Maria is living proof that all it takes is a stunning body and a gorgeous face. There's personality and she is one of the women where I could totally feel, she's a model. She does not pretend to be a model. She embodies the spirit of a model. Untouchable yet present. Arrogant yet kind. Her look is mesmerizing or should I say, her looks are hypnotizing? She lives in her own world and makes us observers want to conquer her planet.
These were my feelings when I first saw Maria. I thought of a Russian woman in a dacha. This week-end home outside with a garden connected to it. And when I saw the tattooed roots on her feet, I felt a strong connection to my idea.
Ten years ago, I had bought a red hammock. It looked so beautiful, I wanted to shoot with it. But I had no idea where. When flying to Mallorca or Ibiza, it was way too large to carry it with me. And I barely shoot in my hometown.
Luckily, I found a guy whose dacha I could rent for a shoot. He received my beautiful hammock in return (and even wanted it autographed by Maria).
Forbidden Fruits
In late summer, the garden is full of fruits. My theme was born. And I knew what pictures I wanted to take at the dacha.
Maybe you have noticed, there's always some kind of poetry in the titles of my pictorials. I love naming my series. To whatever feeling I had during the shoot or what kind of mood the resulting photographs create. When I see artworks in exhibitions and they are named something like Untitled 1, I find this extremely lame. As if the artist lost all his creativity when he dropped the pencil. And words are poetry. I enjoy this very much. Working multidisciplinary (what a complicated word) is fascinating and rewarding.
I don't work in German nature very often. I am more used to sandy colors like on beaches or brown tones of rocks. If you shoot with the sun high up but under the trees, you can totally tell, there's a strong green color cast caused by the leaves. It's something hard to solve. Either you use flash light to overpower the sun which I did not want to do or you work on it in post which is difficult to do because the color cast affects the whole image.
I thought about it for a long time and then decided to keep a natural feeling to my photographs. Therefore you can still see green color cast in this series. But I adjusted the green tones towards yellow. I have no idea why, but I am not the only person disliking powerful green tones (even if they come from sunlight through the leaves). Dark greens like in a rainforest are something else. I love those.
