JUST KNEW I LOVED TO CAPTURE. "

My clients so far have consisted of entrepreneurs in different spaces trying to develop their brands, as well as indigo octopus, which I would say is my favorite because it marries fashion and photography. With indigo, I work alongside our founder to curate campaigns based on which trends she wants to align her brand with that are intentional and aspirational for social media consumption and our site.

What is most fulfilling about your work? What are you most passionate about in your work?

Reigniting my feelings surrounding creative direction and photography is thanks in part to indigo’s founder, Michelle. She’s given me license in a form to be creative and push boundaries with imagery relating to the brand she’s founded and nurtured. It’s her baby, it’s personal, and she trusts me to nurture it with her. She believes in me and trusts me to share her brand with the world; to me that’s the highest fulfillment. Being trusted to conceptualize and develop deliverables to represent something that someone developed out of primal passion requires such collaboration and respect, and it’s taught me a lot about those two things.

Share a bit about your work and creative process. What are the steps you take in planning a photoshoot?

For entrepreneurial clients, I ask for a few key words (usually keeping it around three) that they want to be so loud and so intentional to their consumer that you simply cannot miss them. This is a huge indicator of the sort of brand identity they want to have or to have conveyed. In this instance, it’s less about creating consumables for subjective interpretation and more about developing some agency of control over the interpretation to streamline imagery with their brand. It’s all about telling a story.

I research these words of their choosing to their cores, trying to understand what society’s interpretation of them are, their inverses, examples in pop-culture, avenues to deviate from the norm of societal interpretation. “What is it and what isn’t it?” is an important question for me to ask and understand during this phase. I then curate concepts and introduce elements that are representative of the concepts.

Where do you draw inspiration from? Who or what are some of your artistic and creative inspirations?

I struggle with this question because it changes so often. I’d say that fundamentally I’m inspired by surf culture and anything surrounding the ocean. I’m inspired by architects, garment pattern and design processes from production to a sales floor to someone’s closet, “Spanish Sahara” by the Foals, “Beach Baby” by Bon Iver, “Friday Night” by Orbit, and creatives in the fashion industry. This quote from Rilke has also stuck with me lately:

I’m inspired by other creatives that talk of their passion so inexhaustibly that it starts to feel tangible. I get a lot of inspiration from different publications, and the editors and contributors behind them. Cereal, Kinfolk, and Whalebone are three publications I get a lot of inspiration from. The feeling you get when all five senses are fulfilled and it comes up as Déjà vu later that feeling inspires me. I’m inspired by the idea that despite intention or desire, imagery unites through mere consumption, but also preserves individuality in interpretation and its vastness. We’re all looking at the same thing but it doesn’t mean the same thing to all of us — that kind of thing. Layers of collections of experiences that lend to perception.

What advice would you give to young photographers, entrepreneurs, and/or creatives that you wish you had known when first starting out?

I'm super visual, but I default to the written word as opposed to a visual representation of a concept I'm curatinglike a mood board. I tend to get stuck replicating rather than creating when I try to reference something too specific. I noticed recently that I lean almost entirely on my creative impulse when swiping right or left on what does or doesn't fit into a concept I'm working on. Rely on your creative impulse. Your touch or your take on something is uniquely inspiringhowever you arrive.

Where can our readers follow along with you (website, social media, email, etc.)?

My Instagram is a great place to connect with me @gabriellefreder or by email at gabriellefrederick@yahoo.com.

Is there anything you wish to share that we may not have addressed already?

There’s an excerpt about Picasso that my friend sent me recently from the Antibes that I’ve thought about a lot recently: "Picasso was fond of saying, in response to those who thought that the paintings of his advanced age were the work of a senile old man who was no longer in possession of his faculties, ‘Every day, I do worse’ or ‘You have to learn to be vulgar, to paint with swear words.’ Instead of the twilight predicted by his detractors, Picasso then summed up his entire life as an artist and as a man in a creative proliferation without flippancy, revealing a generous vitality and inventiveness in perpetual metamorphosis and opening new horizons for painting."