Valya

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Valya is a great art model I enjoyed working with in New York.  She exudes the attitude, look, and emotion I wanted to capture of and in that great city. 

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Over the years I discovered it is extremely valuable to research the model and her work, interests, and projects.  Valya and I communicated a lot before the session.  Even with all the prior communication, we continued planning and evolving the concepts of the session during our time together.  She shared creative suggestions and ideas including a great soundtrack (Bjork) to enhance the mood of the theme and intent of our work.

I also read through Valya's blog to help prepare and highly recommend visiting it.  Much of her work has a raw force to it.  She lets her images speak for themselves and offers minimal, but important written commentary, opinions and thoughts.  I appreciate her conservation of words and only adding as much as is needed.  I learned a great deal about her through her posts which helped when we planned the session.

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I decided to try something new for this session.  Along with 400+ still images, I shot twelve minutes of video.  Over the next few months I want to experiment with editing both together to make something great.  Mixed media is fun.

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In that great city, so many millions of souls pass each other on the streets to become a combined life force and energy that makes the city hum.  When the souls get to their home, hotel, apartment, or private place, they can only disconnect so much from the city they are part of.  While being a quiet part of the larger life, they are still a unique individual with his or her thoughts, moods, desires, and rituals.  This feeling of "quiet sensual solitary arousal" must be lived by millions every night in New York, New York.  The theme I wanted to capture was that special moment of "alone" in the big city.











As with models Moon and Candace, we experimented with using the LCD projector.  There must be something exciting about it for models because all three have enthusiastically participated in using it to create amazing images.  I will post some of the projected images in future posts since they are very different than the ones I put up today.

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Here are a few early shots of our work.  This was a big departure from my prior work since I wanted a quieter and more personal aesthetic.  They are not in their final form, but I couldn't stand sitting on our fine work any longer.  Thank you Valya.  If anyone needs a great model in NYC, or the rest of the east coast, you must consider her.

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