Flamingo Restaurant: interiors in pink, palm and neon
Published
At the Flamingo Restaurant the furnishing is part of the concept, not a frame around it. Palm wallpaper, pink upholstery, yellow chairs, rose-colored tables, wicker lamps, plants and a neon sign make up a world of images that holds nothing back.
So the photographic task was not to add color but to order it. A room with six strong colors quickly goes restless in a photograph — in the room itself the eye spreads them over time, while a picture shows all of them at once.
One color leads in every frame
Indoors the pink seats form a continuous line through the picture while wallpaper and lamps fall back into a textured background. On the terrace the yellow chairs take that role, and pink is left on the tables alone.
The decision is made at the standpoint: you stand so that one of the colors already there forms a row. Everything else stays surface.
That also sets the order of the pictures. Laid side by side they change their leading color instead of repeating it — a run in which pink leads three times over looks like the same frame three times.
Plants in the foreground make depth
Several frames were made through leaves. The out-of-focus greenery at the edge does two things at once: it lays a plane in front of the room, and it hides what would otherwise compete with the subject.
In a room where something is happening on every wall, that is a practical tool. A frame without a foreground shows every wall equally clearly; one with a foreground decides for the viewer where to start.
The details guests photograph themselves
Part of the series goes after the individual pieces: the vintage signs on the wallpaper, the neon lettering against the green plant wall, the wicker lamps above the benches.
These are exactly the things guests stop in front of and reach for their phones. A house that owns pictures of them can announce them instead of waiting for somebody else to show them.
They are also the most useful frames afterwards: a detail works square, upright and cropped, without a room being cut apart.
More frames from the house
Ordering without calming down
A series about a colored room can fail in two ways: it can show everything and become unreadable, or it can tidy up so thoroughly that none of the character survives.
The path between the two runs through leading rather than reducing. Each frame gets one color that leads it, and everything else falls in behind. The room stays as loud as it is — just not all at once.
