This New Photo Book Reflects on a Decade of Street Casting

Gabrielle Lawrence’s new photo book, Tell me something true, collates the best of People-File, the agency that shifted notions of street casting

The simple premise behind Gabrielle Lawrence’s casting agency People-File could easily be taken for granted these days. Back in 2016, Lawrence took advantage of ubiquitous tools – the street, a phone, Instagram – and began posting portraits of the interesting faces she spotted around London. Teenagers with backpacks, in parks and stations and the Apple Store, glamorous older women, people dressed for church, people in high-vis jackets. A decade on, it’s not hyperbole to suggest these images and the agency they birthed, helped spark a complete shift in how street casting is understood. 

Still, the tools may be simple, but the work isn’t. Spotting an interesting face is one thing; gaining a person’s trust is another. Anyone who has lost their nerve taking a photograph in public or asking someone where they bought their jeans can appreciate that initiating conversation with a stranger and asking to take their picture – potentially to cast them in a fashion shoot – isn’t light work. “It’s probably similar to the people trying to sell things to you, or those charity fundraisers,” says Lawrence. “People sometimes think I’m one of them.”

Lawrence is, by her own admission, interview-averse and keen not to over-analyse an instinctive process. “Some people love talking about their work and they’re great at it,” she says. “Truthfully, I don’t ever really want to have to explain it, no matter what I’m making.” With a new book out, Tell me something true, published by LOOKBOOKS, which collates ten years of capturing unusual, beguiling faces – alongside snippets of the shoots that came out of them – now is a rare opportunity to catch her.

The predictable question, then, is how she does it – which she gets a lot. “People are always curious about how I approach people and how it works,” she says. Lawrence used to ask her subjects to respond to words on the spot, “freedom”, “anxiety”, “mother”, “internet”, “pain”, “pleasure”, “politics”, “death”. It’s a technique Jung used, designed to elicit a reaction and expose the subconscious. 

“Everything I do is based on instinct and feeling. We live in a world where we are taught not to listen to how we actually feel because we are so overstimulated by visuals, so we miss lots of signals.” It becomes as much to do with your energy, then, as that of the person you’re approaching. “So, if you seem sketchy or you’re anxious or in a bad mood, you’re probably going to have a bad day trying to find people or trying to talk to them. When I approach people I’m always very genuine, honest and transparent about the project I’m working on.”

Her subjects rarely look uncomfortable having their picture taken. Two girls with long fake eyelashes and tinted red hair stand before a wall, one looks deadpan into the camera while the other laughs covering her mouth with a tattooed arm; another image sees a young girl, a flower in her hair and piercings on both sides of her nose, she smiles to expose her traintracked teeth; a man stands animatedly, seemingly explaining the infrastructure that surrounds him. “I’ve developed lots of little habits, like maintaining eye contact,” she says, drawing on a broader interest in metaphysics and the signals people unconsciously give off. 

“I think that’s so important when you’re talking to people – it’s something I've trained myself to do just through repetition.” You have to be quick, too, gauging what’s happening around you almost instantly. “If I see someone amazing who’s on the phone, I might follow them for a bit and wait until they finish the call. Or if someone is having a fight with their boyfriend, I’ll wait until things settle before approaching them.”

The job of a street caster has become easier now that more people know about it from Instagram, and vox poppers and content creators have normalised the idea that you might be approached at any moment in public, to be asked what song you’re listening to, or how much you pay in rent. “I think it used to be a lot more exciting with people’s skepticism or surprise, it was kind of a rush,” she says. “Now I do feel like, in bigger cities, people are just on autopilot, they are almost expecting it or they aren’t present. Then, people from smaller towns also see so much more online. It’s a blessing and a curse.”

This, in part, has led Lawrence to take her practice in new directions. She’s making a documentary and studying Jungian Psychology. She does still go out street casting, however – less regularly than before but still mostly on her own. “I haven’t thought about that before, actually,” she says. “I guess I like the pace and the freedom of being on my own.”

Given this reluctance to analyse her work too much, perhaps Tell me something true is best considered a photo dump rather than a statement of intent or a retrospective. Much like the Instagram posts from which both the book and the agency came, there are no words and what the book reveals comes through the accumulation of images rather than any single person, face or place. It is honest, as the title suggests, and as street casting is meant to be. 

Tell me something true by Gabrielle Lawrence is published by LOOKBOOKS and will launch at Climax Books on 9 July.