Angelina Jesson - interview #1
Angelina Jesson was the very first interview project. The project started in London in September of 2016 and then sat on a hard drive while I figured out how I wanted to approach it. The interview brought up so much potential for interesting content that I got stuck on how to proceed. The temptation was to go deeper into the life of the interviewee and become the proverbial fly on the wall or perhaps more appropriately the ever watching camera in her device. Life took over and before I knew it the moment had past. A few years on I look at the images again and realised that there was more there in that single meeting than I had originally thought.
Around the time of the interview I had met Angelina at a go-see at her agency. She was brand new to modelling but no stranger to performing. Having been born in England she moved to California at the age of three and then onto New York until she was thirteen at which point she returned to London. She had started acting at 6 years old, an early influence that would eventually lead her to getting involved in performance art later in life. The details in between are complicated and hard to follow. Perhaps its enough to say that she has had three different passports each under a different name, attended both the Brit school and Central St Martins and has grown to love the things about herself that as a child she had thought were faults. When we met at Shepards Bush market (a choice I had left to her) she was very involved with her and her collaborators project https://www.jesson-hill.com. An explanation of this by me would defiantly not do it justice so I take the easy route and suggest you follow the link and experience it for yourself.
If I had set out to discover interesting people behind “the image” I now realise that Angelina was probably the perfect candidate to start the Interview Project with.
Angelina is a self confessed hoarder who collects found items such as corsets and snow globes. Her favourite colour is red. She likes to spend her free time strolling markets where she finds comfort amongst randomness. She is a morning person who enjoys a bath over a shower. She is optimistic without expectation and loves the idea of newness. Her preferred mode of transport is a bicycle. She describes herself as a floating head. She has “wonky teeth”, pronounced eyebrows and some “spots” on her face (the characteristics that she had perceived as faults but now sees positively as her identity). She likes soft (squidgy) over hard, loud over quiet, supple over rigid and hyper over mellow. If annoyed by anything it is likely to be herself and she dislikes dishonesty in other people.
At the time of the interview the 5 soundtracks to her life were...
1) Unspoken Words : The Soil
2) Justify My Love: Madonna
3) Bandy Bandy: Zap Mama
4) Nude: Radiohead
5) Inside My Love: Minnie Riperton
6) Spectrum: Gold Link
7) Rose Rouge: st Germain
8) Nadia: Nitin Sawhney
Angelina and I chatted for about an hour and then she introduced me to one of the markets she enjoys. On the way back to the tube station we walked past a London cafe and she treated me to a cup of tea.
with thanks
Angelina Jesson for her time, honesty and for the cup of tea.
Angelina is represented by Premier Model Management