A great friend of mine is an artist.  Her paintings are brilliant and completely reflect who she is on the inside (her incredible imagination and ability to be comfortable in her quirkiness) and I'm amazed by that.  Imagine my amazement when she asked me to help her with her upcoming gallery show by taking conceptual portraits of her.  Me?  Little old me?  ;-)  Sign me up, sister.  I love a good artistic collaboration and an opportunity to think outside of the proverbial box.  (Damn that box!)

So...at first glance these images are gonna look like I'm trying to shoot them with a fashion angle.  Well, yes.  You would be partly correct.  The point is to make them very much look like they belong in a magazine.  However, if you look closer, you will find something that is a little off in each one.  These photographs aren't about trying to make the artist pretty or necessarily glamorous, but are instead striving to show you bits and pieces of a girl who is not perfect and even flawed and perhaps a smidgen disillusioned and maybe even vulnerable.  The concept is that the artist has a back-story is that she isn't really a celebrity, but lives her life as one with her entourage, hair and makeup team, and phoned-in paparazzi.  It's all for show.  So, these images are capturing a show within a show.  Confused yet?

I absolutely LOVE what we ended up with, and hope you enjoy them, too.  Let me know which one most encapsulates what I was trying to describe in the previous paragraph by commenting in the comment box at the bottom of the post.  Muah!