David Gray David Gray

Barre Trash

A photographic exploration of Barre Trash and the world surrounding it, made while immersed within the ballet community during a shoot in Tokyo. Through documentary observation, portraiture and product storytelling, the project explores the discipline and atmosphere that exists beyond performance itself.

Louis DeFelice and Lucas Labrador first approached me to talk about product and brand storytelling. The conversation came from a mentoring perspective initially, but quickly evolved into something more collaborative.

The suggestion was simple: join them in Tokyo during a Barre Trash shoot to explore, through photography, an understanding of the ballet world and the culture surrounding it. Spending time alongside the founders also revealed how Barre Trash speaks to ballet dancers in an authentic way, shaped by people who understand what it takes to perform at the highest level. A year of monthly meetings would never come close to the understanding that immersion, shared experience and time spent within an environment itself can offer.

Partly, the trip became an opportunity to gain a deeper understanding of the brand, but also to spend time around the founders, hear their story, and observe the world the brand exists within.

Alongside photographing throughout the trip to spark conversation, ideas, and play with additional content ideas, the intention gradually became to help shape a beginnings of a manifesto for Barre Trash, something that reflected back an understanding of ballet formed through proximity to the dancers and founders, the routines, and the atmosphere surrounding the brand.

From the beginning, what felt compelling about Barre Trash was that it wasn’t attempting to romanticise ballet from the outside. It came from dancers who understood what it takes to perform at the highest level. Not just performance itself, but everything surrounding it: the training, repetition, pressure, humour, exhaustion, discipline and devotion that shape daily life inside ballet culture.

Documentary photography has, for me, always felt less concerned with directing and more with understanding - being respectful, curious, and patient for authenticity to reveal itself, then responding photographically when it does.

Rather than photographing ballet as spectacle, the focus became the spaces around it. The moments before and after. The warmth layers. The subway journeys. Recovery. Waiting. Conversation. Stretching. The parts an audience rarely sees, but ballet dancers live daily.

Mixing documentary authenticity with product integration has become a central pursuit within the approach, allowing product to exist seamlessly within real situations rather than feeling staged or static. The clothing appears the way it genuinely exists within the world around it: worn between rehearsals, layered through warm-ups, carried through the city, worn daily. That balance between documentary observation and functional product storytelling has become the holy grail of the process.

Alongside the documentary moments, portraits of dancers became a way of aligning the brand with the people themselves, profiling their lives, personalities and discipline, while reflecting both the art form and the spirit of the brand.

The work ultimately became a way of entering the world around Barre Trash simply by being present within it.

The book itself eventually became a kind of souvenir back to them, something to reference, reflect on, and return to over time. Less a polished campaign piece, more a document of a particular brand moment.

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David Gray David Gray

The Space Between

An exploration into the space between documentary observation and product storytelling, where atmosphere, behaviour and authenticity become as important as the product itself. Reflecting on the evolving relationship between commercial imagery, social consumption and photographic truth, the piece looks at how meaningful product storytelling increasingly relies on immersion, observation and emotionally believable moments.

There is a version of commercial photography where product and story exist separately.

The campaign images are carefully constructed. The documentary moments arrive afterwards, almost as supporting material. One sells the product, the other adds atmosphere around it.

The work has long explored the space where documentary observation and product storytelling no longer feel divided.

The interesting space is where documentary observation and product storytelling begin to overlap. Where product feels embedded within the environment and behaviour surrounding it.

Not styled into authenticity afterwards, but discovered photographically within situations that already contain truth, energy and atmosphere.

That balance between documentary observation and product storytelling has gradually become the holy grail of the process. The challenge is subtle. The moment product begins to feel imposed onto an environment, the image often loses something. The atmosphere flattens. People begin performing for the product rather than simply existing authentically in it.

What feels increasingly relevant now is that audiences are exceptionally good at sensing this difference. People engage emotionally with imagery that feels connected to real behaviour and human experience. Not because the image is technically imperfect, but because it contains recognisable tension, intimacy, humour, vulnerability, exhaustion, ambition, freedom or uncertainty.

