Tag: nudes

Women I've Shot

Corporate Commission: Alan Walt Architects & Ass.
The Client Christmas Card 2007

Post author By Leah
Post date May 1, 2015
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The Client Christmas Card 2007

I met Alan Walt in 2007 when he contacted me via a recommendation from Heidi Erdmann of The Photographers Gallery ZA. Alan creates a somewhat controversial or abstract “christmas” card or seasons greetings type card to his clients at the end of each year. He strikes me as the kind of person who likes to ruffle feathers, challenge perceptions and so on and he uses this opportunity to do just that with his clients.
Previous cards had not been related to issues pertaining to sexuality or gender specifically. I got the feeling that he got a kick out of challenging my notions of the subject since it was the subject we would deal with for his commission if he wanted to collaborate with me as a creative.
I can’t remember exactly how the final concept came up. He wanted to incorporate his company name “AWA” into the product in a subliminal way and we discussed references and ideas and decided to use the [taboo] oriental art of Karada (rope tying) as the vehicle.

I had used Karada references, especially those of Nobuyoshi Araki a few years previously and we discussed then in context of incorporating the — I had used Karada references, especially those of Nobuyoshi Araki a few years previously and we discussed them in context of incorporating the ideas or art in Alan’s project.

I sketched my idea, we confirmed the look and went ahead with the job.

I generally work alone, I prefer it since communicating my creative vision, shoot process, etiquette with nude models or trying to maintain my patience with others working on my set frustrates me.

Alan wanted to be present at the shoot which I found totally unnecessary and purely voyeuristic as apposed to useful (he did not attend).
The shoot took place on a small budget, it was before I had my own studio and I shot it in my lounge using a mix of friends, acquaintances and family members who had willing accepted my request for them to pose for a group nude portrait all the while tied into a rope harness.
I sourced the rope from a local rope supply store in Lakeside, Cape Town and incorporated garments with fabric that would be a little reminiscent of a kimono lifted up to expose the body underneath it.
The tying process was a struggle,- it takes a while to create such an end result and with 5 models one can’t make the first overly tight while she has to wait for a good two hours still until the shoot commences. I did this alone and had an amazing amount of patience from the 5 women.

The end result was good and very close to the initial sketch of the concept. Below is the final image.

I shot the images digitally, this was my second year working with my first digital camera and was also at a time when I was still working at least 50% with my film cameras.

Alan put together a small amount of text which appeared on the back of the card. When I read over it now, 8 years later I’m surprised I agreed to it.

I shot a small series of details at the end of the shoot which I’ve only selected and messed around with now (below).
I like the strong graphic play between the rope and the body shape.

Tags Alan Walt Architects, araki, asian rope tying, AWA, Body harness, bondage, cape town photography, corporate branding, Karada, leah hawker, Leah Hawker cape town photographer, Leah Hawker photography, nobuyashi araki, nudes, rope bondage, rope tying, semiology

Projects Women I've Shot

PolaroidWomen 2014

I started shooting PolaroidWomen in October 2014, I still had one pack left of original Polaroid film hanging-out in the depths of our fridge which I’d bought in 2009 (expired 2007) and went and emptied a big portion of my bank account on another stack of Impossible film (the miraculous company that have managed to re-produce instant film for Polaroid after Polaroid stopped manufacturing film in 2008).

The-Begining-of-the-PolaroidWomen-project-by-Leah-Hawker-2014

I picked up my snap-shot Polaroid camera at Orms in 2006 I think and had only ever passed about 8-9 packs of film through it by 2013. I planned to use the project for OpenStudios 2014, one of the first few creative and art based projects I’ve re-involved with for the last 6 years (!).

