Today I wanted to share something different: a few images from my experimental series. The preliminary title is “Pastel”. When I used to paint and draw pastel was one of my favorite mediums because of its softness.
During my last holidays in France I started a new series inspired by pastel. These photos are created using long shutter speed. It was not meant to show the existing movement. Actually, the idea was quite the opposite this time: adding movement to still objects and scenes. I moved my camera, let it kind of dance, to achieve this vagueness and softness of lines, faded shapes and mixing colors.
The night alley with dark blue sky (“Chorus”) had lately received an Honorable mention at the International Color Awards, and the Chinese vase was published in my online Vogue portfolio a few days ago. Hear are some more photos.
I must confess it does not only make me think of pastel. These photos also look a lot like my blurry vision without glasses or lenses… I remember reading an interview with Nicole Kidman where she said that being short-sighted was a blessing in disguise, offering escape from the too busy world. British novelist James Runcie finds that impressionist paintings reflect the short-sighted way of seeing the world and that flawed sight probably makes the world’s imperfections easier to bear.
Paul Cézanne was offered a pair of glasses to aid his weakening sight and asked to “take these vulgar things away”. I also recall “The Spectacles”, a short comic story by Edgar Allan Poe: a short-sighted young man too vain to wear glasses falls in love with a beautiful woman at an opera – the lady of his dreams turned out to be in her eighties… We tend to like soft filters on female portraits, don’t we?
To me, the softness of the “Pastel” images is not about avoiding the harshness of the real world but about its dreamy side.
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