Click on the link to see the full gallery of images from this photo shoot…Aloha
Personal photography project with clay.
From the first day I met Crissy, something about her stuck with me. I’ve come to realize that it was her beautiful, caring soul. She’s the kind of person that even though we don’t see each other for months, we can pick up like we just saw each other yesterday! She has a very rough exterior, but once you get past that & really get to know her, she has a heart of gold!!! Even when she’s stressed, she’s always thinking about others & putting her concerns behind her to help out her friends. She is an inspiration to me!
For this project, I was inspired by another photographer & his partner to attempt to do this shoot with dried, cracked clay, @kimhenry.dance & @ericparephoto. The images hit me on an emotional level! I knew exactly who that person I wanted to be as my subject, so I approached Crissy & explained my concept to her & she was happy to indulge my vision!
I went back to the basics with just 1 light to hopefully use the shadows & the negative space to create the mood that I saw in my vision.
There is a basic emotion I want to capture with this portrait, somberness but not in a dark way, if that makes sense. Crissy’s had a hard life & she’s never had it “easy. A cancer survivor & recently had an accident that brought her close to death. I want to portray her past hard life photographically. The clay covering her exterior beauty, the cracks representing her past struggles, and there are small spots of clay that haven’t dried, representing the current struggles that are still healing today. Then there are the patches of clay that have fallen off to reveal her inner beauty waiting to be seen with her hopes & dreams. On a couple of images I opted to add color to some of her skin tones as a representation of her inner beauty breaking free of the black & white darkness! I don’t want this to be interpreted as something dark, but it should be seen as struggling out of the darkness & finding hope to move forward as Crissy has done! She is an inspiration to me & I hope that she will be an inspiration to others after reading this.
This project is a huge step way out of my comfort zone. Not too much planning to acquire the materials needed, which is only clay & talking to Crissy about where I want to take this. A few weeks before the scheduled shoot, we did do a test run on her arm to see what consistency we’d need for the cracked effect. I pitched my concept to my team & everyone was excited to assist with this project.
This project was originally shot on December 4th, 2022
A BIG MAHALO to my amazing Creative Team…Brandon, Eric, Tien & Crissy
Inspiration by…
Kim Henry
Eric Pare
A work in progress...
Learn, grow...repeat!