The same emotional triggers that drive engagement across social platforms are often the things traditional commercial photography attempts to smooth away. But those emotions are precisely what give imagery atmosphere and memorability. When the balance works, the product becomes part of the story rather than the dominant subject within it. A wetsuit carried across a headland searching for waves. Warm-up layers worn between rehearsals in Tokyo. A jacket pulled tighter against incoming weather. Objects existing naturally inside behaviour rather than interrupting it.

Those moments tend to carry more emotional weight because they remain connected to human experience rather than simply trying to sell to it.

Documentary photography has always offered a way of understanding people, environments and culture through observation and immersion. The best work asks something of the viewer. Commercial storytelling asks for clarity, function and purpose. The most interesting and creatively exciting space exists somewhere between those two things. Not removing craft or direction entirely, but leaving enough openness for authenticity, unpredictability and atmosphere to emerge. Immersion often teaches more than planning ever can.

Some of the strongest product storytelling rarely announces itself loudly. It simply feels believable. The viewer understands the product because they understand the world surrounding it. That ongoing search between observation and integration remains one of the central pursuits within the work.

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David Gray David Gray

The Documentary Truth

An exploration of documentary truth, sequencing and the space left for viewer interpretation. Reflecting on the four-book series Vampire, Drift, Thunderbolts Way and Surge, the piece looks at how photographs, text and association can shape narratives that exist somewhere between reality, assumption and imagination.

Photography has always carried a complicated relationship with truth.

A photograph is often treated as evidence. Something fixed. Objective. A document of what stood in front of the camera at a particular moment in time.

But the longer spent making work, editing books and sequencing images, the less stable that idea begins to feel.

Meaning rarely exists in a single image alone.

The four-book series - Vampire, Drift, Thunderbolts Way and Surge - grew from an interest in this unstable space between what is true, assumed to be true and imagined to be true. Created in collaboration with writer Paul Summers, the books combined photographs and fragments of text that offered clues rather than conclusions, allowing space for interpretation, association and imagination.

The photographs themselves remain documentary. Nothing is staged or constructed in a fictional sense. Yet the sequencing deliberately plays with atmosphere, suggestion and association, allowing space for the viewer’s own assumptions, imagination and lived experience to shape the narrative as much as the photographs themselves.

The idea often felt closer to building “paper movies” than traditional documentary projects. Fragments rather than complete explanations. Moments connected emotionally rather than literally. A sequence of photographs capable of shifting meaning depending on the order they appear, the title surrounding them, or the assumptions projected onto them by the viewer.

Choosing a title like Vampire immediately begins shaping expectation before a single photograph is even seen. The viewer instinctively starts building narrative connections, searching for darkness, danger, mythology or symbolism, even when many of the photographs themselves remain observational and open-ended.

That tension became the interesting space.

Not documentary as fixed truth, but documentary as something more unstable, subjective and psychologically collaborative. Because viewers never arrive at photographs neutrally. People bring memory, culture, humour, fear, bias, experience and imagination. They actively complete part of the narrative themselves.

Part of the attraction to this approach is the freedom within it. Looking at photographs playfully rather than searching for fixed answers or prescribed meaning. Moving away from the pressure of needing to immediately explain what a work is “about”, and allowing interpretation to remain open, subjective and personal.

There is no single correct reading. The viewer completes part of the work themselves.

It was often the same experience looking through photography books as a teenager. Sitting for hours with books by photographers like Winogrand or Friedlander, imagining what had led to a particular moment, how those elements had briefly come together in front of the camera, including the photographer’s own presence within the scene. Then imagining beyond the frame entirely, where people went afterwards, how the atmosphere shifted once the photograph disappeared back into ordinary life.

The photographs themselves never fully explained anything. That uncertainty was part of the fascination. The books became less like documents and more like fragments from larger imagined worlds.

That idea continues to sit underneath the “paper movies” approach running through the four books.

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