ALIENS AND HIGH FASHION: BEHIND THE CAMERA WITH TATI BRUENING

Rorschach test ink prints; a paint-smeared shadow looming from a dark void; editorial shoots encased in stark black frames. Sharp, subversive and striking, the images that line the walls of Tatiana Bruening’s LA apartment are like windows into the photographer’s mind. With her black turtle-neck tank top, freshly ironed bangs and cartoonishly long, pointed lashes, Bruening looks like she could be about to walk a fashion show, or hop in front of a camera herself. When I ask her if she’s okay with my recording our interview, she responds, “As long as I don’t say anything controversial, you’re good to go.”

As a self-made photographer, online ‘creative’ and businesswoman, Tati Bruening knows a thing or two about internet presence. Known as Illumitati on Instagram and Illumitatiana on TikTok, her work is multi-faceted. Since dropping out of college to pursue her interest in photography, her corner of the internet has grown into that of a full-fledged brand, photography service, publicity consultant and- although she clearly has some qualms with being labelled as such- cult favourite social media personality.

Her career ascended to new heights when she began photographing members of LA influencer royalty: think the likes of Emma Chamberlain, Bella Poarch and Vinnie Hacker. Since then, the photographer has gone on to shoot campaigns for A24’s makeup brand Half-Magic Beauty, as well as shooting Halsey’s tour with TikTok makeup artist turned singer, Abby Roberts. Alt-pop musician Alice Glass; Bring Me The Horizon’s Oli Sykes; Hila Klein; Tana Mongeau and Pinterest can also be found on the photographer’s long list of clients and collaborators. All of that being said, at the heart of it, Bruening is most prominently and most importantly an artist. Whilst her high-contrast, editorial compositions echo the works of notable photographer Helmut Newton, Bruening’s style takes on the chic, erotically-charged essence of Newton’s images and rips open a raw edge; one that defines her as an artist of a younger generation. There’s often a cheeky, playful experimentalism to her interactions with the camera, at times purposefully disregarding more traditional photographic methods.

In a video posted to her TikTok account, which currently boasts 2.4 million followers, Bruening stages an imagined beauty campaign with Yves Saint Laurent. In the short clip, she swipes red lipstick across her freshly made-up face before pressing it to the surface of a photocopier, creating a series of blurred, unnervingly half-formed portraits, her red mouth pressed up against glass in a voluptuous, smeary smooch. In another video, she DIY’s a coloured gel by taping a thin, blue plastic folder sheet over her camera, tinting her model and the snow that falls around him a hazy, electric blue. It’s as if he is standing before some huge illuminated screen, or possibly a UFO, its artificial light seeping into the natural surroundings. Her images throw potentially jarring contradictions into play: masculine and feminine, naturalism and urbanism, alluring and grotesque. “I like works where there’s just, like, a touch of surrealism to it, but it’s not over the top,” she says in reference to her own style, “where it’s like, you look at something and you’re like, is this real or not?”

Her models are almost always elusively semi-humanoid, whether they be trussed up in shining latex and neon-bright wigs or smeared with fake blood. Always there is an element of the unreal; the fantastical. Bruening emphasises that, whilst she never tries to force a model into a specific creative direction, she is keen to encourage her collaborators to take a step outside of the comfort zone of their usual styles. “I always have a briefing call; meet in person for coffee, and have them part of the creative process,” she tells me. “But also, people sometimes just have a look. Like, a lot of models, they’ll have a look and you will see their face and be like: this is what we’re doing. This is going to work. This is what you were meant to be. You look like an alien and I love you for that, let’s just go all out on it.”

It could be said that “alienness” is a characterising feature of Bruening’s creative direction. It’s fair to say that shoots featuring influencers such as Jeremy Fragrance or Lil Tay may not be the immediate choice for many photographers, but Bruening seems to embrace the cult following of these personalities’ curated personas. When I suggest that these figures represent a kind of internet anti-culture, she counters: “I think that in a weird way they’re actually the ones who are at the centre of culture.” She feels that whilst professional industries may refuse to take them as seriously as more traditionally palatable celebrity influencers, these distinctive individuals tend to have a stronger community of fans. “If you saw Jeremy Fragrance as the face of Calvin Klein, people would be losing their shit,” she proffers as an example.

Aliens are explicitly referenced within her photography too; more specifically, one distinct alien life-form. A stretched, bony, humanoid figure with a blurred face and breasts scrawled over with black “X” marks frequently appears within the content Bruening produces for social media. Its form is exaggerated to the point hyperreality; its malnourished and overblown dimensions verging on grotesqueness. The character is a deliberate reference to the fashion flats Bruening would draw as a child watching Project Runway, in which she would unconsciously start each drawing with a hyper-idealised image of female perfection.

“I became obsessed with this idea of perfectionism and body, and so I found that the more that I would draw the female figure, the more emaciated, the more alien it would start to look, to the point that I pushed it past perfection and into like, completely surrealist, where it’s just completely unattainable; unachievable.”

In the videos she posts to her various social media accounts, the artist films herself drawing a life-size replica of this semi-nude entity, sizing it up for comparison alongside her own body or transposing its flashing outline onto her bare flesh. It constitutes an interrogation of the expectations and standards imposed by the high fashion world Bruening is so enthralled by. Whether they be a performer, a model or a designer, any creative in the public eye must create something of an alter ego. For Bruening, part of her identity is immortalized in this unknowable exaggeration of the human form. “It just kind of encapsulates me as an artist and like, what I represent and my ideals, I guess,” Bruening says, adding that the identity of the image changes in correlation with her own. “If I were to have this interview a year ago, I probably would have given you a very different response”.

When I ask Bruening if she struggles with the pressures of perfectionism, she laughs. “How did you know I was crying about this last night?” she jokes. As a self-made creator who has had to utilise social media in order to establish her identity as a brand, the commodification of self is an unfortunate but practically unavoidable side-effect. Living and working in a place like Los Angeles, public and private selfhoods threaten to drift apart, and this can often impact the legitimacy of real-life relationships. “I would say that kind of surface level, transactional type of relationship really exists in the really hungry, really ambitious people,” Bruening says, admitting that she too, as a starry-eyed teenager spending her first early days in LA, had fallen into the trap of establishing friendships as a means of climbing a professional ladder. Nowadays, her favourite projects are those that involve working with people who share her creative passion and vision; the celebratory and introspective short film and photography series she created in tandem with Dylan Mulvaney has been one of her favourite projects.

Still, building a creative identity under the ever critical scrutiny of the internet comes with its own price. Balancing the thin line between commercial appeal and creative intent has long been a challenge for artists, and the line becomes ever more wobbly when your audience consists of millions of social media users. “I would love to be as off-camera as possible, but that’s just not possible,” Bruening admits. Aside from her photography, much of her income relies upon her services as a publicity consultant, in which artists whom Bruening considers to be “much more successful than myself” come to her for guidance on how to better utilise social media as a means of elevating their brand. She finds that many are unwilling to sacrifice what they see as their deeper, profound artistic side in order to appeal to the general masses. “It’s a new era where you have to be so privileged to be elusive.” With an internet culture that feeds off of the palatability of strangers, we can be grateful that Tati Bruening, with her genre-mashing defiance and tongue-in-cheek humour, is still willing to shine a light on the artist that exists behind the screen.