“Over the past few years, we have made the transition from a broad-reaching model to a very targeted approach to specifically reach and engage progressive youth consumers,” said Andrea Moore, Levi’s marketing director for the UK and Ireland in Marketing magazine earlier this year. To help, she called in Dean Chalkley, or rather, she signed up London design and advertising agency Exposure, and they got the photographer on board. “Levi’s are good at doing that,” says Chalkley. “They’re such a massive global brand that they realise they need to get local people to do things, and they really trust the people they ask to do that.”

Known for his photographs of musicians, Chalkley also shoots advertising assignments, with campaigns for Ray Ban and Ben Sherman under his belt, and now he’s just created the imagery for a high profile campaign for Levi’s. He’d already shot two look books for Levi’s but, he says, he didn’t get the latest campaign off the back of them. “Exposure called in a few of us, but what they really liked was my Southend Underground pictures [a personal project Chalkley exhibited in 2006]. They liked the fact that they were pictures of ordinary people. And I’d also just shot the New Faces exhibition [recently on show in London] and that made them feel comfortable with my work too.”

Southend Underground focused on the thriving music scene in the Essex seaside town, while New Faces captures the inimitable style of London’s young mod scene. But for the Levi’s campaign Chalkley shot something a little different – artists and craftworkers such as Gary Card, a set designer (featured in the April issue of BJP), Nathan Lyes, a knitwear designer, and Eoin O’Ruainigh, a musician and guitar maker. Levi’s wanted to emphasise the hand-made craftsmanship that goes into both its jeans and the work of the people asked to model, and asked each one to bring a bag of representative work along to the shoot. Whether Chalkley actually used them on the day, though, was a different matter.

“We had discussions about the look and feel of the shoot before we did it, but there was also an element of improvisation on the day,” says Chalkley. “We wanted room to capture what was unique about each person. Some of them brought a lot of props along, others didn’t bring much, but we only used them if they were an extension of who they were. I’ve seen projects with notable people with props that aren’t great pictures. Having said that, when Alex Turvey turned up with a giant key we were pretty impressed. You can’t go wrong with a man with a giant key.”

Chalkley photographed all 21 models in just three days, working at London’s Hoxton Street studios shooting handheld with a PhaseOne P30+ back on a Hasselblad body. He let the art director and client see the images as he worked, and was happy to take advice from them too. “Some photographers don’t want to have the clients there but I really like it,” he says. “It’s better for them to put their opinion in there and then. You’ve got to be a bit flexible and respect the fact that they need to get something out of it. Although I guess that only works if they’re a good client offering constructive advice!”

Levi’s were “pretty excited on the shoot”, and what was originally pitched as a poster campaign for the company’s relaunched flagship store soon evolved into something much bigger, involving a London-wide billboard campaign and ads in magazines such as Elle and i-D. Chalkley says its down to Levi’s entrepreneurial spirit – if they see something’s going well they’ll make something of it, rather than sticking rigidly to the original plan. But the photographer’s creative energy and enthusiasm deserves much of the praise. And shooting medium format also allowed the images to be repurposed for large scale output.

It’s an approach that’s served him well on previous shoots. His images for Ray Ban were originally intended for an online campaign, but ended up being used worldwide and on 10m-high billboards in Milan. “Once it’s out there you don’t know where it’s going to go, so it’s got to be as good as possible the minute you let go of it,” says Chalkley. “When we saw the Ray Ban posters we were like, ‘Woah! Those pictures held up well’.”

Letting go of the images includesgranting control to the agency and the client to do the edit too, and Chalkley handed over every image he took on the Levi’s shoot (he wished the art director luck because he took so many). He says it’s down to flexibility again, appreciating that the client has an agenda and respecting their wishes, but it’s also down to trust – of both himself and his clients. He’s commissioned by companies who like his style and want him to shoot it, he says, and he’s happy to hand over all his shots because he’s confident they fulfil the brief, and some. “If not I wouldn’t shoot ‘em.” he says. “Surely that’s the whole point – the idea is you do what you want every day, not back yourself into the corner of doing things you don’t want to do.”