Origins of a Style

Style has been a topic here in some recent posts, I thought I’d join the conversation with something that came up today.

Yesterday I posted a photograph of an X-wing model on a snowy landscape. I’m very happy with it, I worked on it pretty hard. It’s also a “my style of photograph”.

Or is it?

If it was Lego on snow with that fog, or if there was Lego with blizzard, then I’d say it was my style, for sure. But a spaceship against a real backdrop? It’s been done so many times by other photographers that calling it my style would be preposterous. Well, to be exact, claiming it mine as a style would.

Where does this inclination to shoot spaceships come from, what makes me seriously think whether it’s “my style” or not?

It’s something I’ve been having fun with a long time. I haven’t really looked back much over the years, but, incidentally, I found these two photographs today, probably from the winter of 1981, that is when I built that thing. My earliest surviving scale model toy photographs (that I know of):

I think these shots say it all, I am a prisoner of this thing, it’s a life sentence.

He says with laughter…  :D

I should be miserable for having had one of the most significant artistic and stylistic epiphanies of my life at a very young age, based on some mundane pop culture things, no less. But I’m not. I am happy that there was a vision so vivid that it has survived all these years and I can work on it again with proper tools of the modern age, perhaps adding something with the benefit of education and years of working as a designer and an illustrator, closing the circle on a vision that apparently has been with me for 35 years.

This is not a question of style for me, it’s a question about creative soul.

Avanaut

Full time illustrator, part time photographer. As such, I created blizzards with Star Wars Lego and had an influence on how The Lego Movie looks like.