From lorry driving wannabe to snapper of the stars: meet PEROU

Date
1 July 2015

Japanese lesbian turned shaven-headed Marilyn Manson documentarist and portrait photographer is quite the trajectory. Throw into that timeline a period spent considering being a long-distance lorry driver or Christian missionary in Africa, and you’ve got the story of either a deeply fascinating individual or a bit of a raconteur. Photographer PEROU, we reckon, is both. 

The man behind the aforementioned rock documentary God is in the TV may be recognisable to some as a judge on Channel 5’s Make Me a Super Model UK, or from his 90s modelling career. However it’s likely the majority of us have seen his work – whether we know it or not – having shot the likes of Russell Brand, Kofi Annan, Jay Z, Helen Mirren, Katie Perry and Justin Bieber, to name but a few. He started out in the industry, he tells us, thanks to a “temporal shift in the universe,” (he studied photography at the University of Westminster), and is represented by agency JSR.

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PEROU

“My dad ran the canteen in one of the few colleges in England that ran a photography course in 1988 and got me place on a BTEC,” he says. “It’s not what you know…” Leg-up from the canteen or no, PEROU’S career has been a pretty stellar one. “Fortunately there are no typical days,” he says. “The only constant is that I make pictures every day just the subjects change. One day it might be photographing the president of the United States, in the States, literally the next day I might be in Tokyo photographing Japanese motorcycle gangs and the next, I might be sat at home wondering what just happened.”

"One day it might be photographing the president of the United States, in the States, literally the next day I might be in Tokyo photographing Japanese motorcycle gangs and the next, I might be sat at home wondering what just happened.”

PEROU

PEROU works from his east London studio “the Bow bunker,” a converted warehouse used for photography, film and events. The ideas for said shoots can come from anywhere. “Sometimes I come up with ideas for shoots just before I go to sleep or as I’m waking up which is exhausting, sometimes an ad agency will come to me with a life-like drawing and I have to turn it into a photograph” he explains. “I equate photographing people to meeting people. Obviously: I have to meet them to photograph them. So if that’s a famous artist or a politician or a terrorist, I want to meet them and swap stories or listen to their opinions to widen my own understanding of the world around me. To be a people photographer you’ve got to be interested in people and I am.”

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PEROU

This engagement with personalities as well as aesthetics has served the photographer well, and means he gets to work with a huge range of clients, his favourite of which have “deep pockets,” “understand photography” and “live abroad and don’t like to travel.” But it’s the people and the things they say that seem to really get PEROU going. “I HATE photographing people that don’t want to talk to me,” he says. “I just want to talk, and make pictures, in some ways photography is enabling me to travel round the world meeting interesting people and expanding my mind. It’s very selfish really. All photographers are self obsessed, did you know?"

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PEROU

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