SPORTWEEK DREAMS #02: TATSIANA BARBASHOVA

Shooting swimsuits on a tropical beach can easily have (seen and done) a boring result: the ingredients are always the same, beautiful girl, beach, sea and little more.

It is only right, even to comparison with other shoots, to think twice before doing, how and why. With Elisabetta’s shoot there wasn’t a real concept, the concept was Elisabetta itself, her presence, shot in the most classic of sport illustrated formats, a sort of “best of” of this aesthetic. But I did run out of all my bullets on that shoot, I did all the great classics! There was nothing left!

I thought about it through and through on how to resolve (resolve, not only create) the second shoot, the one that saw starring the belarusian Tatsiana Barbashova. To arrive at a solution I started with a conception that I would like to share with you, step by step.

You know how to show silence in a movie?

Don’t skip ahead and just read take a break, take your eyes away from the screen ( so they may rest a little) and think about it.

Are you thinking about it?

Don’t run off to read the answer, think about it!

…

Ok, to show silence in a movie you use… noise! Of course! If you shoot a scene without sound you are not telling about the silence, but it is simply a scene without sound. Here is an example, from Sergio Leone’s masterpiece “Once upon a time in America”:

In short, this teaches us that to tell something, sometimes it can be useful to use the opposite, the absence to talk about the presence: like noise can tell about silence, in equal measure the shadow can be used to talk about light.

And that is what I did! We covered our model with make-up to make her look super tanned (then emphasised it in photoshop) and I placed her always indoors, but always letting a little bit of light through from outside, as if she wanted to find relief in the shade from the sun and the heat from outside.

Here are the images:

I also add a shot that did not find its place on the magazine

At the end of the shoot, like I did last year, the magazine did a little questionnaire to the models, for which I took this photograph:

This is my authorial video:

A few backstage pictures taken by Daria Longinotti:

last but not least the backstage video by Pasquale Ettorre:

olè!

PS: I want to anticipate all my dear friends that enjoy commenting on what I write. Did I really have to begin with Sergio Leone to come up with this crap?!? Yes, exactly: I had to begin with Sergio Leone to come up with this crap! (there so we got this out of the way!)

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