[Exhibition] Las Semillas de El Pimiento Verdi ...

Buono Estente,

Recently, I've been privileged to photograph in the rehearsals of a new show by an important director here in Spain, Albert Boadella. The show is called El Pimiento Verdi (a Spanish play on words with a restaurant called El Pimiento Verde [The Green Pepper] and Verdi's bicentennial) and is a 'operatic duel' between Don Guiseppe and Herr Wagner, also in his bicentenary year. The idea was to photograph the performers and the rehearsals, and what happens therein, rather than to photograph the finished show in an unfinished and ultimately less visually exciting form ... therefore the photographs are generally more portraits/candids and photographs of moments, scenes being performed for the first time, or reactions to said scenes ...

44 (we originally intended to choose 30 ... failed, got to 37 and then added some more back in for editorial reasons) of my photographs from the rehearsals are now exhibited alongside the show, and in order to not violate POTN rules, here are a mere eight of those ...

Early consultation on what Verdi looked like in order to add the relevant parts to Jose Manuel Zapata's beard ...

IMAGE LINK: http://www.flickr.com/​photos/owainshaw/86754​93109/

IMAGE LINK: http://www.flickr.com/​photos/owainshaw/86765​91950/

IMAGE LINK: http://www.flickr.com/​photos/owainshaw/86754​91481/

IMAGE LINK: http://www.flickr.com/​photos/owainshaw/86765​93008/

IMAGE LINK: http://www.flickr.com/​photos/owainshaw/86754​79581/

IMAGE LINK: http://www.flickr.com/​photos/owainshaw/86765​94198/

IMAGE LINK: http://www.flickr.com/​photos/owainshaw/86754​90769/

IMAGE LINK: http://www.flickr.com/​photos/owainshaw/86765​97354/

This is a great set and I love the photojournalistic style. #7 is really great, so much character. My favourite though is #5, I can feel the movement of the cloth every time I look at it! Not sure about #8, looks like you recovered it quite a bit so it has more grain than the others. I don't like the look of it and also the head and hands in the foreground really bother me.

white_aardvark wrote in post #15864902
This is a great set and I love the photojournalistic style. #7 is really great, so much character. My favourite though is #5, I can feel the movement of the cloth every time I look at it! Not sure about #8, looks like you recovered it quite a bit so it has more grain than the others. I don't like the look of it and also the head and hands in the foreground really bother me.

Not sure if #8 has been recovered more than others, it's possible there was due to shooting into the lights, and the fact that Albert has very light hair which is difficult when he's back-lit ...

#5 is a favourite of mine, just for the waves and the curves of the cloth ... quite pleased with how it fills the frame as well. (Smug Alert: this was Single Shot. )

Luis' beard and quite intense, serious eyes make him a really great subject for portraits ... although sometimes his seriousness makes him seem harsh, I hope that in this one you can see the niceness in his character as well.

I think I've always approached theatre with a semi-photojournalistic style - trying to tell the story of the show in my images where possible (and the director kind of agreed in his blurb about me for the exhibition, saying I had 'the instinct of the scene - to find the key instant of the rehearsal') - but in this project it is more outright photojournalism and candid portraiture (he also said I was 'invisible', able to 'convince people I don't exist' - which frankly makes me feel like a bad-ass ninja) ... I really enjoyed working in this way, and am generally really happy with the results.

That singing into the piano one is really interesting!