CJ has many interests, including rock climbing, playing the electric guitar, photography, learning Mandarin, and mechanical engineering, to name a few. But for his senior session, he decided to style it after the films of Wang Kar Wai as his muse. My research online for images found glamorous people in starkly inelegant corners of Hong Kong in the nineties, vivid color casts to convey mood, and a lot of smoking while brooding.
Cincinnati hasn’t had a Chinatown in decades, so we chose Findlay Market for the corner Asian grocery, wonton vendor, and bustling market vibe. To substitute for the cigarettes in hand, CJ came up with a retro film compact camera and a tiny flip phone. He also brought his real camera. Like his sister, he is artistically adventurous, so his session was more of a creative collaboration. On my own, I steer away from visual clutter and aim for clean color and classic portrait lighting. But in this session, we embraced the graffiti and the crowds as part of the urban texture.
I have no illusions of accurately capturing the style of Wang Kar Wai or his frequent cinematography partner, Christopher Doyle. But it was a good creative stretch to try a new approach. Thank you for the inspiration and opportunity, CJ!
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