Polly Borland
Most photographers love having the ability to hide behind the camera, relishing the agency it affords them. Melbourne-born, Los Angeles-based Polly Borland isn’t immune to these pleasures. “I like photography because it’s about control,” Borland says on a Zoom call from her native Australia, where she’s spent the entirety of the pandemic.
Though Borland devoted the first three decades of her career to crafting decadent, erotic, and uncannily hypnotic images of others, she’s rarely trained her lens on herself. For her breakout series, The Babies, she documented a group of infantilist fetishists. After discovering actress Gwendoline Christie in a Brighton boutique called Pussy, she made the future Game of Thrones actress the subject of the visual fairytale, Bunny. And for her Smudge, Pupa, and Morph series, she ensconced various models in layers of nude and high-chroma pantyhose.
