Rodolfo Asin – Victoria Bernabei (201X)

There’s probably in excess of a seven (7) stop dynamic range between absence of shadow detail and loss of highlight detail.

In order to accomplish that you really have to know the latitude of your emulsion/sensor and make sure your exposure is dead fucking on.

But what impresses me about this is the fact that you have both a strong blue (the water in the pool), a saturated green (the grass, palm fronds and plants above Bernabei’s head) and a distinct red (the lower panel on the door).

It requires a masterful effort to balance those elements in any image but all that is merely an overture meant to frame both the exquisitely rendered skin tone and morning/evening sun on the palm tree.

All that on top of a thoughtful, balanced composition.

It’s rare for me to encounter work that causes me to pause and independently consider color as anything more than a part contributing to the total sum of the image. Generally, when I think of what I would label masterful use of color it’s work from Eggleston or The Double Life of Veronique–arguably the best example of color cinematography in the western film historical canon. And not to diminish the brilliance of both, what I like about them is they make me think about the role color plays in the reading of an image. Yet, what the demonstrate isn’t easily applicable to my own photographic voice.

I can’t really process it all at the moment, but I feel the stunning color separation in this and the way it is employed in a layered fashion to re-frame the scene from a fine art meditation on the quietness of a moment to a sort of implication of the erotic potential in the physicality of the inter-relationship between being in a body, being caressed by light and therefore seen.

There’s definitely some problems with Asin’s larger body of work and objectification of women’s bodies but the skill of the photographer does manage to sublimate the objectification from time to time–to fucking spectacular effect.