Duck Devil
Abbie Trayler Smith
A pink rubber duck sits in the bathroom of a flat on Brick Lane in London’s East End, in an image from Abbie Trayler-Smith’s diary project.
‘I was working for a newspaper, doing five or six jobs a day, it was bang, bang, bang; take the pictures, and get it back to the picture desk. The diary work was the opposite of that. It was a very slow process, a way to find my voice. What am I drawn to when nobody’s telling me what to photograph?
I was using a Ricoh camera that I carried on me all the time. Shooting on film you can't look at the back of the camera. After a few months I’d print out the images and lay them out on the floor and edit them into a book. It helped me translate the world around me and process what's going on.
When this picture was taken , I was living in a flat in Brick Lane with a lovely guy called Damon. It was a moment in my life where things felt very up in the air. And the little duck sat on the side of the bathroom, and just summed up where I felt I was, perched on the edge.
I'd gone through seven or eight Ricoh cameras by that point and broken them all. That camera would go everywhere with me. That included going to lots of parties where they ended up flying across the dance floor at 4am. That's what happened to those cameras. They just partied too hard baby, they partied too hard.’
Specification
Abbie Trayler Smith
Abbie Trayler-Smith’s work draws on an emotional response and engagement with her subjects. She embraces the personal and is driven by a desire to get under the skin and straight to the heart of the issues that people strive to deal with.
Images from her long-term project The Big O, examining the issue of obesity in school-age children and young adults, have won awards in the Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize at the National Portrait Gallery and World Press Photo and are held in public and private collections around the world.
Kiss it! her first photo-book is due to be published late 2023. It is an intimate photographic portrait of Shannon (now 26) who has fearlessly allowed Abbie into her life, with absolute candour, over many years. Through the document of her experiences, Abbie’s work aims to produce a more resonant view of what it actually means to be fat
Your Print
When will I receive my print?
We produce prints in a batch every two weeks. Shipping can take up to one week in the UK, and two to three weeks internationally. Orders should be received within 3-5 weeks depending on your location.
What will I receive?
Your print will be posted flat, in a protective sleeve, to avoid damage or curling in transit. Prints come with a Panos Prints provenance certificate with background information about the image and the photographer.
The paper is A4 sized, the image will be smaller than A4 with a white border around it - see Image Specification for exact image size. Borders will be laid out as demonstrated by the print images on the site. We do not provide framing services and images of framed prints are only meant to be illustrative.
Print Care
Paper and ink
We print on Hahnemuhle Baryta FB, an archival fibre based 350gsm fine art paper. It is a bright white paper with a traditional character finish and heavy weighting. This paper has long been the industry standard paper for digital printing.
What is a giclée print?
Giclée comes from French and literally means ‘squirt’, referring to the spray of very fine drops of ink that produce an inkjet print. We print with archival paper and pigment inks to the accepted standards of fine art giclee printing found within the collectors market. Prints should last over a hundred years and with care longer than this. Avoiding extremes of light, heat and humidity will help prolong the life of your print.