Eric Aydin-Barberini is throwing out the photographic rule book to make images that truly reflect his perspective as an artist

If you’ve been following magazines like Dazed or Culted over the past few years, you’ve probably come across the work of London-based visual artist Eric Aydin-Barberini. Having spent the majority of his career as a commercial photographer shooting festivals, film sets and fashion weeks alike, Eric is now, like many visual artists, using his personal projects to unravel the pace and perfectionism that can seep into a photographer’s practice through industry work.

Outside of his commissions for clients such as Spotify, Ray-Ban, Adidas, Arsenal and Universal Music Group, the photographer has been turning his curiosity inwards over the past few years and “leaning into everything I’d previously been taught to shun: harsh edges, bold colours, visible masking,” he says. “Making imagery that didn’t resemble the literal places I’d been, but did reflect my experience of them.” This desire to put more of himself back into his work stemmed from “a late-in-life autism diagnosis”, the photographer tells us. “As I unmasked (deconstructing the palatable version of myself society had shaped), my work started to evolve. It became a record of how I exist in the world, rather than a documentation of what everyone sees.”

With an aim to make images that more intimately reflect his own experiences, Eric is creating photographs that look almost like paintings at first glance – autobiographical images that use elements like colour, distortion or blur to map out the artist’s heightened sensory accounts of the places and people he’s documenting, “as someone that’s hypersensitive to light, sound, texture and smell”, he says.

Imbued with the magic of “errors” that usually come with shooting on film – such as light leaks or high contrast – these re-edited pieces remind us that leaving the rule book behind always evokes more feeling than airbrushed edits ever could. It’s through these deliberately re-worked visual traces that Eric has come to tilt his lens towards himself: “I’ve spent my adult life making other people wish they were somewhere,” he says. “It’s time to let the world see how it felt for me to be there.”