Surreal – model portrait series
Portrait photography as a fine art concept: a surreal series with a model. A free conceptual series between fine art and character make-up. Every frame is its…
A free conceptual series between fine art and character make-up. Every frame is its own figure: a plague doctor mask above a painted torso under a headdress of black roses; a post-apocalyptic figure with welding goggles, a gas mask and dreadlocks; a Venetian mask in turquoise and red; a violinist in a baroque wig in half darkness; a face under green slime; a hand smothering a scream.
Pictures like these are made half before and half after the exposure — whatever gets composited later has to agree in perspective and light at the moment of shooting. That is the one rule on which a composite succeeds or fails: the blade shapes behind the wasteland figure come from another file, so the figure has to be lit as though they had been standing there all along. Get the direction of the key light wrong and no amount of retouching will save it.
So the direction of the light is fixed before the mask goes on, and it stays the same for every element that will be added afterwards.
A mask has no expression. Everything a face would otherwise do has to be taken over by shoulders, hands and the angle of the head. The plague doctor frame works not because of the mask but because the arms are raised, which gives the silhouette a tension the rigid face cannot supply.
Dark on dark always needs an edge. A black costume against a black ground is a hole in the picture without a narrow light from behind — that light separates the shoulder and the head from the background, and on every one of these figures it is the first lamp to be set.
And the color treatment is decided per figure rather than chosen at the end: cold and desaturated for the plague doctor, warm brown-gold for the wasteland figure. That decision is made before the exposure, because it determines which colors in the mask, the costume and the make-up survive at all.
- Style
- Fine Art Surreal
