Gold above the water, steel below
Ondé's SS27 collection is one form. An overhand knot, tied in metal, made as a ring, a stud, a clasp and a link. We shot it about thirty times and let the temperature do the rest.
Above the water the collection is gold, on terracotta and in brown studio light, with carnelian and garnet in the stones. Below it the same knot is chrome and steel, with chalcedony and moonstone. Nothing crosses. The only thing that appears in both worlds is a pearl.
One hard light, placed low, and no fill anywhere in the collection. In the studio it falls off to black on one side of the face. On the terracotta wall it throws the arm's shadow up beside her, and the shadow is half the picture. Under the surface it stops being a lamp altogether and becomes caustics moving across a shoulder.
The frames are cut tight. A mouth. An ear and a jaw. A collarbone. A hand and nothing else. The whole face is rare enough that the few wide frames have a job to do, which is to let the grid breathe. Casting is five faces carried across every environment, eyes closed or turned away in almost every frame. Freckles, pores and the fine hair along a jaw are all still there. Skin is the thing most likely to give this kind of production away, so it is the thing we spend the most time on.
A knot, thirty ways
The still lifes share one setup: camera at table height, the ring standing, a horizon line behind it and a long shadow running right. Only the backdrop changes. Eleven product shots taken the same way stop being eleven packshots and start being a series. The macro frames do the opposite. No context, no air, one raking light running the full length of the form.
One form, two metals, one light, four crops. A buyer can look at the hero, the ear detail, the underwater still life and the macro and place them in the same season without being told. Every format came out of the same direction: hero 4:5, story 9:16, still life 1:1, paid 16:9, macro crop and motion.
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