Reira / Lucent Models

Reira is one of Lucent Models' distinctive talents, and this was a chance to build an editorial around her specifically. The first time we met she told me she liked to move, so we built the shoot around movement. Dance poses in a parking garage. Arms up between painted walls. The kind of frames that don't happen in a studio because there's nothing to dance against.

We stayed inside a six-block radius of Nakazakicho. That's one of the privileges of working this neighborhood — the variety of surfaces per square block is absurd. A corrugated metal doorway, a brick alley, a hand-painted wall, a parking structure with fluorescent bounce. We moved through all of it in about three hours.

The series is presented in both color and black and white. The color pulls out the styling — pleated skirt, platform boots, the specific palette of this corner of Osaka. The black and white strips that away and leaves the figure. Neither is the "real" version. They're both doing different work.

Shot on medium format digital. Natural light throughout. The same approach I take everywhere: be close, stay out of the way, let the subject tell you what the frame is.