This week I continued my Monday night studio project with Vincent as model and Stephanie as guest  photographer. A few months ago Vincent suggested a shoot based on Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde. I jumped at the chance to do this shoot as the concept fitted will to a few ideas I have had floating around in the back of my head for a while now. It also bought back memories of when I read the book during a backpacking trip from Sydney to Perth way back in the mid 90’s. The concept behind this shoot was then to portray a journey of self destruction through light and lens choice, I also wanted to keep the lighting at around constant f8 (we actually shoot between f7.1 and 9) so that there was a continuation look and feel through out the night.

Aestheticism and duplicity

Dorian Gray – “The Picture of Dorian Gray”, a story of a young man in the late 1800s who unwittingly makes a deal with the devil in order to stay young forever.  He is a  handsome and narcissistic young man who becomes enthralled with Lord Henry’s idea of a new hedonism and begins to indulge in every kind of pleasure, moral and immoral, which eventually leads to his own societal demise. As his soul becomes to corrupt and his relationships with his friends and fiancée start falling apart, his portrait begins to reveal his true nature. So my concept was to use photos of Oscar Wilde and other images of the dapper man about town as a basis, for the shoot. And try to tie in a few themes from the book like a picture frame as reference to Dorian s portrait.

“The only way to get rid of temptation is to yield to it.” – Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

 

As the shoot moved on we also wanted to show an increasing self-doubt and auto-aggressive behaviour that steams from a gradually eroding self-esteem. To help set the atmosphere the play-list was Early Nick Cave, Bjork and Portishead.

 “Experience is merely the name men gave to their mistakes.”- Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

Lighting and lens choice.

I wanted the lighting to have the feeling of a classical painting, it needed to show the emotional range depicted in the demise of the anti-hero Dorian. So I chose set up a 400ws Bowens monoblock with large beauty-dish with honeycomb grids and barn-doors on a large boom arm set high camera left. As a fill light I used as 200ws Bowens flash head and a shoot through umbrella that I moved around the studio as needed. The 3rd light was an other 400ws Bowens flash as hair-light  set in the back left corner of the studio. As seems to be the standard during my Monday night shoots, some where near the end we took a break from the studio flashes and used a ring light combined with a hair-light just to mix things up.

I started the shoot of with an 85mm 1.4 lens for the classic portrait look, as the night went on I slowly moved to wider 24-70mm 2.8 zoom. Finally I used a 17-35mm 2.8-4 shooting up close and at 17mm to get a distorted perception of the world. . The ring light images were shot with a 50mm 1.4  set to f2, they are the only images that aren’t shot between f7.1 and f9 during the night.

 “Nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of nothing.” – Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

If you don’t know the story of Dorian Gray you can down load several version free of the audio book from Librivox (in English or German) . Or there is also the printed text, e-book and DVD available on Amazon.

I wonder what Oscar Wilde would think of an homage based on a portrait of himself and his work.

Translate this page using google translate