The project resulted in a selected series of 35 framed instant images for the exhibition,- the images take a voyeuristic peek into a fantasy world of women in dreamy, nondescript natural spaces…..tiny portholes to a place where the ethereal is momentarily a reality.
Below are some snaps from the OpenStudios event:

PolaroidWomen-2014-by-Leah-Hawker--02

PolaroidWomen-2014-by-Leah-Hawker--04

PolaroidWomen-2014-by-Leah-Hawker--03

Some of the images from the series below:

PolaroidWomen-9 Instant Images of Nudes by Leah Hawker Cape Town Photographer

PolaroidWomen-8 Instant Images of Nudes by Leah Hawker Cape Town Photographer

PolaroidWomen-7 Instant Images of Nudes by Leah Hawker Cape Town Photographer

PolaroidWomen-6 Instant Images of Nudes by Leah Hawker Cape Town Photographer

I aimed to approach the image taking process differently to my norm. Where I usually control and stage my work quite particularly, here I asked my models to be natural, carefree, awkward, real and just playful. I guided some more than others, depending on the location and woman I was working with.

I shot in about six different locations for the series, ranging from swimming pools in Franschoek, orchids, rivers, shooting ranges, forests and beaches,- all with a sort of anonymous composition which leaves the environment and the women to be anyone, anywhere, a slice of time, a dream.

I plan to continue the series into 2015. For now the remaining framed pieces left over after the Open Studios show are hanging at Exposure Gallery in the Old Biscuit Mill, Woodstock.

Tags cape town photographer, cape town photography, Cape Town Polaroid, Exposure Gallery, Impossible project, impossible project instant images, leah hawker, Leah Hawker cape town photographer, Leah Hawker photography, nudes, open studios 2014, open studios cape town, original polaroids, polaroid, Polaroid exhibition, polaroid nude series, Polaroid photographs, polaroid project, PolaroidWomen

Projects Women I've Shot

The Pinup Series, 2012
Part 2

Post author By Leah
Post date April 23, 2015
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Part 2

This is the second half of the shoot I did for the Pinup Series which was broken over two days in August 2012. On the second shoot date I worked with South African Playboy Playmates Wendy Du Toit, Kate Lovemore and Jade Fairbrother. Samantha Brownell did hair and makeup.

Catalogued here are a number of behind-the-scenes type shots from the shoot as well as the final images for each of the three Playmates.

Wendy Du Toit (pictured in the above images) was flown down from the Northern Cape for the day for this shoot. We met on the morning for a brief interview on MuthaFM before going straight into the shoot. Wendy is definitely the traditional “girl next door” but as far as the Playboy history goes she fits into the early 60’s with her look.

Kate was great to meet and shoot. She’s totally self-assured, enthusiastic and natural. Her partner, Twiggy or Grant “Twiggy” Baker, an SA champ surfer and all round cool guy, joined us to shoot some behind the scenes footage of Kate.

Of each of the Playmates I shot a semi-nude (for exhibition as part of the Nostalgia Now exhibition which I curated in 2012 at Exposure Gallery) and a nude which went on to be featured in a pictorial about the Playmates in a follow-on issue of the Playboy South Africa print mag.

The make-up references were reasonably straight forward but the hair was definitely quite a challenge. I spent a fair amount of time trying to re-style some areas in post-production,- a lesson learned about preparation and research before shooting if there ever was one…

Lastly of the six Playmates I shot Jade Fairbrother who was also the first Playmate I ever shot for Playboy SA and went on to Playmate of the Year (which we later shot in beautiful Zambia).

The exhibition “Nostalgia Now” was the 3rd in a series of 4 small group shows I curated at Exposure Gallery during the last 5 years. It was tied in with the Cape Town Month of Photography and invited emerging and professional photographic talent to participate by submitting images for exhibition that related to the body and that reflected nostalgia in the now via a rendered nostalgic format be it homographic, hipstamatic, polaroid, cynotype, tintype, faded out, bleached etc etc. The concept was correlated to that of the main festival and asked the viewer to reminisce about the now.

Below is the invite and a shot from the end of the opening evening.

