February has come fast and the semester ends soon. Time is running to finish all the assignments for school, especially when you have to be creative doing a picture of self-staging.
If you remember, last month I already helped my friend Mai with her project on self-staging. Apparently she was quite pleased with the outcome and the pictures got around at her school. In consequence her classmate gave me a call and asked if I could help him to realize his idea, too. Of course I was happy to help him out, the only problem was time. I had caught a cold and had some other projects going on. So we stayed in touch and narrowed down a time when I could go to Düsseldorf to do the shoot.
One week later I met Emanuel. From talking to him on the phone (and because Mai had told me) I knew already that it would be fun working with him. It hadn't been easy to find a suitable location for the photos. We discussed several options but in the end we agreed to take advantage of an empty classroom at his school, the Fashion Design Institute. And to be honest, I was also curious to see this school since I had already heard a lot about it from Mai. In the evening the building was mainly empty. A few students were still busy crafting their dresses and we were only disturbed by the cleaning lady while making our photos.
The body painting and body writing was done by Diana, a friend of Emanuel. She experimented with different font types to write the words which Emanuel had chosen. The first step however was to whiten the skin with paint. The whole process took more than an hour. She had to interrupt sometimes to let the paint dry. All in all it was a creative process where everyone contributed.
The setup I used was actually quite simple. In preparation of the shoot I experimented with a couple of lights but in the end decided for a one light set up with a gridded softbox. It gave me a more dramatic and a more serious look which I found fitting for the topic of black and white, the visible and the invisible. In some of the photos an additional big reflector was used for a fill light.
