Category: Nude

rue | tanzsaal | 2o21

To tell you why I am so happy with these pictures, I have to tell you something from my photographic story. Let’s go back in time:

More than ten years ago I had a studio near my home, where I spent most of the time and took most of my pictures. I had endless opportunities in and around this studio. One of them was to take pictures from outside through the open door. The model got bright frontal daylight, but was shaded from both sides. This was because it was indirect daylight, a very soft yet contouring, powerful light. The best light for portrait or nude portraits. Due to bad circumstances, I had to leave this studio after a few years.

I got an intermediate studio not far away, with a lot of space and lots of opportunities to take pictures. But not with the opportunity to take pictures through the open door. I missed that very much. I tried to solve this problem for a couple of weeks and on a dark and rainy November day the idea came up to me to use my favorite tungsten light to imitate the sun. I built my "open door" in the studio with a 2000W Arrilite, a large heat-resistant Chimera softbox and two black-lacquered styrofoam sheets. after two sessions with this setting I improved it with a mirror to reflect the light and make it even softer. From now on, this was one of my standard settings in the studio. Since I haven’t had a studio for the past three years, I lost that opportunity. But now I have enough space in my new studio to use it. I am very happy to be able to show you my first results even if the are very similar to each other.

The attitude of my model, the incredible Jessy Ley, reminds me a lot of the Girl on the "Blind Faith" debut album from 1969, even though she is more than twice the age of the girl on the cover (the older ones may remember, the younger ones must use google).

Incidentally, I think that today it is absolutely impossible to put an eleven year old girl naked on the cover of a record or anywhere else.

What do you think? I would like to get any feedback.

I’ve been dancing every morning for a year now, solo dancing to a random dozen songs from my library, straight out of bed, naked. In the year of nigh on zero physical contact with other humans, it’s kept me grounded and (relatively) sane. Anyhow, in April, I had my old phone set up on a beanbag camera mount, from doing a Facebook Live of a poem the previous day, so in a WTF moment a couple of songs into my session, I set it up to film my moves.

There not a lot I can do with it, as a movie, as even flickr bans (in their terms) “restricted” vids, but I grabbed some frames from it; here are a few, cropped to square.

In the last few months I had several shootings in different places with frau_katzenblum. I took over 10,000 pictures with her. And edited more than 1000 of them. So as you can see, the nine images that I present on this blog are only a very small part of our work together. And not only that: it’s just an excerpt from a single series that was created during our last shoot together.

Teilnehmer: Model Frau Katzenblum

Backside views taken during our shoot in 5Hausen in October 2020. M: Colette and Susanna – thanks a lot!

Teilnehmer: Model Colette

Joanna in the soft afternoon light