – the monumental scale – is really important. If you’re affected by that it’s quite something to see.
Benjamin: I like pictures that can solidly exist on a billboard, at a bus stop, in a book, in a magazine, and in a gallery. So I don’t really draw any distinction between advertising photography and editorial photography. Of course, one speaks globally at a massive scale and the other is more an intimate playground for exploration and characterisation, yet both are about telling stories and hand-making dreams. But while I acknowledge that advertising pictures serve a different purpose from editorial or art pictures, I can’t compromise on their quality or rarity. I have to confess that I’m extremely demanding in terms of image-making, mostly with myself and, by extension, with other collaborators. No matter the pace and demands of the industry, I cannot possibly live with delivering a mediocre picture; it is simply not an option. Because for me, photography ultimately remains the most noble and chic medium to record reality, at a certain time, in a certain place. To paraphrase Nan Goldin: ‘I thought by taking pictures of my friends, I would keep them alive forever,’ and also, ‘My camera partially functions as my memory.’ I think that’s the most romantic and moving description of photography.