Photography & Light Painting — 2013
Corps & Objet
Light painting
Photography, directing
the sitters and retouching.
The Project
Light
as a drawing tool.
A session in a black studio, the shutter held open for around twenty seconds: during the exposure, a lamp moves in front of the sitter and leaves its trail on the image.
Body and luminous object share the frame. Depending on the shot, the light covers the face in a mesh of red lines, draws a pair of eyes above a motionless sitter, spirals around the torso, or multiplies the arms of a sitter who moves during the exposure.
My Role
Each image is a single exposure of 15 to 25 seconds, at f/8 or f/10 and ISO 400: long enough for the lamp to draw, closed down enough for the studio to stay black.
01
Long-exposure Photography
02
Light Painting
03
Directing Sitters
04
Retouching
05
In-situ Mockups
Building the Identity
The studio’s black, and a single colour.
The background is total black: all the light in the image comes from the lamp. Only the portrait with the mesh of lines turns red.
Palette sampled from the project’s own visuals.
The Decision
Light isn’t lit — it’s traced.
The Work
In detail.
The red mesh
The lamp travels over the face for the whole exposure. The sitter stays in shadow; only the red trail shows where the head is.
The eyes
Two eyes drawn in mid-air, high above a seated, barely lit sitter. The image plays on the gap in scale between the drawing and the person.
Utopie
The same technique taken out of the studio, into a park at dusk: the word “utopie” is written with the lamp, letter by letter, between the tree trunks.
Plates
The series
In short
One lamp,
one exposure time.
The series rests on a minimal set-up: a black background, a camera, a hand-held light source. Everything else comes down to gesture.
Corps & Objet