About Studio Form
These photographs were created in the studio, almost always with a minimal set of tools: one or two lights, a backdrop, and now and then a plain object – a chair, a stool, a low pedestal – used as a foil for the human figure. With little else in the frame, the viewer’s attention settles on the figure, and on the way the light shapes it.
I work in black and white because it lets me treat the body as an expressive form before anything else. A shoulder reads as a clean edge against the dark, and the run from hip to knee becomes a curve that is given sculptural form by the studio light(s). Some images showcase the whole body at once – a back arched into a taut line, the body’s weight shifted onto one leg; other images crop in close, until the frame holds only a clavicle or the long gradient of a torso reduced nearly to terrain.
Light does most of the work here: a hard rim lifting one edge out of deep black, a raking source drawing the grain of the skin into relief. The visual aim is controlled drama – rich blacks and fine gradations of white that generate atmosphere and mood.