Family photo after Picasso
Here another photo with a story. I was asked to take a family photo. The family came up with the idea to take this drawing by Picasso as a starting point. The drawing is called Famille d'acrobates avec singe and was made in 1905, when Picasso was still quite poor as an artist and lived in Paris.
I liked the idea because it suited this family, both have a strong affinity with theatre and performance art.
We wanted to recreate this pose ( Josef, Mary and baby Jesus) and I also wanted the pink colouring to come back. Now we still needed a big monkey but that was quite impossible. We decided to use a big dog, the biggest dog I could find, at least that was easier to achieve.
Also the clothes and the hat had to be arranged. We took the time to do that. Some things can be solved simply or cheaply, but you don't want to end up with a cheap picture.
Then came the day of the shoot. It is always challenging because with a child you are never 100% in control. The child had to look into the camera and preferably struggle impatiently, the dog also had to look at the child and of course not bite.
It all went pretty well. The dog turned out to be a bit difficult because he looked everywhere but not at the child, he also left the set on a regular basis. As you can see, in the end we succeeded, clear control over the parents and less control over the child and the animal.
The photo was taken in a studio with normal white flash light. The pink glow was created by using a pink fill in flash, which gives you an image with natural colours and yet a colour cast. This colour cast is stronger than in the original drawing. I found it necessary to give more character to the image, photography is easily without character compared to drawings.
The nice thing is that when you imitate something from art you quite often get an image with its own feeling. Drawings and paintings have very different qualities and properties than photography, in fact the only thing they have in common is that it is two dimensional and even that is not entirely true, paintings often have a depth dimension of the paint used.
Nice to show you this photo. And nice that it is also a photo in which the chosen work of art fits the family, that is very important to me.