We are very pleased to announce that “In the Garden” by Clemens Ascher and “Exogenesis (or Life outside of Earth) by Alessandra Kila have respectively won gold and bronze at the GoSee Awards in the categories “Art” and “Stills“. We have helped Clemens build his dystopian visions by adding some CGI architectural elements to his images and we we have added some magic to Alessandra’s otherworldly images.
Alessandra Kila is a photographer and close friend of ours. She pops in and out of the studio nearly every week and when she asked us to help her with her new series of images, we were as usual very happy to collaborate on her fantastical voyage to another planet as her work is just unlike anything else. And it’s stunning!
In this series called Exogenesis (or Life Outside of Earth) Alessandra ventures to unfamiliar territories looking for life forms beyond our planet. In her pictures the carefully constructed sets are overturned by the surprise of the unexpected. Alessandra is indeed an avid collector of oddities. All of the organic matter encountered in her still life comes from places she travels to – from the Atlas mountain of Morocco to the slate quarries of Snowdonia.
When she goes on a trip she always takes with her empty boxes and rucksacks that she then fills with stones, rusted metal wires, seeds, flowers and everything else she stumbles upon. She then re-assembles everything in her studio creating new juxtapositions which are both evocative and surreal.
We helped her in creating the lush colours of these fantastical worlds by refining the strong tonalities of her pictures and by blending together the many layers that form these not-so-still still life photographs.
Below you can find the making-of of one of the images together with some snaps from Alessandra’s studio.
CREDITS:
Concept and Photography: Alessandra Kila
Styling Assistant: Francesca Oletti
Retouching: Pepe Alram, Kate Brown / Recom Farmhouse
We recently came across the beautiful series of images by Jean-Claude Moschetti‘s «Magic on Earth». Jean-Claude is a press photographer and this is his long-term project about traditional secret societies and voodoo in Africa.
Clemens Ascher’s latest series “IN THE GARDEN” depicts scenes from an indoor garden complex.
The world he represents appears to be entirely artificial, a plastic utopia carefully designed to deliver happiness and comfort to its inhabitants. The bright and saturated colours in these pictures are seemingly trying to compensate for the void in which these people live.
We have helped our friend Clemens in constructing this dystopian vision by adding some CG elements to his pictures. Together we discussed the set prior to his shoot and we came to the conclusion that models, plastic plants, carpets and placeholders for walls were going to be photographed, whilst windows, final walls and all other architectural elements would be created in CG.
We love photo books here at the London studio. So it is no surprise we came across Paul Salveson’s book “Between the Shell”, which won last year First Book Award and is now published by Mack.
Look at these images and look again because what first appears to be a theme park is in reality a carefully constructed world balancing on the threshold of leisure and order.
Shot by photographer Clemens Ascher, the series Pleasure Grounds depicts scenes where people are shown in a moment of leisure but the space they inhabit is bleak and slightly threatening. Military weapons and wild domesticated animals populate this landscape and as viewers we are unsure what is real and what is ficticious.
We have collaborated with Clemens in the realization of this fine art project, playing with altering the proportions of objects and people, choosing slightly off-putting poses for the models and using extremely bleak lighting to take the scene to the limits of reality. Clemens wanted to create an artificial world, nearly two-dimensional, where missiles, animals and people would function like interchangeable figurines, marionettes playing on a theatrical stage.
Whilst the background and animals were shot in different parts of the world from Austria and Switzerland to the US, the models were shot in a studio in East London. Aside from Clemens, part of the creative team on set was Christoph, our creative director, fashion stylist Alice Whiting, prop stylist Elena Riccabona, hair and make-up artist Brooke Neilson who all greatly contributed to the realization of the project with an exquisite selection of props, costumes and style.
Here are some snaps taken by Christoph during the shoot.
Our CGI artists created the missiles in Maya and added some texture (such as rust, dust and scratches) in Mari for extra reality.
Below are some screenshots from Maya.
And here are some screenshots from Mari.
After shooting the individual elements, Clemens created the layouts for each image. Following his directions, we started to assemble all the pieces from background to architecture, to the armament and the people. Here’s a short gif animation of how it all came together.
Photography: Clemens Ascher
Fashion Stylist: Alice Whiting
Props Stylist: Elena Riccabona
Hair and Make-up: Brooke Neilson
CGI Director: Christoph Bolten
CGI Artists: Kristian Turner, Richard Jenkinson, Florian Einfalt
Post Artists: Pepe Alram, Kate Brown, Riikka Eiro
Still Life with Fish and Forsythia, Daniel Gordon, 2013
We recently received the latest copy of Foam magazine, which in this issue titled Under Construction, New Positions in American Photography features photographer and artist Daniel Gordon. It is so original! The colours and the patterns, the still life classic composition and object choices, all belong to an inventory of images we are familiar with. It is as if a 19th century Dutch still life painter had taken acid whilst traveling through exotic countries! Read more
Nearly 1 year ago we posted on Mad Love a personal project which consisted of a series of perspex light-boxes enclosing different types of pure, simple arrangements of raw materials made in CGI. We had a small cluster of clouds, drips of black goo and splashes of paint. This time we enjoyed modeling some mushrooms and a formation of crystals.
Last week Rikka and Kristian, our retoucher and CGI artist in the London headquarters showed me this very interesting selections of photographs by Taiyo Onorato & Nico Krebs. Fantastic! I straight away looked them up on the net to know that the Swiss duo, who works in Berlin, exhibited this body of work as part of “Una Espressione Geografica” exhibition in Turin, Italy.
