Yvette after a Shower (Long Island, New York)

The session on Dolphin Beach came to a close at 8 AM, as I had worked through all my 4"x5" film for the session, and more and more people were venturing onto the beach - not close enough to be a problem, but certainly serving as a portent for the hordes that were to come. We drove back to Yvette's, to grab some breakfast, permit me to change film, and allow Yvette to have a shower to wash the sand off her.

35mm transparency film

Before we headed out to work at our next outdoor space though, I wanted to do some colour images of Yvette indoors; I asked her not to dry off after her shower, and we worked on a small window seat she had in one room. We spread thin shears over the window to diffuse the light, and remove any of the outdoor scenes from cluttering up the images.

35mm transparency film

The colour work came fast and intuitively, with the images coming as much from the light as Yvette's position. As we worked, her body slowly dried, leaving her hair damp and curling - my favourite image of the session, to the left, wouldn't work at all had Yvette's hair been dry. The wonderful curl of the lock of hair, and the deeper colour of the wet hair above and behind root the image in a solid reality, while the rich, luminous quality of the skin pull it to somewhere else entirely. It is a wonderful mix of reality and fiction.

35mm transparency film

The more I work indoors with colour, the more I fall in love with the luminous, ethereal quality which it brings to the work. While I have a deep and ongoing affection for black and white, the difference between that work, and the colour indoor images is that of night to day. Black & White's beauty and delicacy comes from its subtlety and its richly detailed shadows, while the colour work draws all its impact from the delicate highlights it creates from the skin backed by white. There is no equivalent within my monochrome work, and, perhaps, this is why I am so drawn to it. With much of other colour work, I am often simply repeating my black and white vision on colour film, celebrating when both worlds mesh. With these images though, if they were monochrome, they would be totally different, and in my opinion, far poorer for the conversion. Off all the work I have created in colour, the indoor work, more than anything else, is about colour itself.