Tagged: portfolio
Beauty: Aurum
Check that azure accent
My thoughts behind this weeks look was gold, if you have ever studied my photography (you haven’t, no one has ever) then you may have noticed that I hate photographing gold. I prefer my images to look like they were shot in the depths of winter, even if there is flare flying around, and bokeh coming out the ying-yangs my images tend to always look a bit cold. I think its because i prefer the way blue tones come across on film (or on digital I guess). So with this week I wanted to challenge myself a bit, and shoot a considerable amount of gold. I shot with yet another familiar face, dancer, poet, artist, queen and bad a$$, Jahra. I’ve worked with Jahra numerous times before, on my personal instillation project “Genesis”, her performance art project “Murdered Many” and filming spoken word down at 1885. She is needless to say one of my favourite people on earth just because she is so cool. Like actually if you haven’t met Jahra you probably think she is real cool, and if you have met Jahra you probably think she is real cool. She also happens to have a very strong sense of personal style, to the point where she has looks that are difinitively her… She is like Madonna, Michael Jackson and Lady Gaga rolled into one in terms of personal iconography. She also happens to be super open to my ideas, and interpretations of her look which excites me a lot.
OH ALSO YEAH SHE IS REALLY BEAUTIFUL I’M GOING TO STOP GUSHING NOW (THERE ARE PHOTOS AFTER THE READ-MORE)
Beauty: DeMonica
Sometimes, I experiment with makeup and I hate it. Sometimes I experiment with makeup and I really like it.
I was really bored today, so I did the usual looking up of recipes online, playing of video games and listening to music for like 10 minutes before becoming bored. I’ve been toying with the idea of this look for a while now just in the back of my mind ever since (now I’m gonna go all gay and obscure on you for a bit) drag performance artist Raja (also known as famous makeup artist Sutan Amrull) released the artwork for her latest single Zubi Zubi Zubi (image below) and it made me think about how when someone just paints their face (insert colour here) for Halloween or whatever they usually go out and buy the cheapest crappiest $2 face paint from the variety store (I say variety store now because i feel “one of those cheap Asian shops” is maybe a bit racist?), they slap it on haphazardly leaving gaps in places and blah blah blah, its effective I guess but it normally looks like absolute shit. What I initially wanted out of this look was to use really nice skin-like products i.e cream makeup, but a combination of budget and “I don’t wanna wait to get paid, then go to bodyfx and find out that they don’t have it or its not quite the shade of (insert colour here) that I want, wow disillusioned now, send to back of brain cabinet” forced me into doing this a lot sooner and a lot less polished than I had anticipated. Back to Raja and Zubi Zubi Zubi, the reason I was so inspired to this by that image (which is below by the way, I haven’t forgotten, I’m getting there) is because it veers so far away from that super matte, flat, patchy gross Halloween skin and ends up looking smooth and beautiful and creamy and like real skin.
Raja – Zubi Zubi Zubi
So I quickly had to change my aesthetic from this super polished, alternate version of Raja’s Zubi face to a dressed up Halloween face. Not necessarily looking like real skin, but at least looking anything but flat and boring.
Beauty: Cedric
Cedric’s Natural state
I’ve done a bit of makeup work with Cedric before. But its previously been either keeping everything super natural and really just a bit of minor adjustments (contours, highlights you know the deal) or flirting into the feminine, drag world (drag used used in the purely acronymic sense of D.R.A.G – “Dressed as Resembling A Girl” and less in the show girl, drag queen sense). This time around i wanted to stop flirting with the idea of the female persona and actually do a transformation on Cedric. I have strangely enough only ever done one full-on male to female transformaion on a man other than myself and it was the first time I had ever done one on anybody, myself included and I was only doing it because I had to (yay beauty school), needless to say it was not great.I did manage to avoid using glitter though, go me! So for me I guess this shoot with Cedric was really an experiment of my own skills and of what I could do with Cedrics face with the… well, limited supplies I own (I also don’t own any typical “drag makeup” or theatre makeup).
Beauty (as in makeup, not inner beauty, wtf?)
