Alternative Revolution Magazine: Special Edition Louise Cantwell Photography

Alternative Revolution Magazine W/Louise Cantwell Photography. I am a photographer from a small town in Scotland near Glasgow. I started photography nearly 7 years ago and I have never looked back. I am completely self-taught and I approach the process from a more emotive and fashion perspective than from a technical point of view As a teenager I became fascinated with alternative/gothic fashion and music and because of where I grew up there were not many opportunities to explore these genres. I always wished I were artistic but I could not draw or paint. I always wanted to be musical but I never had the patience or skill to learn to how to play anything properly and like most things in my life I would give up on this pretty quickly. I have a very vivid imagination and extremely complex and vivid dreams. I have a creative mind but previously had no way of expressing myself or my ideas. When I started portrait photography I very quickly realized I had found a way to make these ideas come alive. I have a fascination with the macabre and melancholy and I love the contradictions within the alternative sub culture. I love how beauty can be found even within the darkest concepts and often your first impression could be negative ie evil, vulgar, despairing, disturbing, can actually contain glimpses of true beauty, hope and release if you open your mind and look close enough. It is amazing what can be found hidden in the deepest, darkest recesses of the mind. We all have something hidden in there. I think I spend a lot of my time fantasising , daydreaming and imagining a life completely opposite from my own mundane existence, partly as a defence mechanism of mine to not have to face real life. I have a passion for design and styling and enjoy making a lot of the costumes and accessories for my own shoots. I am restricted by my financial constraints and also where I live so I have to be really creative to make something really stand out. It is amazing how something can start off from the tiniest of sparks and run away with you snowballing into something huge. The thing I love most about alternative fashion is that it can lead to so much self-expression and how versatile it can be. You can take any idea really and put an alternative twist on it. The things that a lot of society deems as unattractive or disagreeable within the alternative scene are thought to be attractive and inspiring. Being individual and non-superficial is true beauty in my eyes. I have a love of old buildings, castles, stately homes and anything grand and spectacular. When I started photography I became really passionate about derelict and abandoned buildings, in particular mental asylums of which I have a horrible fascination. There is nothing like wondering around a place like this and imagining what it was like before and picturing what went on there. It can also be quite terrifying to think how it could so easily of been you confined somewhere like this if you had just been born a few years further back. I gave up on urbex photography after falling through some floorboards and realising how lucky I had been all those times walking on rotting floors and climbing up onto roofs. I am a very private ?normal? person. I am an idealist which I think is one of the reasons certain things fascinate me so much, because I strive to know how other people think and feel, who are so different to myself. It is this fascination that has held my interest when it comes to photographing people. Photography for me has been more of a personally journey than anything else. I has pulled me through some very hard times and it has been something to hold on to. I have finally found something that I am good at. It forces me to face up to things and come outside of myself for a while. It has been my therapy and has nursed me back to health so many times. I am grateful to have found something I love so much and getting to work with such lovely gorgeous people is not too bad either.