The project “Woman, Movie Star, Icon” is progressing in fits and starts given that we live in trouble laden times and everyone is in a constant state of flux these days.

I have built a special site to showcase the best shots from the series as I produce them. The project, which started out as a modest exercise in making some new portfolio work for me, has now grown into a full fledged concept, involving some twenty or so women. Some are good friends of mine, others are people I asked in bars and cafés and even right there on the street to take part in my idea. The great thing so far has been that the majority of people I approached have been very positive and cooperative in working with me.

The idea at base is to shoot the ladies as much as possible without too much fuss or preproduction. What I intend and want most of all from these photographs is the feeling of something more produced and professionally conducted without the involvement of hair, make up and stylists. In every case the make up and hair is done by the women themselves, and my job is to make sure I get the most beautiful photographs of them as they are. After all the object, or at least one key object of this project is to capture the genuine and, as much as it is possible, unadulterated image of the women involved and not resort to studio style over production. So all the women wear their own clothes and accessories, make up, hair style and in most cases work with me in their own homes and environments.

One of the key points I am trying to make with this work is to show that beauty is not necessarily what the media would have us believe all these years; that beautiful women are perfect in that preordained way that shows such as ‘America’s Top Models’ and so on would have us swallow.

Another of the main purposes of this for me is to try and define that undefinable term “Beauty’, by exploring three methods. From the no frills head shot to the almost fantasy feel of the Icon segment the idea is to use three types of images from each woman to illustrate the multifaceted quality of beauty. I have always seen that there is a clear distinction between beauty and attraction. The two could be one, but not necessarily, and not inseparably. I mean that there are indeed people who are both beautiful and attractive, but it is not written in stone that one must mean the other. This is whole discussion that needs much more space and time to work through than I allow myself on this blog. Maybe I’ll get into it at some point.

See this project by clicking HERE.