Photo Print: Body Language by Paulo Abrantes

This is a shot taken outside of the buiding where the spiral stair pictures where made. This Building´s walls are all made of transparent plexiglass from ground to the top with all those lines framing the plexiglass wall panels and they also reflect all the surrounding buildings, so we actually can see a distorted urban landscape in all the building´s walls changing during the day because of the sun´s light angle. In this particular facade it also has a very long seat/bench, for people to relax with a view to a big empty square just in front. When I saw that I thought it would be nice to try a frame including some different people with different mood in the same picture and also try to catch those distorted reflections in the backgroung and this way making a kind of a surreal image. I´ve made several tries to process the picture like that but in the end I didn´t like the end result in none of those tries (very distracting and confusing) and I decided to go the opposite way, persuing a clean, light image where the main issue where the people there with their different postures and attitudes and using all the other elements just to frame and contextualize them in a kind of abstract/geometric way, trying to achieve a more direct and immediate aproach of the theme. I also chose to process it in color because I think in this particular picture colors are an important element not only for the visual aesthetics but also to help the implicit concept to work. I also tried that the compo, in a tryptich format, were abstract enought to be able to give several readings according to the personal sensivity of the observer. Among others, my favorite reading is the one that allows to wacht the bench as a time line and the middle frame as a gap generation, and with this idea in mind to see that are the older people in the picture that have a more relaxed posture and the midle age man the one with a compromised/thoughtful attitude about that time line.

Picture content Emotions

Art category Photography