Stories: The photographer and the model

I like to take photos of people doing perfectly mundane things and represent them in a different way.

In this case, this photo was taken in my studio photography class. The teacher was demonstrating some techniques, nothing especially noticeable, but I took a photo anyway. I was struck by how much he was looming over the model and, since he’s a big guy, how imposing he seemed compared to the much slighter model.

I did intentionally put the model in the extreme upper corner of the image and framed the shot so the teacher was taking up almost the entire frame, almost pushing the model out of the frame.

In the end, something that was a rather mundane moment in class was recast as something ominous, a power play. The high-contrast black and white added to this feeling.