DIY Fashion Shoot Book, published by Laurence King Publishing in 2014, occupies an engaging space between the photobook, the workshop manual, and the fashion-education guide. Developed by We Are Photogirls—Emily Stein and Celia Willis, a photographic duo whose projects involve teenage participants—it treats fashion photography not as a finished image alone, but as a collaborative practice of styling, directing, making, and looking.
Its structure is deliberately active. Across 40 shoot ideas, the book proposes exercises that move from a full-day “Dream A Little Dream of Me” styling project to shorter challenges, including fashion family portraiture, a Marie Antoinette-inspired make-up technique, and a 20-minute styling competition. Photographs are paired with step-by-step guidance, research prompts, and suggestions for involving friends, making the page a point of departure rather than a passive display surface. The emphasis is on transforming available people, clothes, references, and domestic surroundings into photographic situations.
That approach gives the book a particular place in the history of accessible fashion imagery. Its subjects are school-age fashion enthusiasts, but its underlying lessons—how an image is conceived, how a group is organized, and how visual references become a scene—also speak to the wider culture of amateur and participatory photography. The examples are described as cutting-edge while remaining practical, balancing imaginative themes with processes that can be attempted outside a professional studio.
For collectors, the book is notable as a clearly defined document of photographic education through making. It records a collaborative model in which the image is inseparable from the social act of producing it, and in which fashion becomes a medium for invention rather than simply display. The 144-page English paperback is a compact, substantial record of that method: useful as a period artifact of youth-oriented visual culture and as a reminder that photographic authorship can begin with a prompt, a group of friends, and the decision to stage something together.
