Though many photographers have taken an occasional shot at Cinderella, Snow White or Little Red Riding Hood, no photographer ever has visualised a really broad choice of Grimm’s “Fairy Tales". Ironical series by Brazilian artist Bruno Vilelas, Vancouver-based photographer Dina Goldstein or the Austrian photographer Gunter Meindl consist of ten, maybe twelve different motifs each. The same is true for the Disney advertisments photographed by Annie Leibowitz, the Campari campaign with Eva Mendes or the commercials for Melissa Shoes. With over 50 Fairy Tales, our Grimm Project not only is the broadest project in its kind ever, it also shows a unique style extra developed to highlight the acting performance of our models.
For “Dracula”, we are the first and only project ever bringing a group of young actors together for the sole purpose of photo art work. Since Werner Murnau’s silent movie “Nosferatu” (1922), there have been countless vampire movies and theatre productions, but not a single coherent Dracula photo project.
The same goes for Edgar A. Poe, the “Decameron”, “Alice in Wonderland” and all our other projects: Although photos may have been produced as a documentation of movie and theatre productions and various photographers may have translated single scenes into photos, no photographer ever has dedicated himself to the photographic interpretation of the complete narratives as a stand-alone artistic project. Our studio has visualised not just one, but more than twelve books, adding up to an unique and coherent collection of the world’s best-known and most-loved stories.
99% of all artistic nude photographs are based on a single concept: A man - represented by the male artist behind the camera - watches a woman looking back or pretending to be unaware of being observed. All these images centre on one theme: The ambiguity of temptation and rejection. Woman is shown as desirable, yet unreachable. Since the very start of photography in the 1830's, not much has changed in this scheme. From 1993-1998, Hans Corneel de Roos explored this ambivalence himself in his Rodin Nude Photo Project, based on sculptures and drawings by the French sculptor Auguste Rodin. Ten years later, affordable digital SLR cameras being within everyone's reach, nude photography had become a mass hobby. Not satisfied with the idea of adding just another pretty nude series to the gigantic heap of erotic photos, Hans drew back on his experience in theatre and nude performance to develop a new approach, which he named "Nude Photo Theatre". Starting with the "Fairy Tale" Project, models are not reduced to their good looks and seductive qualities anymore, but actively engage in depicting highly dramatic scenes. Over 400 comments on our online previews confirm this is valued as original and innovative.
Since virtually all nude photography reduces women to their ability to stimulate man's sexual appetite, humour is the great taboo in a genre pretending to overcome prejudice. Except for the self-ironical nude scenes by German photographer Martin Pudenz and Meindl's Fairy Tale interpretations mentioned above, nude photography appears to be a rather dry and serious business. By restoring the model as an acting subject rather than a passive object, we have created room for witty, absurd and sometimes hilarious scenes. Except for the Edgar A. Poe Project, which remains true to Poe's dense atmosphere of gothic horror, all our book projects speak to the reader's sense of humour.