Cine-photographic portraits

In an exclusive preview of his upcoming exhibition „At the Movies“ (Vienna, November 2011), Berlin-based photographer Frank Lassak shows a selection of monochrome portraits, whose tonality hints at stills from well-known films noir, such as „Rear Window“ (Alfred Hitchcock) or „The Maltese Falcon“ (John Huston). Neither re-enactment, nor plagiate, the pictures in this series try to capture the feel of classic Hollywood-style film stills, thus giving a tribute to famous stills photographers like Barton B. MacLeod or Susan Cook.

For this project, Frank paid special attention to the lenses he used: „As much as possible, I wanted to shoot scenes that recreate the field of vision of a 35mm camera, in order to be as close to the fictitious ‚set’ as possible.“ Using special adaptors for his DSLR, he employed classical movie camera lenses and even a 50 year old Asahi Takumar portrait lens. Says Frank: „These lenses are not optimized for modern digital equipment, but are especially suitable to create that particular nostalgic mood I wanted to achieve.“

In „At the Movies“ and „Femmes Noir“ Frank mostly worked with actors and students from Schauspielschule Charlottenburg and chose a variety of locations, props and stylings to make the stills look authentic. The series was produced from September 2010 to July 2011.

http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1P2-21366304.html. More: http://www.mandy.com/home.cfm?c=mac336 Great pleasure to work with John Wayne and more recent Malcolm McDowell http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1863203/combined