Weird as stock photo
Its kind of a weird concept when you strip it all back. We put these various combinations of chemicals, oils and colours on our faces and bodies in order to change our faces so that they are somewhat closer to this idea of perfection. But of course beauty is subjective isn’t it? That’s what our parents and friends tell us. Of course *brooding music plays* “THE MEDIA” wants us to think otherwise. You may now be thinking that I’m going to go into the battle of subjective beauty and conventional beauty and well I’m not going to so shame. Personally I think that conversation is one of the most tiring and pointless one can possibly enter in. Continue reading
Cori for New Face No Agent
Meet Cori,
I’ve known Cori for a few months now (if you remember that “Spirit” shoot then you would have seen him before) and I kind of just remembered a couple of weeks ago that he is amazing.
Well he is amazing
I worked with one of my besties, Ana Van Schie De Pont on styling/creative direction and got in an assistant (Lei Lei Kung) which is totally weird because normally on my shoots its just me and the model, and Angela if I am shooting NFNA stuff.
Also his photos were uploaded last night to facebook and interest was shown within 20 minutes which is pretty insane.
Enjoy all the amazing images after the jump
Double Department Store: Devo
A month or so ago I got a very last minute call from a friend of mine who works at The Department Store wondering if I was available to shoot an editorial for their upcoming zine. Continue reading
You wish you were me
You cant handle this
HEY GUYS! LOOK AT WHAT ME AND CEDRIC AND ANA AND BEVERLY DID ON SATURDAY!
I’ve known Cedric for a couple of years now and I have been pushing him to get signed for like…. ages so naturally when I heard he got snapped up by N Model Management I was super excited. We’d been sitting on the idea of this shoot for a while now and one of my besties Ana DePont VanSchie (spawn of fashion royalty Doris DePont ) kind of has the best taste in everything crazy and 90’s so we decided to just put all of that together and push out a baby that was somewhere between a 90’s wannabe and Andrej Pejic. I really am ecstatic that Cedric has been signed with an agency that is passionate about him and that really want to work with his skills (and also an agency that actually WANTS him to do mens and womenswear). Cedric really has something special, there aren’t really many male models in NZ that can bring femininity and androgyny to the table. If you follow me on tumblr (if you don’t you should) then you would have seen the teaser gifs for this shoot which I am pretty stoked with (WARNING: They are SUPER tacky and SUPER 90’s). Anyway I am gonna let these images speak for them selves and there is a lot of images. Continue reading
The week that was / Makeup Monday
So the past week was quite conflicting I guess, for the past few months I have been amping myself up to see the new Batman movie because we all know how great the last film was and how great batman is in general. Needless to say I was sorely disappointing. I don’t want to ruin The Dark Knight Rises for anyone but yeah its pretty much the worst batman movie I have ever seen.
On Thursday I got a message from a good friend of mine Jahra asking if I would be interested in doing some filming for a spoken word night at 1885. I always saw spoken word nights to be this super wanky pretentious collection of try-hard hipsters wearing beret’s carrying bongo drums and snapping their fingers constantly. It turns out spoken word nights are only one of those things (snapping fingers constantly). It was a really beautiful and inspiring night full of energy and some really talented performers. I am currently trawling through videos but check my YouTube channel systematically for more updates. Here is one of the performances from “Decolonize the Night: spoken word @ 1885”
The third and final eventful thing this week was me FINALLY getting to try out some of the products from the mindblowing new collection from M.A.C, Heavenly Creatures. I was so impressed by these products that I decided to do a shoot semi-inspired by them (and a little bit of final fantasy 7 and black swan). If you are familiar with the video game Final Fantasy VII (7) or even the film Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children then this may make some sense to you, if not I apologize. I initially started out with the idea of doing a shoot based around the character Jenova from FFVII but really stripped back and totally re-invented, my only constraint to the initial Jenova was that she be travelling to earth. Then I got my hands on a couple of the products from the Heavenly Creatures collection and then I sort of clicked as to how I was going to visually represent this Jenova character. For some reason mythological space birds come to mind when I think of Heavenly Creatures and swans are birds….. black swans are birds….. black swan…. ballet…… Post apocalyptic black swan bird lady coming to a new planet from her futuristic metallic cube meteorite! Have I lost you yet? My mind works in strange and mysterious ways. Continue reading
Stolen Girlfriends Club Menswear a/w 2012: Here Lies The bones @ New Zealand Fashion week
Lifestyles of The Richard Famous 