LE BOOK sits with Julian Song

Chinese-born Photographer Julian Song finds inspiration in supermarket aisles, misplaced objects and the awkwardness of everyday life. His images bring fashion and absurdity together, with a meticulous eye for detail and a sense of humour that never takes itself too seriously.

Look at a photograph by Julian Song and something will probably make you look twice. It might be a familiar object in an unfamiliar setting, a strangely precise gesture or a beautiful image with one detail that seems completely out of place. Everything looks intentional, yet something doesn't quite add up. That tension is where he likes to work. His photographs borrow from the visual language of fashion, but there is always room for the unexpected, the awkward and the faintly ridiculous. Rather than inventing a world that has nothing to do with our own, he prefers to make small adjustments to the one we already know.

“Usually, my ideas begin from something very small,” he explains. “It could be an object, a gesture, a color, or something completely ordinary that suddenly looks strange to me.”

His method is deceptively simple: take something familiar, change one rule and see what happens. The result is an image that makes immediate sense, until it doesn't. That moment of uncertainty is part of the pleasure.

COLLECTING VISUAL MISTAKES

He pays attention to things most people would probably overlook. The way products are arranged in a supermarket. A cheap object. An odd advertisement. Someone standing in a particular way on the street.

“I think I'm always collecting little visual mistakes.”

It is an unusually good description of his creative instinct. Where someone else might see a badly arranged display or an object being used incorrectly, He sees a possible image. The appeal is not necessarily in the object itself, but in the strange relationship it creates with everything around it.

He doesn't spend all his time looking at photography for inspiration, either. Everyday life, he believes, can be far more revealing. Films, music, design, bad advertising and the internet all feed into his visual imagination, but so do the things that happen without anyone intending them to be interesting. That sensibility extends to his understanding of humour. He rarely sets out to make people laugh. Instead, he takes an absurd idea seriously enough to give it a convincing visual form. The joke, when there is one, often comes from the contrast itself: an elegant composition built around something ridiculous, or an apparently ordinary situation treated with the gravity of a fashion campaign. Nothing needs to wink at the viewer. The image is funnier because it commits to the idea.

“I love beautiful fashion images, but if an image is only beautiful, sometimes I forget it very quickly. A little humour or awkwardness makes it stay in my head longer.”

FIVE CENTIMETRES CAN CHANGE EVERYTHING

For someone whose photographs feel so playful, Julian is remarkably methodical behind the scenes. He describes his thinking as mathematical. Once an idea comes to him, he breaks it down into smaller problems: composition, colour, lighting, styling, set design, gesture and the practical question of what needs to happen in front of the camera. Preparation matters because he wants everyone on set to understand the same image. He can spend an extraordinary amount of time thinking about a single prop or deciding whether something should move five centimetres.

“I’m quite obsessive with preparation,” he admits.

But this attention to detail isn't about eliminating every possibility of surprise. Once the scene is prepared, he actively makes room for things he couldn't have planned. That willingness to let an image develop beyond its original concept is an important part of his process. The planning gives him control over the essentials; the accidents bring in something less predictable.

“Sometimes the best detail is something I never planned.”

It also explains why he prefers to build things physically whenever possible. Even when an image appears impossible, he wants there to be something real in front of the camera: a set, an unusual construction or an object the model can actually interact with. “Physical things have imperfections, shadows and accidents that are very difficult to invent later,” he says.

Post-production has its place, but he prefers to use it to extend an idea rather than create the entire illusion afterwards. A real object casts a real shadow. A physical construction has its own irregularities. Those details give the finished image a sense of credibility, even when the situation itself is absurd. The more carefully he constructs a scene, the more believable its strangeness becomes.

FROM PINKPANTHERESS TO LADY GAGA

His interest in building visual worlds began long before his own photographs. As a child, he was fascinated by music videos, album covers and pop performances, drawn to the way an artist could create an entire universe in just a few minutes.

