My last post was all about how I asked my models to look stoned and brain dead.
That, as it turned out, is a surprisingly difficult thing to pull off.
So herewith a few outtakes from the raw series in which people failed to look like zombies.
Category Archives: Series
Zombies wear Gap
A series over a year in the making, a while back I realised I’d fallen into the trap many photographers end up in in the early years after they turn pro.
I’d become so het up about things like correct framing, exposure, focus, lighting and all the other technical titbits that I was starting to lose sight of the madness that got me into this in the first place; of shooting things at random just to see what happened.
So I recruited some improbably willing models (improbable given that my pitch was: “I want to make you look ill”) who gamely stepped in front of the lens for what I like to call my raw series.
Which was all about making people look slightly brain dead and/or stoned.
Big thank yous go to Andrew, Angela, Antonio, Emma, Luke and Martin for being bonkers on cue.
MOVE!
I think the pictures say it all with this lot…
Rat Race
It started with lighting tests.
I was doing a lot of lighting tests, and I was doing them on myself. Hundreds of them; possibly thousands. So many lighting tests, in fact, that they were becoming the closest equivalent I now have to conference calls.
Conference calls are a bit of an art: the trick is to keep all spikey stationery out of reach so that you survive six hours of hot air, people taking their telephone to the toilet and the man who precedes every word with “er” without gouging your eyes out.
Well, it turns out that lighting tests are a bit of an art, too: the trick, here, is to avoid burning your eyes out with repeated bursts of 3,000 watts of energy per second.
So I started covering my eyes. And I ended up with a lot of lighting tests in which I looked asleep, and a lot of lighting tests which looked like I was fleeing the pap-pack.
And then I started wondering whether it was possible to communicate anything at all of myself without showing my face. Turns out, it was.
And then I wondered what it was that I wanted to communicate. And I remembered all the times I’d sat before the speakerphone on conference calls, decked out in my suit, my tie, my expensive cufflinks and my painful shoes, carefully composed on the surface and — inside — just screaming to be allowed, just for one second, to be me.
And then other people became involved. And it went from little lighting tests to a full-blown series that’ll run as long as it wants to run.
If you want to sit for it, and join the Rat Race crowd, drop me a line.
