Paola Maria in Seduction
“Seduction is the most subtle, elusive, and effective form of power.” - Robert Greene
If you read my last couple of posts, you’ve already heard my thoughts on how great of a year 2023 was for me. From my work accomplishments to personal growth and all the travels in between, I couldn’t have asked for a better year overall. With that being said, I feel like I had so much going on that my personal work as a photographer took a slight hit, in both creativity & productivity. The last photo project that I took on was the Roam Without Caesar, Fashion Story.
(Feel free to check out that story when you get a chance.)
It’s not that I haven’t had ideas but for so long, I have been creating out of necessity rather than solely for the love of the craft, though if you had asked me prior, I thought my love of the craft was fueling my needs rather than the other way around. With so much mental downtime in 2023, I believe I have found my voice in my work, something I have been in constant pursuit of since I decided that I wanted to be a photographer.
As I mentioned, my love for fashion photography was largely sparked through discoveries thanks to Tumblr and people I surrounded myself with in my later 20s. After discovering the realistic style of Peter Lindbergh and his advocacy for feminine beauty, and the expressionist approach of Helmut Newton and his provocative use of voyeurism, as well as a few other notable photographers (please refer to this post for more information), I realized that Fashion Photography was the genre that best spoke to my desire to convey a message through my art and to explore deeper concepts of the world using women as the central characters.
My interest in characters and stories is largely bred from my love for cinema and the use of female protagonists, which probably speaks to why I love Lindbergh & Newton so much. If you were to look at my journey as a photographer in a linear timeline, you would see that the pursuit of cinematic imagery has been something I’ve been chasing for years. And if you are looking for characters to explore through imagery, I know it’s cliche to say as a heterosexual male in 2024, but to me, the obvious choice is using women as your focus.
Some of my favorite films put women at the center of their stories and because women are inherently complex, in the most beautiful of ways, they make great characters in which to explore concepts of morality, empathy, romance, vengeance, and every other human concept we approach as we traverse the planet. Take a film like Basic Instinct, for instance, Catherine Tramell is one of the most fascinating characters in cinema, to me. In another instance, Mia Wallace from Pulp Fiction is only in the movie for about 20 minutes but her character jumps off the screen in a way that makes you believe she has a much more integral part of the film. There are many instances like these where due to the natural complexity of women, it is much more captivating to watch women characters explore these ideas than the majority of their male counterparts.
I’m sure that’s cliche to say as a heterosexual man in 2024 but I don’t use these words lightly and it’s truly something that I believe. And I say this without considering beauty or heterosexual attraction, my point is solely focused on how emotion is portrayed, how intention is displayed, and how much more depth is explored in these concepts.
This is something that I am just currently wrapping my mind around with my work. I’ve always enjoyed capturing women on screen and the surface, I believe that the assumption is taken due to my heterosexual interest but in reality, it sources back to how captivated I usually am in theaters while watching the feminity of characters on screen.
I’d be lying if I said that this Fashion Story had a deep meaning and that I was looking to solve issues of the world with the way that I captured it. I think that sometimes as artists, we explore ideas that already exist, not so that we can change the way the world looks at them but also just to add our point of view to the collective consciousness of it all. Seduction, in its simplest terms, is the act of persuading, which is innately innocent. The act itself isn’t something we learn in school or directly from traditional standards of education, but it’s a concept that we are all aware of, and for most of us it’s an act that we use daily. The concept is especially familiar to the female species on this planet. If you look across nature at many different species, it is as natural an act as breathing but it’s something that only a small percentage truly master, at least intentionally (i.e. female big cats, birds, and insects of prey).
The art of seduction is a beautiful dance to witness if you ever get the pleasure, and thus my interest in the concept as a whole. The subtleties of movement and expression, which stand out to me as a photographer, are what makes it so enticing. I had this board on my Pinterest for the bulk of the year but I knew that I needed a specific look to pull it off; literally, I was basing my inspiration on a look, a connection to the camera between the model and the viewing audience. Paola, who' I’ve worked with in the past, saw the board and was instantly interested in helping bring this imagery to life.
If you enjoyed this concept & story. Please tap in below in the comments & SHARE with people that you think would also appreciate it. The more people that see our art, the better for us as artists. So every eye counts
~Life & Love