The Real Santa: Photo Series by Kate Abbey

UK-based director and photographer Kate Abbey is celebrating the holiday season in a special way, with her candid portraits of Santa. She told us a little bit about the inspiration behind her new series entitled ‘We don’t see him. That’s what makes him special’:

“I’ve been wanting to properly explore Santa for years.”

“There was something about his outlandish representation that I find intriguing and I wanted to reduce the myth of the perfect, jolly fella and bring him closer to me – into the real world. After all, he’s a just an everyday bloke dressed up in red clothes, heading off to do his job and earn an income.

I started to explore Santa in the everyday before he got to work, but it was the imaginative words of my niece that first brought sense to the process. The make-believe world she described, with superpowers and fantasy ideas, that lead me to forming a real version of how he actually went about his business. Following on, I enlisted 20 more little minds to feed me their imaginations culminating in the booklet below.

The Santas I saw weren’t magical at all. They had naff, PVC boot covers with Velcro fasteners and fake fur trimmings – there was nothing necessarily exceptional about them and yet I found their quirky personalities and individual natures more remarkable then the perfect persona of who they portrayed.”

— Kate Abbey

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