Tags behind the scenes photoshoot, cape town photography, jade fairbrother, Kate Lovemore, leah hawker, Leah Hawker cape town photographer, Leah Hawker Photographer Cape Town, Leah Hawker photography, nudes, pinup nudes, Pinup Project with Playmates, Pinup shoot, Playboy Playmates, Samantha Brownell, South African Playmates Pinup, Wendy Du Toit

Projects Women I've Shot

The Graveyard Girls, 2007

Post author By Leah
Post date October 22, 2014
No Comments on The Graveyard Girls, 2007

I worked on this small body of work during 2007. I had intended for it to become a larger body of images but got distracted by more and more of my commercial work. I exhibited the final three images in the KWV Cathedral during the Cultivaria Festival of 2007. The rest of the negatives were archived, hopefully for future use.

Here is a collection of the images mostly in the working stages and includes pictures from my working diaries, contact sheets, notes and the stencils used for the body marking.

A detail from my visual diary of that time shows planning notes and research along with inspirational images from graveyards I shot in Mozambique in 2004. — A detail from my working diary of that time shows planning notes and research along with reference images from graveyards I shot in Mozambique in 2004.

I was working with the “Widow” concept, utilising graveyards around the Cape Peninsular. I’m drawn to these spaces. They represent a continuation of identity in our after-life. I find the details, often worn with time, like our memories, to be beautiful and I have an unexplainable attachment to multiples.

I incorporated items from my collection: vintage veiled hats, gloves, hand mirrors, suspenders, heels, stockings and strong body language along with texts, stencilled in gothic fonts to my subjects bodies.

Cape Town has some very beautiful graveyards including the sailors graveyards in Seaforth and Dido Valley and the closed off (Victorian?) Graveyard below Groote Schuur Hospital in Observatory. Many of the sailors graves are inscribed ‘unknown sailor’.

I worked with women I had shot before mostly, some friends, some previous models from commercial shoots. I hand cut the ‘tattoos’ or body texts I had chosen for each image, including: Revere, Deference, My Carnal Avarice, Chastity and “Those are pearls that were his eyes” -a segment of Ariels song from The Tempest :

Full fathom five thy father lies.

Of his bones are coral made.

Those are pearls that were his eyes.

Nothing of him that doth fade,

But doth suffer a sea-change

Into something rich and strange.

The permanence which comes with tattooing or scaring the body is connected here to the potency of feeling loss which remains inside the body invisibly but forever. The words represent the inward tensions connected to loss but also tied to how society has created regulations for behaviour in such contexts, how even the behaviour of despair/grief/loss has become stereotyped and stigmatised. In the images I am placing a juxtaposition between the words used on the woman’s bodies and the context in which they reside.

Heidi Erdmann, of The Photographers Gallery, added these words to the catalogue published alongside the images for the Cultivaria Festival:

The curatorial concept and theme for this exhibition is the BODY and it is discussed along two axes, Public/Private and Cruel/Tender.
Through the photographs on the exhibition the viewer will witness the collision of self-image versus private desire, historical forces versus contemporary syndrome all represented with both humour and pathos…the work illustrates how over time the human BODY has remained one of the most photographed and pictorial objects in the world.

The images were all shot on my Mamiya twin lens medium format camera; all on B&W film. The negs, once I’d processed and contact printed for selection, were drum scanned and then hand coloured through Photoshop, painstakingly, using very feathered selected areas which were bit by bit, layer by layer, coloured using the photo filter tool (Image> Adjustments>Photo filter) at varying opacities and colour grades.
The process yields a look much like old original hand coloured B&W images, the ones most people remember seeing in photo history books or girlie postcards. The detail and colouring is best seen in the original exhibition prints which were printed 82cm x 82cm on Hahnemülle paper.

The often misty surrounds were created by using kiddies smoke bombs (lit inside an old can, they smoke for about 20 seconds, in varying brilliant colours and then disperse, subtly, around quite a big area, depending on the wind).

Tags B&W medium format photography, cape town fine art photography, cemeteries, graveyards cape town, hand colouring, leah hawker, my carnal avarice, nudes, revere, the graveyard girls, those are pearls that were his eyes, veiled hats, visual diary