Photo Exploration: The Lost Fashion Shoot
I had worked with Boneyard Clothing in early 2012, and loved everything they did. When another opportunity came up in May 2012, I was thrilled for a studio shoot.
It was lots of fun with a variety of looks among three models, and I was excited to get BYC the work. I slipped the memory card in my bag and went home to process the photos. And at home, I opened the bag and looked for the card. And looked, and looked, and looked. And panicked. I had never physically lost a card before (and haven’t since), and wasn’t really sure what to do. I did the only thing I could do — call BYC, apologize, and accept that I had let them down.
Until this past week.
As I was digging around in a long-repurposed bag for something else, I felt what could be a memory card. Lo and behold, there was a little sleeve inside a zippered pocket. When examined, it was the lost card! I was greatly relieved to get the session back (although two years late) and was surprised at how much my style has changed, at least in what I was taking for the majority of the shots. Although my personal favorite picks from that session are still (roughly) in line with what I would shoot today, I liked seeing a little bit of progression here and there.
My sentimentality gauge is pretty unbalanced with this work, as I believed for years that it was completely gone. The rediscovery of these images has been a great boon, not least of which for the freedom that I see in the work. There are many elements in much of the rest of the series that I would be sure to clean up now in the studio rather than in post, and even in the above I see a few bits that I would try and adjust in the moment. But isn’t that a little bit of what makes nostalgia nostalgic? That we can’t go back and relive the past, but we can at least learn and laugh a little at the experience?
Thanks to Boneyard Clothing for setting up the shoot, and Justin of The Go Devils for being the model in the above photograph.