The Frankfurter Summer Garden 2022 — Event photography
High-society event reportage in Frankfurt. Event photography: Frankfurt am Main. The set shows what staging an evening like this involves: a flower wall of…
THE FRANKFURTER's 2022 Summer Garden, a garden party at a neoclassical villa. The set shows what staging an evening like this involves: a flower wall of balloons and blossom with a neon “Hello gorgeous”, a neon-green BMW in the magazine's livery, an M4 and a Maserati MC20 among the partners' banners, the photo wall of sponsor logos. And in between, the thing it is actually about: guests with a glass of rosé under the trees, the singer at the microphone, conversations in half shade.
A society evening is always an advertising surface too, and the job is to serve both at once. The partners need their logo legible; the magazine needs pictures in which the evening looks like a party and not like a trade fair. So the frame in front of the sponsor wall is shot slightly off-axis and from below: the singer separates from the backdrop, the picture gains a direction, and the logos still sit complete in the frame. Straight on at eye level, the same situation would look like a press conference.
In the flower-wall frame an out-of-focus hydrangea sits in the foreground. That is neither an accident nor a mistake — it turns a photograph of a decoration into a photograph of a garden party. Shooting props head-on and isolated is the fastest route to a catalog picture.
The hardest light is supplied by the garden itself. In the afternoon the sun falls through the trees in patches and stripes across faces, which cannot be rescued in pictures of guests. So either place people fully in shade or wait until the sun has dropped below the treeline. The wide frame with the Moët parasols was made at exactly that moment: the sky above the trees is still glowing, and under the parasols the light has already evened out.
And one organizational part that belongs to the work: sponsors get counted. By the end of the evening every logo has to appear legibly at least once — that is worked through as a list beforehand, not left to chance.
- Year
- 2022
- Place
- Frankfurt am Main
