Sometimes everything just clicks in place. That’s what happened when I got together with the lovely Larissa of Blonde Moxie Makeup for a private photo shoot inspired by the curvy sensuality of Marilyn Monroe and Anna Nicole Smith.
With some inspirational music pumping out of the iPod and armed with an array of props including some fabulous roses made by Amber Ray (I’m happy to say I finally got one for myself at MBF this year!), we worked through several sets that included pinup with a killer leopard slink dress and a black slink dress, soft portraits with furs, accentuation of Larissa’s gorgeous shoulder tattoo, and some sexy and seductive shots that explored the many facets of a lollipop.
It was such a pleasure working with Larissa – a great artist who spends her time making others look beautiful for the camera and the stage. I think in the end my favourite shots were those that weren’t posed at all, when we were just chatting away, relaxed and away from the photo shoot headspace.
Someone recently told me that if I wanted to get representation and start seriously selling my work I needed to get more commercial with my photography. Produce work that people want to put in their homes, up on their living room walls. From the response to my long-awaited Chornobyl & Pripyat CONTACT shows this year – fantastic reviews but no sales – it seems that people love looking at my carefully crafted images of entropy but owning and displaying them is a different matter. I once had someone love a piece in a show for it’s colours, textures and light to turn around and immediately hate it when they found out it was taken at a prison.
So what sells? Landscapes and flowers – people love flowers, or so I’m told. Fantastic – I’ve never been a landscape photographer nor do I dabble in nature photography. I can appreciate it when I look at it, but there’s no appeal there for me, nothing that makes me itch to go out and shoot, no real wow factor that makes me want to stay up all hours of the night processing photos until my rotator cuff gives out on me.
As my fame seems to elude me and I’m not willing to cut off a body part to speed the process along like good old Van Gogh, I have been struggling over the past little while trying to find a way to make some of my photography more “commercial” while not feeling like I’m selling out. Changing my entire photographic subject matter was out of the question so I looked at what I have done in the past that people seemed to like and that had sold.
Although the public loves the stark reality of the urban landscape, the photos that they like to buy are my abstract experimental pieces. This is where my graphic design background and my love of Photoshop comes out. Being able to see the potential in the images if manipulated, working them beyond their usual limitations, mutating them into new images able to stand on their own. The abstract muse hit me like a hurricane and I went back through all my images, scanning for those that spoke to me, that may not have been able to stand on their own, but could shine with a little manipulation.
The results of dancing with my abstract muse – Coalescence.
![Them Rickety Stair](http://www.photolena.ca/wp-content/uploads/2009/07/DSC09526.jpg")
