Collaboration

This week we were asked to collaborate with another fellow Master’s course participant and after finding that most people had already formed groups by the time we were able to post an idea out there, Matt and I decided to work on a project together. Although we are partners in life (8 years and counting) and in our photography business (4 years and counting), and now fellow students, we have very much formed our own practices over the past few years and we don’t actually collaborate with each other that often - so it was an interesting challenge.

From the beginning we knew we wanted our collaboration project to end up in a single image that we’d create together, rather than a set. We’d played around my suggestion of self portraits and decided we’d actually photograph each other in a mirrored way and we ended up with the idea of creating a playing card. It just happened that this week the Marlowe Theatre Costumes Hire shop local to us had a massive closing sale on, and we’d stocked up on some studio costumes and outfits - a couple of which came in handy when finishing our vintage look.

The actual shoot took less than 20 minutes, we used the same lighting set up and camera settings and photographer each other, trying a few different poses that would work well with a playing card mirrored image final edit in mind. We chose the salute which worked great considering traditional playing card ‘poses’ but also compositionally creating the pleasing S curves - the pose itself being a playful take on us honouring / being in the service of the art of photography.

To finish the project, we combined an actual scan of a playing card - which we already had in our photo stock - with a composite of the two images, masterfully done by Matt and colour-toned by me in a vintage painterly style that I like to use in my portraiture work.

We played the Matt-and-Andreea card