Alva Bernadine was born in Grenada, West Indies and moved to Britain at the age of 6 to London. At the age of 10 I bought a toy camera that took blurred pictures, some of which her mother still has in the family album.
I became seriously interested in photography at the age o...
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Alva Bernadine was born in Grenada, West Indies and moved to Britain at the age of 6 to London. At the age of 10 I bought a toy camera that took blurred pictures, some of which her mother still has in the family album.
I became seriously interested in photography at the age of 21. His first pictures were of London tourist spots and the next year he started practicing his present style.
Worked mainly in the editorial field for over 30 years, Alva has photographed for numerous magazines such as Vogue, GQ, Elle, Sunday Times.
In 1987 won the Vogue /Sotheby’s Cecil Beaton Award in 1987 for a series of shoe pictures entitled ‘The Fetish’ (self-portraits) and in 1997 and ‘98 he was nominated as Erotic Photographer of the Year here in Britain and eventually won the award in 2002 for his first book, Bernadinism, How to Dominate Men and Subjugate Women.
His work is unconventional, sometimes surreal and is very singular in style. It ranges from a classic use of perspective to experimental work using a sound-activated switch to capture action pictures of women’s arses being spanked. There is always an ‘event’ in his pictures, there is always a strange, surreal or quirky happening. Alva Bernadine pictures always begin with an unusual idea. The colors are saturated and they are always taken on location, using rarely studios.
