Babes In The Woods, #2
When I was 25 I was living alone in an apartment on Baseline Road in Phoenix. It had two floors, two bedrooms, a laundry room. I slept in the living room, processed film in the laundry room, used one bedroom as a darkroom and the other bedroom as like...a meditation room or something. I'd wake up in the living room, almost be in the kitchen, make coffee, eat Grapenuts, go off to work. It'd be 90 degrees easily by 8:00am.
I had a friend who would come up every Wednesday and stay in a hotel on Apache Blvd for his job. I'd meet him in his room, watch t.v., drink pitchers of beer, get stoned, eat chicken wings, walk across the street to the various bars in the neighborhood, drink as much as we wanted to...worse case scenario was I'd sleep on his floor and deal with my job the next day.
Great people watching on these evenings...great philosophising by my friend and I...of course we thought we could write the great American novel simply by transcribing everything we witnessed at these bars. Ever present was the young mom, eager to be out of the house with her newborn and needing a drink. Her baby car seat was propped up on the bar with the sleeping baby inside it. Sometimes a variation: baby car seat on the pool table, baby sleeping amidst the juke box blasting the Bon Jovi, the Skynard, dudes yelling at the sports on the screen. Oh, now its time to play darts...it's ok...she'll be ok...just rest her on the table and we'll play one game.
Just finished this image for the series Babes In The Woods . It's a composite we shot in pieces with Laura Johnston doing the post production. A quieter image than the previous shot....more serene that surreal, but still trying to speak the language of advertising a bit. While putting it together I realized that these scenes from Apache Blvd planted the seed for this image.
3 comments:
works brilliantly , the baby's look shows a real acceptance of his situation . asks more questions than the other one i think , my favourite of the two .
Wow...thanks for your input.
I typically like to have some "bombs going off" in a shot to feel good about it...some type of wow factor in these commercial looking photographs, but here I wanted to see if I could use all the tools ( post production, great model, interesting prop, etc ) for a subtle photograph.
Andy Anderson did some great photographs of clowns that I used as a reference to the retoucher. We wanted enveloping shadows, muted colors and screaming colors, all together. Some shots are prop stylist shots, some are talent shots, this was a retoucher's shot.
Thanks TA, it was great collaborating with you. It's nice to be given permission to go all out with color. I love how it came out, It feels so rich and juicy but also somehow calm. I think the pensive expression of the babe is what makes it work.
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