OK a little shameless self-promotion - After 9 years my book Angelus is finally finished and available on Blurb.com

You can find it here:

[link]


Following is a little ramble about the book:

The idea for this Angelus started while I was shooting at a friend’s studio in Maracaibo Venezuela in the mid 90’s. I was infatuated with the idea that there can be so much beauty in environments that are so poor, dark, desperate, and seemingly without much hope of change. At the time I was working on a series of dual portraits that attempted to show both beauty and negativity in the same person, but didn’t feel I was achieving anything even near to what I had envisioned. I wanted to do something with more of a story line and less subtle than a portrait series. So I thought why not take this a bit farther, why not use an icon that is widely accepted as beautiful and pure like the Angel and immerse it into conditions that are contradictory to our paradigms. I liked this idea since at that time every single angel related image I had scene was either cute or had a very pure and positive overtone.

On the surface Angelus was to be about feminine beauty and the contrast of this beauty when placed in a much darker context, but on a more intrinsic level I wanted to this to be about the human condition. The last thing I wanted to create was a book of beautiful women with wings Like most of my work I wanted to establish a set of image guidelines to work around. In this case I wanted all the environments to be minimal and surrealistic, and all of the characters had to be powerful with an underlying sense of beauty and darkness. And of course I wanted each image to be beautiful and strong on its own outside of the series. Thinking that this should no be too difficult, I set forth to create the body of work that I thought should take about a year. Well here I am almost nine years later and after a number of variations on the theme and many edits, reshoots, and re-edits I think I am finally happy with the final image set. Through much editing pain I have reduced the final compliment of images from well over 250 down to 80 and can say I am done. For anyone who decides to get a copy I hope you enjoy it, and as always all comments welcome.