Elska is a project centered on traveling around the world, meeting a selection of everyday local guys, and introducing their city and their lives to readers through honest photography and personal stories. Below, photographer Liam Campbell shares exclusively with GayCities a selection of photos and behind-the-scenes commentary about some of the beautiful men he met in Glasgow, Scotland for the latest issue…
Diego E
Before coming to Scotland I gave a thought to what visual themes I might encounter. It’s the same thing I do when approaching any Elska city. For example, when I went to Paris I wondered how many photos would feature a visible Eiffel Tower in the background, or if I’d do a shoot with a guy wearing a beret or holding a baguette… As it turned out, Elska Paris does include the first two of these, but not the baguette (though perhaps there are some baguette-shaped things in the issue)!
For Scotland I thought of the national flower, the thistle (which appears on our cover from the shoot with Scott H); and of kilts (two different styles of kilt were captured in our shoot with Nathan L). What I didn’t expect however were wildflowers, which we spotted everywhere during our shoots, delivering a dose of loveliness to sometimes dirty, grey, and damp backdrops.
I certainly didn’t expect flowers to become the main visual theme for the issue, but it turned out that each of the twelve men photographed for the issue would include one scene posing with a flower. It all started because of Diego, the first guy we shot in Glasgow, who chose to take us to the Glasgow Botanic Gardens for the outdoor part of our shoot. It wasn’t the setting that made us develop a flower theme though, it was Diego’s cheeky character in how he interacted with the flowers, like when he knelt down and took a bite out of a tulip. From that moment, I was obsessed with involving flowers throughout our time in Glasgow.