Dreamland

Dan Burn-Forti

16 images

A previously unseen story unearthed during lockdown archiving.

1 of 17

Created by

Dan Burn-Forti

View artist profile

More work from Dan Burn-Forti

1 of 5

Selected Projects
Klarna - Clothes Love All
Klarna's Clothes Love All campaign photographed by Dan Burn-Forti champions inclusivity, no judgment and to love all.
View story
Selected Projects
Landsec
The Christmas campaign for Landsec's shopping centres, encouraging post lockdown shopping.
View story
Selected Projects
Bank of Scotland
Bank of Scotland's latest campaign featuring Susan Calman in various moments where her bank account has saved the day.
View story
Selected Projects
Financial Times - Year of the Dog
Dan photographed the How To Spend It magazine's issue dedicated to the other unsung heroes of 2020, our pets.
View story
Selected Projects
Channel 4 - Taskmaster
The latest campaign for Channel 4's comedy panel game show Taskmaster.
View story

Hooray, it’s St David’s Day! In honour of wonderful Wales, here are some pictures I took of Ann Hughes, Wales’s self-proclaimed no.1 Tom Jones fan. She really liked Tom Jones. She had a densely packed shrine dedicated to the warbler. It was quite unusual. #tomjones

So farewell Daft Punk. What a legacy of joy they leave behind. I shot them for Esquire just as they were launching the perfect Random Access Memories and they were absolutely super. No funny business, no stroppy nonsense, just charming and keen and excellent. Once the shoot was over and the chaps had left the studio, there was a slightly embarrassing non Daft Punk moment though. We were in a studio on the outskirts of Paris with 50 odd helium balloons and I couldn’t bear to pop them. So we thought we’d take them out on the street and hand them out to children. A little surprisingly, no one seemed to want them. In retrospect I guess a beardy middle aged man handing balloons out to children must have seemed a bit unusual, but finally we had one taker. A little girl with her mum said “oui!” When offered one, but chose to take them all. She mumbled something in French, her mum looked to me and said “oui?” To which I replied “...oui?” at which point the girl released all the balloons, they flew down the street and wrapped themselves impossibly densely around the higher branches of a tree and I’m absolutely certain their remnants are there to this day. Oops. #daftpunk #esquire #balloons

An interesting off shoot of my celebrity portrait experience has been the ones where the subject quite obviously couldn’t care less about doing it. Usually it’s been the older celebs who wanted to be anywhere else rather than hanging with me, and who were quite obviously doing it to either make someone else happy, were too polite to say no, or could just do with a few quids from the DVD sales of something they’d made 40 years ago. Here’s a few examples of unenthused sitter I’ve encountered over the years. Roger Moore said “I’m only doing this so my daughter can get in with the Sunday Times”. Bruce Forsyth was pretty uptight and swore an awful lot. Omar Sharif, though polite in the end, could barely be bothered to let us in his flat. And as for that creepy sleezebag Rolf Harris, he was another shockingly keen swearer and distinctly unenthused host. There’s plenty more curmudgeons where these came from, but I think that’ll do for now. #rogermoore
#bruceforsyth
#omarshariff
#rolfharris

The original fat cat, Cedric Brown in his lair at the British Gas HQ. Not sure what he’d done wrong at the time but I remember people were rather cross with him. I like the light I put on his desk! #cedricbrown #fatcats

This was one of the 1st proper shoots I did and I offer it as an example of how making a success of anything seems, in my experience, to rely very heavily on a good dose of Lady Luck. I’d been bothering The Observer Life Magazine relentlessly since I was a grotty useless assistant, and they graciously caved and gave me this road trip shoot with the lovely Miranda Sawyer, to see if I was worth a punt. It involved meeting Miranda somewhere far North and taking pictures to illustrate her road trip story. It could easily have rained. Miranda’s car could have been a dog, the landscape could have been grey and flat. My generator powered not at all mobile lighting set up could so easily have failed. But for whatever reasons, the gods aligned and I got some interesting pictures that day. They went down very well at The Observer and it made the cover. They commissioned me again and this led to a fantastic few years of excellent shoots for them which led to lord knows what that no doubt led to whatever it is I’m still milking today. But what if it had rained that day? The sliding doors nature of life is everywhere it seems to me, you’ve just got to hope it doesn’t rain. #mirandasawyer #msmirandasawyer

So, whilst I’ve spent the last few weeks posting the occasional picture of celebs from the past, I’ve actually been fully occupied with a deeply nasty dose of the Covid 19’s. It’s been completely grim. 10 days lying like a shivering coughing nauseous delirious moron at home, barely able to lift my head off of the pillow, followed by a week as a guest of St Marys Hospital Acute Respiratory Ward being nursed by the brilliance of our perfect NHS with their endless blood tests and swabs and checks and probes, in a room filled with some of the sickest peoples I’ve ever seen (or heard). They let me out today. It was intense. But I just wanted to mention this firstly to be able to thank the wonderful peeps at St Marys, but also to make sure that if there are still any twats out there that think this is a hoax or is being exaggerated, or “is just like a bad cold”, please believe me when I say it absomotherfuckingly is not. It’s the worst thing I’ve ever experienced and I wouldn’t wish it on anyone, not even an idiot hoaxer. So please, wear a bleedin’ mask, don’t go to the pub. Don’t be bloody stupid. XXx #stmaryshospital