Portraits - Willow “Heart”

Collaboration is key to my process, I love being inspired by people and their stories. One of my gifts is to see people on a deeper level and help them express their ideas.

As soon as I met Willow I knew I wanted to shoot something with her. This collaboration with Willow was a three-way collaboration between Willow, Luca Calo (Makeup Artist) and me. The range of images we shot with Willow is so vast and varied.

With every collaboration, I ask the talent to bring their ideas and any visions they have for a photo session, so the origin of the shoot came from Willow's idea of blood and a heart, pardon the pun, but everything sort of flowed from there. ⁠

After some initial brainstorming, each of us had about an hour to shoot whatever ideas we had, so each person brought something to the session. Our budget was less than 100€.

My goal was to take Willow’s inspiration as I would the inspiration of any creative director and use perspective, color, and light to flesh out the idea. She is a woman of dualities. She is extremely nice soft-spoken, and caring but with a fascination for transgression, gore, and knives, so I let that feed the spirit of the session, a balance between dark and light.

I hope you enjoy the images! If you do enjoy them, sign up for my newsletter to keep in touch about new work and more insight into my sessions!

- Aaron

Part 1 - Shadows & Beauty

The portrait photographer in me just wanted some beautiful interesting photos of her, but also some that were hidden by the shadows of a Globo, Scarred with motion, and splintered with a prism filter. And a little splash of red light.

Part 2 - Golden Chains

This was inspired by Luca the MUA he brought some golden chains that he loved and attached the to her. It gives the sense of a crown or a veil and gives this part of the session a soft, beautiful, and sensual mood.

Part 3 - Bathed in Sunshine

Knowing what was coming we went the opposite direction and bathed her in flowers, spring colors and a youthful innocence.

Part 4 - Hip-Hop & Patent Red Lips

This was all about the lips and the mood

Part 5 - Split Personality

This was a chance to play with some double exposure and motion blur, I love the surprise and randomness of these types of shoots and despite the unpredictability, somehow the mood always shines through. This was edited in two versions in the spirit of the rest of the shoot, one was BW and the other a fiery red-orange.

Part 6 - Bloodbath - Trigger Warning*

These Images are graphic with blood. NSFW

We bought some stage blood and a cow heart from a local butcher and let Willow explore her excitement for this idea. This is normally not a place that I explore in my work but, in this session, I love the juxtaposition of the knife, heart, and blood with her excitement and zeal. You could tell that she was having a great time and the images have such an eerie but playful vibe. I think this set of images suggests a lot about everyday violence and how viscerally we can react to these images in very different ways.

Reflections

We spent half a day in the studio and it was fun to explore an inner world that wasn’t my own.

Thinking about lessons learned and what I would do to improve on the idea, I would put the plastic cover under the paper background and perhaps use a sheet or something organic, with the blood to give it another layer of texture and balance. The plastic sheet worked, but it gave it more of a serial killer / Dexter vibe that I would change next time. We also learned that it would be better to heat the blood first, it was uncomfortably cold for the model at first.

Overall, we felt really good about what we achieved and I look forward to working with something like this again soon!