Paris based Australian born photographer Vee Speers series the Birthday party was one of the personal standouts for me at the recent Paris Photo. Birthday Party is a fantastical series executed with great simplicity and a wonderful imagination. Imagine a birthday party with a twist, amongst the princesses and the boxers, the soldiers and the retro bathing beauties are the characters from the darker side of some childhood fantasies. A rodent exterminator or a scary looking collector of dolls, a circus perfomer with a one size too small sailors suit and a girl dressed in white holding a dead rabbit. Some images are unsettling and some images I covet to hang on my walls. Vee Speers was inspired when she threw a birthday party for her daughter Sienna and one of the tiny guests arrived in a three piece suit. Sienna is one of Vee's muses in this series beautifully transforming herself from a singer to a beautiful girl dressed in a harlequin skirt and to the party girl blowing a huge bubble. These photos are timeless. Vee Speers has achieved this with her wonderful cast of character, the simple use of an old wall as a background, styling that is hard to place in any particular era and hand tinting to original Polaroid images.
