Edward Olive | A Photographer You Should Know [GP Feature]

If you haven’t noticed, the Gear Patrol team appreciates top notch photography. To that effect we knew that Edward Olive would be the first to kick off the Gear Patrol Features, what we aim to be a reoccurring piece bringing you some a dose of culture and some generally thought provoking content.

We know you’re busy and who has time to read through pages of droning writing, we sure don’t. So, in typical Gear Patrol style we’ll keep them succinct.

Madrid, Spain based Edward Olive, is a find from the amazing visual cornucopia known as, flickr.com. Olive’s work is sharp, edgy, and offers more perspective than you’ll ever find in traditional photography; utterly surreal and from the photos we’ve been provided by Edward, teeming with sex appeal. All this from a former lawyer.

Better yet is watching Olive’s rising appreciation through the web. Tens of thousands of visitors clamor to see his latest works daily. We find ourselves of kindrid spirits.

Olive is a traditionalist, shooting exclusively with vintage cameras: Hassleblads, Rolleiflex and Mamiyas. The result is a grainy look that humbles the thought of digital in one fell swoop. Olive, not normally prone to release images to the web has agreed to share two larger images with Gear Patrol to share with our readers.

Edward Olive’s biography and photos (slightly NSFW) after the jump.

[click on image to enlarge]

Edward Olive is a fine art photographer & actor born in Dublin, Ireland, brought up in Whitley Bay in the North East of England, former city lawyer in London & Paris and now resident in Madrid, Spain where he makes his real living from screen acting (mainly toilet paper and hamburger chain adverts) and upscale wedding photography.

His work is still underground. He has never won a photography competition, never had an exhibition of his work, never had a picture published even in a collective photography publication. He decided to take matters into his own hands in a virtual world and uploads pictures to the web on an almost daily basis which now receive literally tens of thousands of visits per day.

He works almost exclusively with vintage cameras such as hasselblad, rolleiflex and mamiya and shoots only out of date film to give his pictures “a grainy vintage look, an unpredictability of colours and tones and a touch of sex pistols”. While most professional photographers go the way of clean digital images and stereotyped safety, Edward Olive looks back to a oddly coloured fantasy world of 1970’s short skirts, black and white busty female wedding guests that has his clients nearly throwing him out of his wedding jobs when they catch him climbing on chairs to catch low cut tops or crawling under tables to get…

A photographer to watch out for.

We hope to feature more of Olive’s work here on Gear Patrol with you in the coming weeks.

Visit Edward Olive’s site: edwardolive.net or his photos on flickr.

Related Topics