We were delighted to return to Aviva's Street to School campaign in 2014 after producing some strong work for them in previous years. The focus on 2013's shoot was grieving parents. This time around, we focused on the missing children themselves. We chose London's Victoria tunnels as a location to lend some additional gravitas to the campaign and heighten the sense of the children's discomfort. These tunnels, underground in Waterloo, have recently been acquired for conversion into a skatepark, but in the past have served as accommodation for the homeless and even - historically - as a morgue for the fallen of World War II. 

 

To maximise the impact of the gloom here, we used only our own lighting, and we recruited some children who have actually run away from home themselves to advise us on matters such as clothing and the streetwise mentality that they had to develop. We made our models look older than their actual age, and shot them in normal clothing, as our experience of this campaign tells us that many children run away with little else except the clothes they are wearing at the time. 

 

It's always a difficult subject to shoot, because of the emotions involved and the need to combine hard-hitting images with a degree of subtlety, but we were very happy with our work.