Scarlett Carlos Clarke on nepotism, nudism and her new feminist magazine Hate

It’s late on a Tuesday night in Parsons Green and photographer Scarlett Carlos Clarke and I are sitting in her home, a staggering one-room house with 20ft ceilings and walls adorned with black and white photography. Her late father, the photographer Bob Carlos Clarke, took the shots in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when he was renowned for his sexually charged subject matter and heralded as Britain’s answer to Helmut Newton. Now, almost ten years after his suicide, Carlos Clarke is following in her father’s footsteps but carving out a clear path of her own.

Bob Carlos Clarke committed suicide in 2006, aged 55, by jumping in front of a train at Barnes station. His daughter talks openly about the tragedy: ‘Before he died, he became quite insular. I was sitting in the car with him and he wasn’t saying anything, which was so unlike him, and I didn’t know what to say to him. I remember asking, “How’s work?” or something stupid that I’d never usually say... but he just had his head in his hands.’ He was sent to the Priory clinic to be treated for clinical depression and his daughter believes he tricked the doctors into thinking he was making a recovery. ‘He was a clever person, so manipulative, and he fooled the doctors into thinking he was OK. Then he just went for a walk and that was it.’ Why might he have wanted to end his life? ‘He had a fear of getting old. He saw that his type of photography — print — was dying out and that any idiot could come along with a phone and take a thousand pictures, one would be average and then they’d make it look better on Photoshop. That killed him. He thought, “That’s something I’ve been doing my whole life and it doesn’t mean anything any more.” ’

She keeps boxes of her father’s original prints and shows me her favourites: candid, flashbulb shots of teenagers kissing and having sex in a club in the early 1990s. ‘I remember him saying he’d save these in a fire,’ she says. On the bedroom walls are photographs he took of his neighbours — a man and a woman, shot from the neck down, having sex.

In a fluffy rabbit onesie and with a messy blonde bob, Carlos Clarke, 23, looks young for her age. She’s a conscientious host, offering me wine while her boyfriend, the artist Tim Noble, 49, throws us cushions to sit on before returning to a small canvas he’s working on in the corner of the room.

She, too, keeps busy with work, curating art shows, taking publicity shots and making videos of Britain’s coolest musicians, including Eliot Sumner (daughter of Sting and purveyor of catchy electropop), hotly tipped all-girl punk band Skinny Girl Diet and six-piece South London outfit Fat White Family, and most recently publishing a not-for-profit magazine named Hate.

‘We started Hate because we wanted our own voice,’ says Carlos Clarke — ‘we’ being her and co-editor Luisa Le Voguer Couyet. There’s no advertising, so each issue will be funded by them or by the profits from the last (the first issue, priced at £7, was sold in the ICA shop and online, and sold out within a month). The result is a DIY aesthetic with recycled paper, doodles and work by artist and musician friends, as well as some fairly explicit content — a Noble drawing of aborted foetuses, pornographic contributions from artist Dan Mitchell and an interview with a New York-based female art collective called @look_at_this_ pussy, who collect photographs of everyday things that resemble vaginas, from a net curtain to a carefully folded napkin. Carlos Clarke’s featured work includes a close-up of a woman’s genitals with a snail crawling across them.

Is the magazine meant to shock? Is it meant to be feminist? ‘Yes, but it’s a very mixed content, with male and female contributors. We didn’t want to avoid real issues by making it glossy, bubbly and jokey — the content is humorous but there are more serious things. There’s an interview with the philosopher Daniel Pinchbeck about the environment, for example.’ The next edition of Hate is the ‘sex’ issue, which will be out in April.

She refutes the idea that her father’s fame has helped her get a leg up in the industry, pointing out that the fashion world has moved on and the people she works with now at magazines such as i-D are a different crowd to the people her father worked with when he was shooting images such as Jerry Hall riding an alligator. ‘It’s not like his being a photographer has helped me; I’ve got no contacts from him. If anything, it’s made it harder because there’s this pressure to compete — which is annoying, because his style is totally different to mine.’

She is close to her mother Lindsey, a former model and gallery owner. Last year, on her own, and again this year with Noble, she went to the Sahara Desert on a road trip, to put herself through something new and challenging, and to take photographs. Now that she and Noble are living together, Carlos Clarke has never been happier. They became an item in the past year, following Noble’s divorce from his wife and artistic partner Sue Webster in 2013. They have collaborated together on a music video for Fat White Family, in which Noble wears a pig’s head that Carlos Clarke found ‘disgusting’ and had to keep ‘spraying with Dettol’. But unlike Noble, Carlos Clarke is still working on the fringes of the art world. She showed photographs independently in St Marylebone Parish Church as part of this year’s Frieze Art Fair to good reviews, and is currently being cast for a new piece by the sculptor and electronic media artist Paul Fryer — ‘a replica of me in wax. It looks human, with real hair; it’ll be a modern-day Ophelia, floating in a tank, immortalised.’

As our time together comes to a close, Noble breaks his concentration from painting to ask about her future as a photographer: ‘What would your dad do, Scarlett, would he push you to be a commercially successful photographer, or would he say, “F*** all that”?’ She becomes pensive. ‘He’d just want me to do my photography, carry on making Hate and earning a living doing creative work,’ she says. ‘He was always the person I wanted to prove stuff to — the person that made me ambitious. Even though he’s not here, he’s still that person.’

Portraits by Jeff Boudreau, styled by Jenny Kennedy