London-based photographer Brock Elbank is on a mission: to photograph as many freckled people as possible. A self-confessed lover of the skin feature, he wants to celebrate freckles in all their glory. For #Freckles he has so far photographed 90 people from around the world
I’ve always liked freckles. I think they are very fascinating. It’s a bit like marmites, it’s the sort of thing you either love the more you hate them.
Because the light dusting certainly is attractive to most people… Who’s that?
That’s Josh Hardwick who’s a… my wife spotted him at an organic farm in Gloucestershire. Yeah, he’s mixed race. He’s got this curly mop of red hair, this sort of honey-coloured eyes. I mean, just incredible-looking kid.
What did the freckled tell you about the reaction of the non-freckled to them, particularly if they’re heavily freckled. Here’s a woman, for example, who’s very heavily freckled, it seems all over her body.
Yes, Leah. We’ve probably done around 90 portraits now. She’s by far… I mean, she’s completely covered, you know, I said, have you ever been teased? No. Have you ever struggled with them? No. I mean, she’s like an exception to the rule because everybody else is kind of, have a love-hate relationship with it I see. One thing I’ve found is that it almost becomes not a therapy session, but people kind of chat and talk about their experience of being teased, as the series is growing I get more emails from people saying how much they struggle with freckles. As a child, you know, they’ve grown to sort of live with them or even like them in later life, and that sort of fascinates me because I don’t understand why people don’t like them.
Were you ever shocked, did you ever walk into a room and think, that is unusual?
Dony, I love unusual. So many people kind of blend in, you walk down Oxford Street, Regent Street, you know, most people, you know, I like people that stand out, they are the kind of people I’m drawn to photograph. The more individual, the better for me.