That influence was present when he approached his cover featuring PinkPantheress. Rather than illustrating her music literally, he focused on the contrast he hears in it: something light and immediate, with a nostalgic, slightly strange quality underneath.

“I didn't want to simply illustrate her music,” he says.

Julian wanted the image to work in much the same way as the music itself: easy to understand at first, with another layer waiting to be discovered.

“I always prefer to build a visual world around the artist rather than make them fit into something that already exists in my work. I don't really see it as a fight between their vision and mine”

That distinction matters when working with musicians and brands. Julian isn't interested in imposing a signature aesthetic regardless of the subject. He first tries to understand what is essential to the person or project, then finds a way to translate it into his own visual language.

Constraints can even make the process more interesting. Sometimes he proposes an idea that sounds strange when described aloud but makes perfect sense once everyone sees the image. Those moments, when an unusual concept finally clicks, are among his favourites.

His dream cover subject is Lady Gaga, whose theatricality and unmistakable visual identity make her an exciting challenge. Photographing someone who already has such a complete universe of her own would require finding a perspective that audiences haven't seen before.

As for what he would propose, Song is keeping that idea to himself until the shoot.

THE SUPERMARKET AS A FASHION STAGE

One of his earlier projects offers a particularly clear picture of how his imagination works. Faced with a very small supermarket and a limited budget, Song looked for a way to make the contrast between the setting and the fashion feel stronger. His solution was to photograph the scene from the cashier's point of view, following the different looks of a strange but stylish customer who came into the shop every day.

It is a wonderfully straightforward premise. The supermarket becomes a stage; an everyday customer becomes a recurring character. Fashion enters a space where it isn't expected, and the tension between the two does the work. The project also reveals something about Song's relationship with limitations. He doesn't necessarily need an elaborate set or a huge production to make an image interesting. Sometimes a change in perspective is enough. That doesn't mean he is chasing novelty for its own sake. In a world where images circulate constantly and visual references are shared almost instantly, he knows how difficult it is to make something genuinely unprecedented. For him, the more important question is whether an image has a point of view.

“We see thousands of images every day, so I think you can immediately feel when an image has a reason to exist and when it's just following what is already popular.”

To keep his work fresh, he deliberately looks outside photography and sometimes attempts things he isn't sure will succeed. Curiosity, for him, means being willing to make a picture that doesn't fit neatly into what he already knows how to do.

A WORLD WITH ITS OWN RULES

Ask Song to imagine his photography as a place someone could walk into, and he describes a world that looks almost normal at first. The colours are beautiful, everything feels clean and familiar. Then the inconsistencies begin to emerge: objects are the wrong size, people are using things incorrectly, and the rules of the space don't quite make sense.

“I'd want people to feel comfortable enough to enter, but curious enough to keep looking,” he says.

It is a useful way of understanding his photographs. Their appeal doesn't depend on the viewer decoding an elaborate concept or knowing every reference. The images offer an immediate visual pleasure, then leave room for discovery.

His favourite television series, Ma Dashuai, hints at another side of that sensibility. The Chinese series, which he grew up watching, draws its humour from the awkwardness and absurdity of ordinary life. Its characters aren't trying to be funny; they simply are who they are. He sees something similar in the photographers he admires. Jean-Paul Goude, Guy Bourdin and David LaChapelle may approach their subjects differently, but each has developed a visual language that is instantly recognisable.

Julian is working towards that same clarity of vision, one image at a time. What matters is what he can make of it and how far he can take an idea without losing the detail that made it interesting in the first place.

His advice to other creatives is simple: “Be humble. No matter how much you achieve, there's always more to learn.” Coming from someone who can spend an unreasonable amount of time adjusting a prop by five centimetres, the sentiment feels particularly apt. There is no shortage of things to look at; the challenge is to keep noticing them. For Julian Song, an image doesn't need to invent an entirely new world. Sometimes, it just needs to move something five centimetres to the left.