Loud Backdrops: A Youth Portrait Series Shot on Colour Seamless

Seventeen studio portraits built on saturated seamless paper in Bogota. Yellow, cyan, magenta, a skateboard, a stick of candy floss and a soap bubble machine, and what happens when you give someone one prop and three minutes.

Every photographer should keep one project that exists purely to test things. This is mine from 2016: a stack of coloured seamless paper, a small studio in Bogota, and a rotating cast of people I mostly found through friends.

No client, no deck, no product. Just a question I wanted answered, which was how far you can push a background before it stops supporting a face and starts competing with it.

Pick the colour for the person

The rule I ended up with is that the backdrop is a casting decision, not a design one. Yellow behind a white vest and a red headwrap because it makes the skin luminous. Deep magenta behind white dungarees because the garment stays clean and the colour does all the shouting. Cyan behind double denim because it collapses the whole frame into one hue and turns a portrait into something closer to a graphic.

Get that pairing wrong and no amount of lighting saves it. Get it right and you barely need to light at all.

One prop, three minutes

The other thing I was testing was props. Each person got exactly one object: a skateboard, a lollipop, a bubble machine running just off camera, a stick of candy floss, a cartoon mask.

It works for the same reason it works on commercial sets. A person handed nothing will perform being photographed. A person handed a skateboard will sit on it, lean on it, hold it upright like a shield, and somewhere in the middle of doing that will forget the camera for half a second. That half second is the entire job.

“A person handed nothing performs being photographed. A person handed a skateboard forgets the camera for half a second.”

What it fed into

Ten years on, this series is still the direct ancestor of a lot of my commissioned studio work. The four-colour system and the prop-as-icebreaker approach behind the College Board portrait library in Miami came from exactly here, just with the volume turned down and a lighting diagram that stopped moving.

It also fed the music and youth work, including the heavily coloured sets I built later for Greeicy. Personal projects are where you make the mistakes. Commissions are where you spend what you learned.