An insider’s portrait of life as a young male model

Sometimes, periods of enforced inactivity with other people – time spent waiting around; the in-between moments – can be unexpectedly transformative. For Nick Offord, these encounters are the basis of his second monograph, No Shows – the core of which, he tells us, is friendship.

Spanning over a decade and captured while a model signed to Tomorrow Is Another Day, the agency celebrated for placing androgynous male beauty on the catwalk, No Shows documents the liminal moments of men’s fashion weeks. Portraying the coming-of-age stories of bright-eyed young models as they float between castings, shoots, and shows in Milan, Paris, London and New York, No Shows tells an alternative story of fashion week to the one we may be used to seeing. “I was always more interested in those day-to-day moments, empty beds, cheap shared hotel rooms, brushing teeth, those sort of intimate spaces and moments,” Offord tells us. “That’s what felt real and worth documenting.”

The bonds created during these experiences are at the heart of No Shows, the idea for the book forming from the boredom Offord felt while heading from job to job as a model. He described that first moment of taking a camera to fashion week as “a game changer” when it came to combating the inertia of castings: “You arrive in Paris or Milan with no jobs confirmed, you cast, you wait in line. You wait to hear back, more often than not, you never hear back at all. You wait for fittings. You wait for the show… I never felt comfortable with all that uncertainty, and the camera gave me an excuse to basically do what I wanted, an excuse to look closer.”

This sense of youthful uncertainty is palpable in Offord’s images. Lit by the soft natural light emanating from hotel windows, the bodies of his friends are seen in tender states of undress, often obscured by shadows. Offord’s favourite image from the series is a portrait of his friend Adam sitting on his bed. “His face is completely in the dark, just lit by the window from behind. For a long time, that’s the photo I used to define the style of the project. It seemed to say so much with so little,” he tells us.

There is a sense of gentle, muted abstraction that stands in stark contrast to the bright lights and pace of fashion week. Offord’s portraits are more liminal, exploring his fascination with presence and absence. “I think it’s the idea that there’s a presence of something or someone without them or it actually being pictured”, he explains, “It’s quite interesting to define a feeling or a mood with the absence of a subject, it becomes more abstract and allows the imagination to fill in the space instead.” With figures captured in motion – a young model lounging, cigarette in mouth, reaching towards the camera as if in search of something – his portraits are emblematic of an adolescence in flux; the first grasp of formative identity and adulthood.

Picking up a camera became a means of Offord asserting control over his own sense of identity, flitting between the roles of the observer and the observed. “There was an element of me taking back agency, but it felt very natural”, he describes, “having a camera in my hands was the perfect distraction I needed, a creative outlet that ran parallel to modelling. Being creative and walking in shows feels very separate to me. If anything, when I make work, I lean towards the disordered.” 

Offord describes his own practice as an image-maker as being informed by the photographers he shot with as a model. “I remember being photographed by Juergen Teller for Marc Jacobs early in my modelling career, it was this big serious job for me in Venice and I was young and nervous. Juergen was just so blasé and easy, he’d move on from an idea or location every five minutes. It felt like a big game that you were playing together – a completely inspiring, open and collaborative way to work together. We shot the whole job in one day and drank at the hotel bar for the next.”

Despite being a young model working with legends like Teller, travelling the world surrounded by comrades, the completed project collates the softer, more intimate moments between friends suspended in the throes of adolescence; “There were always plenty of bizarre and unexpected things going on, but I tend to get my camera out in those quieter moments, generally those were the times I’d take photos that I liked... There were quite a few shots we had to edit out of the selection. We didn’t want to get anyone in trouble with the police!”

Nick Offord’s No Shows is published by Road Map and is available now.