shag palace: a 1970s wunderkammer of randal ford's making
Welcome to Randal Ford’s Shag Palace, where Norman Rockwell meets Richard Avedon meets Wes Anderson. Where things are a little bit psychedelic, a little bit trippy, a little bit bizarre. Portraiture and lifestyle photography are familiar to Ford, but in the case of this particular personal project, the more unfamiliar the lifestyle, the more fantastic the portraits.
Ford shot the Shag Palace series in a meticulously styled home and worked with a talent agency to cast talent who fit the interior design, which Ford describes as “1970s-head-to-toe.” “I have to do personal projects to satisfy my creativity,” Ford explains, and this house fit the bill for so many of Ford’s creative preoccupations: style, precision, and a heavy dose of personality.
“The house was begging to be shot in,” he reflects, noting the ceaselessly patterned walls and upholstery, the light fixtures and decorative objects, and of course, its namesake carpeting. And, as ever, Ford made sure his characters were accompanied by their four-legged friends: in one shot, a full pedigree dachshund lounges, and in another, a dalmatian dots the stairs, twinning with the dress of his human counterpart (“a happy on-set accident,” says Ford).
To amplify the images, Ford wrote mini backstories for each subject, which he used when sharing the shots on social media. Gideon Tsang in his desert home outside of Palm Springs and Eddie dialed in at home in Miami are two of several caricatures cast in the theater of Ford’s imagination. “I tried to build a world with these,” says Ford. “I wanted to focus on subtleties and make images that someone might quickly scroll past, and then immediately come back to and linger.”
See more of Randal’s work here.