Elephant Room – Bar and Coffee — Photo production
Interior photography at the Elephant Room: the bar and coffee lounge. The Elephant Room, photographed in its own light. The room is kept dark: pale gray…
The Elephant Room, photographed in its own light. The room is kept dark: pale gray velvet armchairs and banquettes on a black tiled floor, a palm against the light, marble at the bar and on the walls, exposed ducting under the ceiling, a candle and a cornflower in a glass on every table — and over all of it the large mural of an elephant in blue, green and red, backlit and coloring half the room.
Photographing a bar with no guests in it and still making it feel occupied is the real task, and it gets solved across three scales. The room: empty, straightened, framed so you can see the routes between the seating groups. The work: the bartender stirring in a mixing glass, the red espresso machine and the backlit bottle shelf behind him. And the product: a cocktail in a coupe with a torched rim, against the blue and amber circles of the bar's own lighting. Only together do the three add up to a place where something is happening.
The room provides the light, and it provides it in contradiction. The copper wall behind the corner banquette is warm, the mural is cold and blue, the candles are orange, the ceiling spots different again. There is no single color temperature that serves all of them. So each frame decides which source is allowed to tell the truth, and the others fall where they fall — which is exactly how a guest sees the room as well.
The mural is the brightest surface in the house. Expose for it and the seating in front goes black. So the frame is built to let the table candles carry the foreground: they are small, but they sit in the lower third and give the eye something to hold before it reaches the elephant.
The cocktail was photographed at the bar, not on a table with a speedlight. The circles of light behind it are the house's own bottles and spots. A glass cut out on white would have shown the same liquid and said nothing about the place.
- Type
- Bar & Café
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