Clare Park originally studied classical ballet and was inspired at a young age by the choreographer Pina Bausch. At nineteen she won the Vogue model competition and was contracted to work for Conde Nast. Subsequently she was photographed and filmed by many of the great fashion photographers of that era. Clare graduated in 1989 from The Royal College of Art with an MA in photography, the Vogue/Sotheby and the Sunday Times awards. During her final year at the RCA she began a series of self-portrait images exploring her formative years, which have been widely exhibited and debated on television and radio. These continue as a visual narrative of her life. Much of this work is collaborative, with personal projects and commercial commissions often linking and developing alongside one another. As well as a wide range of editorial portraiture for clients, including The Independent, Vogue and The Sunday Times, Clare helps to develop a unique identity for corporate establishments such as Rada and individually for actors and musicians. As well as creating imagery for discographies, she also devises book covers for novels, plays, and sociological books published by Faber and Faber, Harper Collins and Virago Press amongst others. The cover photograph for ’The Beauty Myth’ by Naomi Wolf has become the most well known of her self-portraits. This intuitive understanding of the body in movement has led her to form photographic collaborations with health specialists, especially in the creation of books with the yoga practitioner Liz Lark, and in written work on the portrayal of ‘the body’ in our culture.
