Modern Rococo

This week, as I race to crush deadlines, I wanted to share a January 2019 shoot created and produced by Mary-Kate Bullaro. MK is a brilliant creator and collaborator, and we’ve made tons of art together in our time. For those following these pages, MK appeared in the last Distant Era series as “The Vila.” The theme for this 2019 shoot was called “Modern Rococo,” and we shot it in a bedroom.

This was from a time before Distant Era. Mary-Kate had organized friends around a theme for a fun, informal, ongoing project she dubbed “Fantasy Is Reality.” I spoke with Mary-Kate and other collaborators who put together such projects back in 2021. Last year, I also shared our first Fantasy Is Reality project together, Autumn Elves, which we made in November 2018.

It seems incredible how many photo projects we did back then, so close together. Some of them, like Modern Rococo, were spur of the moment inspirations, which we did in the most limited of circumstances. And yet, within the four walls of a small bedroom in Rogers Park, we made a world.

I wasn’t sure what “Modern Rococo” was then. I’m still not sure how to define it. But as the subjects donned their wigs, coats, and sunglasses, I began to get the picture.

The Ladies of Modern Rococo 2019: Sara, Rachel, MK, Gaby, Sarah Jean

Photography

Speaking of things I don’t know, I’m not one hundred percent certain how we shot this, but I’ve found some clues.

Thanks to some help from from Gaby’s mirrored sunglasses, we can see Elizabeth standing on the bed holding the light, and I’m next to her with the camera. (We can even see Rachel snapping some pictures with her phone.)

Judging from the magenta on the wall behind the subjects and some of the subtle cyan hues in the shadows of Gaby’s hair and sunglasses in the crops above, we can tell I’ve got two gels set up—one cyan and one magenta. It may have been my first experiment with them. Back then, I didn’t understand how they worked to fill shadow, nor how my key light (which looks as though it has a MagMod MagBounce attached) would knock out the lighter cyan hues. I’d return to gels at the end of 2019 in Distant Era’s Blade-Runner-inspired cyberpunk series, Chicago, November 2019. In 2023, we’d control them even more deliberately on images for Drew Beyer’s film, Even’s Elegy.

Editing

When it came time to edit, I did my best to take the photographs out of the bedroom and transplant them into a sort of dreamy, misty, bubblegum world. The subjects and their expressions did the heavy lifting here, with their bright colors and their sass. I experimented with color curves on this project, crafting a look specifically for it.

Fast Fun

Modern Rococo surprised us for how much fun it was and for how fast we made it. I sometimes miss the time we created projects week after week, exploring what’s possible. But I knew less then, so there was less to do.

Whenever I come across these images, I linger on them for a while and remember that sense of fun and playfulness that we had when we made this work. Fantasy Is Reality was an important part of learning how to shoot. It gave me a playground to experiment in and try different things without the pressure of perfection or client expectation. It was vitally important for that reason. Turning a bedroom shoot into a Modern Rococo world was something I’d never done or thought to do, and I was happily challenged by this kind of project. Thanks enormously to MK for inviting me to make this playful art one winter’s day in 2019 and to Gaby, Rachel, Sara, and Sarah Jean for being wonderful subjects, and of course to Elizabeth for holding the light!