Cerveza Aguila in the Studio: Portraits of a Country on One Backdrop

A studio campaign for Cerveza Aguila built entirely on pale seamless - an elderly couple with their standard lamp carried in from home, a dancer in a fruit headdress, and the beach girls the brand is known for, all lit exactly the same way.

Aguila is a coastal beer with a very fixed image in Colombia, and most of its advertising has been made on a beach for thirty years. I had already shot that version of it on the coast in Cartagena. This job was the opposite: everybody in a studio, on the same pale paper, lit identically.

Strip away the sand and the horizon and you find out very quickly whether your campaign is about a place or about people.

One light for everyone

The discipline here is that nothing changes between subjects. Same key, same height, same distance, same pale blue-green seamless. The five women with bottles raised get exactly the lighting the elderly couple get.

That is not laziness, it is the argument. When the treatment is identical, the only thing that varies frame to frame is the person, and a viewer reads the set as a group rather than a series of separate ideas. It is the same logic I would use years later on the College Board library, for very different reasons.

Bring the furniture

The detail that makes this campaign work is the standard lamp. It appears twice - once beside an elderly couple in their own armchairs, once beside a man in red trousers and green shoes who has claimed the chair entirely.

Putting real domestic furniture on a studio backdrop is a small trick with a big return. The seamless keeps everything clean and consistent, and the armchair and the fringed lampshade smuggle in a whole living room that we never had to build or light. The subjects also behave differently the moment they are in a chair they recognise.

“Strip away the beach and you find out fast whether your campaign is about a place or about people.”

The range is the message

Look at who is in this set. Five young women in denim shorts. A couple well into their seventies. A woman standing alone in a printed housedress. A dancer in a red ruffled skirt with fruit balanced on her head, straight out of the coastal carnival tradition I photograph every year in Barranquilla.

A national beer brand that only shows twenty-two-year-olds on a beach is describing a party. A brand that puts a grandmother on the same backdrop with the same light is describing a country. The second is a much harder sell in a meeting and a much better campaign.