Published on 19 gennaio 2010
I have signed the contract with MAX magazine for another year for my column MAX CASTING.
To celebrate this I have dedicated the BEST of my website to more than forty women I have shot for this column in the past year.
They might appear simply as photographs of young girls, excuse the extreme simplification, with their tits out: in reality it is not like that. As always and as I will never get tired of repeating, you have to have a precise concept when you do something, and you have to have it even more when, as in the case in question, the project lasts for more than a year.
I will try to explain the “concept” behind MAX CASTING:
When this task was given to me I had only one thing in mind, what I DID NOT want to do: I didn’t want to simply take glamour photographs, as you can see thousands everywhere. namely I didn’t want to take fake images, with young ladies that were simply and finally showing their nice little asses and their perky tits.
So I gave myself some very precise rules and boundaries, which I am going to list schematically:
-the models must not have anything fake: no fake breasts, no fake hair, no fake nails, no contact lenses… all real. Already this would have taken us far away from most of the glamour shots you see around
-through the images I wanted to tell who are the models, creating above all a portrait. Therefore before the photoshoot I have always taken some time to talk to the girls to decide WITH THEM, how to take the pictures. Actually, I was stimulating the girls so that they would decide on how to do the editorial! In short I have always tried to make way so that they wouldn’t undergo the photoshoot, as it happens often, but that they would become the creators: it wouldn’t have been MY editorial, but THEIRS.
-on this perspective I wanted that the clothing that they would have been wearing (many or few…) would be their clothing. You do understand that a magazine loves that the models wear the clothing of their various advertisers, but I thought that the brand new prada shirt would have surely been nice but also very fake.
-i have always had “hair&makeup” on set, but I have always wanted the model to choose how the hair and make up had to be done: first of all I wanted the model to like herself.
-i always wanted the technique to be as simple as possible. This year I have never used any professional equipment: never used a studio flash, never a bank, no infinity curves… I wanted to shoot like any amateur photographer would have photographed his girlfriend.
-i always wanted the poses not to be poses. I didn’t want the model to act shit hot (excuse me) in front of the camera. I wanted a normal girl, with a normal attitude.
-i always showed the photographs to the model before sending them to the magazine, to have their approval: if they didn’t like one or more pictures I’d toss them without saying a word.
-i always used photoshop in a very light way, only to give tone and contrast to the images, never to twist the physique of the girls, never to stretch the legs for kilometers, never to give curves that didn’t exist.
-in short, as I was saying to my models, I wanted a copernican turnaround to happen (really!) of the usual roles: the true boss was the model, I was only the one doing click on the photographic camera. I wanted each editorial to differ from the other, because in each photoshoot different was the fundamental thing: the model. sure some editorials look similar, but, deep down, none is the same as another. As I always say to the models I want to cancel myself, I want to disappear. I am proud of the fact that, in the end, it looks like forty editorials done by forty different photographers: as once was said “looks like is an other photographer, but it is just an other model!”
This is it. Try now to go and look at images of young sexy girls that you see all over through the filters and boundaries that I’ve conceived for MAX CASTING: you will see images that, maybe they are more beautiful than mine, but that they’ll never be able to become a MAX CASTING.
allow me the presumption and my need to be didactic, but I invite you once again to have a solid concept before you get down to do a photoshoot: each single MAX CASTING editorial could look good or bad, but it definitely goes back precisely to the concept that I had in my head since the beginning.
Alas I want to thank all the sweet young ladies that they have kindly let me photograph them in the past year: julie, inna, martina, laura, sarah, xenia, daphne, mathilde, vicki, anna, ausra, mandy, francesca, elinska, amanda, simona, lauren, eva, ella, ani, paulita, daniela, yulia, anni, oksana, jill, valentina, bianca, victoria, giselle, caitlin, pille, julia, cassandra, valeria, catherine, beatrice, tanya, gertrud, ida, julia, brooke, ines, kamila, danielle, rithina, anelly, margot, giuly. THANK YOU!
As I said in the beginning I will at least go on with the same project for another year: if a model (with the characteristics I mentioned above…) would like to propose herself she can write to model@benedusi.it
