Fashion Couple

I am not of the school that all fashion should be produced with the youngest people that can be found. I tend to gravitate towards prefering to make images and look at photographs where the people in them have a bit of life experience. In my opinion that makes for more interesting and impactful images that go far beyond mere eye candy that certainly can be sweet for a moment but ultimately unsatisfying.

I like photographing women who appear to know something of life. I recently did a session with a great beauty, a movie star in in her thirties. I photographed her twice within three weeks and the second time I said: “You’re much more beautiful today than you were three weeks ago.” And she replied: “But I’m also three weeks older. Helmut Newton

This small project blurs the lines a little bit between pure fashion and fashion portrait which is something that I just love to do. When photographing an individual, their reaction to the wardrobe is the primary focus when working on this bit of blurred genre. When working with two or more people on camera it adds another variable that’s critical — the reaction to each other.

There are as many styles and work processes as there are photographers. I tend towards the mindset that overdirection of people in front of the camera kills the emotion, feel, and humanity. I tend to provoke my collaborators in a certain direction with as little mechanically oriented specifics as possible. For what I am looking for, less is definitely more.

As an aside, one extremely esoteric hobby of mine is attempting to create interesting looks by combining extremely budget friendly items together in various combinations. The ensemble on Jehanne works reasonably well. An $8 plastic body suite, a $10 multi-layer tulle skirt, and a $10 belt with some interesting metal bits to hide the hidous waist band on that skirt ties things together nicely.