carnival theme – The Softer Sex

The Carnival Girls Series | 2008

The Carnival Girls was a small project I shot in 2008. I worked on location at a local company in Observatory that manufactures (I think) and rents out these kiddies party rides. They are kitsch and bizarre and totally appealed to me for the theme of this shoot.
I wanted to create images with an ominous element and shooting inside the Kiddies Rides warehouse & workshop was ideal for this. My model, a close friend who I talked into posing for me, was perfect (thank you) and I even sterilised the rides before she sat bare bum on them- good shoot preparation and logistics!

Pages from my visual diary of the time- images show shoot preparation and research, image editing and body language sketches.

The project was shot on medium format colour film using my twin lens Mamiya C3 and lit with one soft box. I used a collection of props which were nostalgic to me of youth, and school girls at carnivals: handmade flowered masks made with fabric daisies and orchids, satin bows, knee high striped or checkered socks, powdered, teased hair, round pink cheeks and lips (all reminiscent of children’s dolls).

The negatives were scanned and the final three images were giclee printed at 55x55cm in a limited edition of three of each. They were exhibited and sold on exhibition at Exposure Gallery to a German buyer and I’ve not printed the following editions yet.

“The Housewives”, Nude Private Commissions:
This is Berel

(Note: “The Housewives” was a term I fondly coined in 2006 after I started getting shoot requests from private, individual women who became my clients. Many of the women who contacted me were married and in their mid 30’s and were doing the shoots as gifts to their husbands. The folder in my archives is still called this and so I’ve stuck to it, in part just for the irony: most of these women are not “housewives” at all, but strong independent and forward thinking women who I have had the honour of documenting.

All are private commissions and the demographic has changed substantially over the years. Some I’m still in contact with, others I’ve totally lost contact with, some have become friends, some may wish not to have their real names used, others don’t mind, some may have their faces obscured for privacy reasons, others have generously shared their experiences of being photographed.)

I photographed Berel in December 2009 in the Ruth Prowse Photography Studio. It was at the time when Cara, one of my good friends, was shooting her own graduate body of work and had this stunning carnival pedestal rented for use in her images and made an awesome prop for this shoot, adding so much atmosphere and a dynamic object to pose with.

We shot one or two pics with a Santa hat on which she has had the idea to use as her husbands Christmas card,- the shoot was his Christmas present… Love this pic + snowflakes, cute and fun, but sexy!

The shoot was fluid, she was wonderful to work with and open to the suggestions I’d had. The outcome was a few different sets of images: the carnival, fetishy ones, a series of standing nudes with pearls and a couple of sitting nudes, which were incredibly simple and very classic in nature.

Playboy South Africa published a story on my work a little while back and had asked for a selection of images from my “Housewife” shoots to print. The below image was printed, with her happy permission, as a full page.