Maria in “The Dress,” 2012
It’s funny how the
gestalt of a place or event can be so easily expressed through a single item.
In the case of Harvey
Stein’s “Photographing People” workshop last week at the International Center
of Photography, it was a dress, a loose navy blue jersey ankle-length number
with white diagonal stripes.
A beautiful young girl named
Isabel bought the dress on Tuesday and wore it to class on Wednesday. All the
girls in the class immediately loved Isabel’s dress and wanted to know where
they could get one like it.
I don’t know if any of
them ever did that. But several of them slipped behind the seamless background over
the next two days to borrow Isabel’s dress so that they could be photographed
in it. It looked good on all of them, and all who wore it loved the way they
felt wearing it.
The thing about
photographing this dress is that it can be striking if the model is standing up
and just as striking if she’s sitting down or sitting on the floor, as Isabel’s
friend Maria is doing in the picture above.
You can see how the
dress is cut in the front. What you can’t see is how it reaches down to almost…well,
let’s just say it has almost no back.
It’s hard to imagine that any woman could look bad in this dress. And even if
your back were plumb ugly the cut of this dress would probably distract anyone
from noticing it.
By the way, if you’re
curious about Maria’s hair and wonder where the wind source is that’s holding
it up, stop looking. There’s no wind source, nor is there a bunch of hair goo
holding it up. Maria’s hair is instead wrapped around a tall plastic water
bottle and cinched at the top of the bottle with a rubber band. Maria’s mother is a photographer in Mexico
City, so I’m guessing she learned this trick at home.
Harvey Photographing Maria with
His iPhone, 2012
I say this dress
expressed the gestalt of our class because its loose, comfortable style
reflected the loose, comfortable style of our class. Over five full days we
covered a lot of ground. Most of us were working outside our normal comfort
zones. Yet we were confident and forthright when it came to doing so. Sent out onto
the streets to photograph strangers, we created our own working rhythms and,
more often than not, got the pictures we wanted. In the studios students picked
everything from the spare notes of Miles Davis and Buddy Guy to gentle Brazilian
sambas to the beat of Michael Jackson to set their pace.
It’s true. Really. All
the girls looked good in this dress.
It is certainly true that they all did look fabulous, Chris. I think you or I might have looked good in it!
ReplyDeleteHope you don't mind but I added you to my blog roll
ReplyDeleteI like that dress, too! Your photos of people recently are fabulous, Chris. I'm enjoying them all.
ReplyDeleteI like the water bottle trick!
ReplyDelete