I brought my 88 year old father into the Vietnamese Nail Salon to get his toenails trimmed. He can’t do them anymore and they get REALLY long before he says anything about them.
While I was waiting I noticed this woman getting her nails done. I was particularly drawn to her wide set eyes and asked her if I could take her photograph. I took some photos of her fingers and nails sitting on the towel waiting to be filed.
Later when I was doing the collage of her face photos I connected the finger photos and kept seeing them as little wings. I envisioned her wanting to fly from the Vietnamese Nail Salon to New York or Dallas, to BE somewhere, to fly to the top, to be seen gliding and flying and rolling across the sky.
I later came across her at the local Target where she is a co-worker of my daughter. She didn’t remember me taking the photos at all.
Day after day I saw a new addition being built about two miles away from our house. The houses looked interesting, as much as a suburban tract house can. Finally a sign appeared showing an open house so I went to check it out.
The woman showing the house was tall and willowy with a decided stylish side to her. She showed me around and we got in a conversation about how she ended up selling real estate and her background as a model. We went out onto the little front porch and as we did so the light illuminated her face in a wonderful way. That clinched the deal for me and I asked her if she would be willing to let me take some photos of her. She agreed and that was that.
In the end, after many renditions and much more complicated collage efforts I kept coming back to the beautiful detail of her skin in that light. The color was fantastic but so was the texture all by itself so I landed on the monochrome/color diptych as a way of showing off both those elements.
