In August 2012 I initiated a new series of work, using the Playboy South Africa Playmates, to go alongside a group exhibition called Nostalgia, which I was curating at Exposure Gallery.
The series was shot over two days with six different Playmates. The images catalogued here come from the first shoot on Womens’ Day, 8th August with Yolandi Malherbe, Mpho Tsila and Yolandi Wiggett, – hair by Chantal Morgan and make-up by Colleen Van Rensburg.
The approach for the shoot took a while for me to plan, I wanted the final images to really look like old originals and thus decided to layer the processing of the images.
I shot in studio against a mid-tone grey back-drop roll using two lights; a strip soft box creating rim light and a beauty-dish with a grid as the main light. After retouching and quite substantial colour manipulation (to adjust backgrounds and props appropriately) I overlaid the files with previously documented textures and then had them printed out onto cotton-based Hanhemulle.
I spent a couple of days staining, soaking, burning, crushing, folding and generally damaging these originals until they looked sufficiently handled and then re-documented them on a white background. These files were again re-worked before final exhibition prints were created , again on Hahnemulle.
The shoot was fun and relaxed with bubbly and a few friends coming in to lend a hand or deliver koeksisters (thank you Leigh Van Den Berg, beauty-blogger-extraordonaire of lipgglossismylife) (and also thank- you for the blog post about the shoot!).
For each of the playmates I worked with I produced a semi-nude final image for the exhibition and a nude for publication in Playboy magazine itself. We also shot one or two fun closer up shots for each Playmate to use on social media.
