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^Alberto Montaner is not a girl. He does not have his ear pierced. He does not even have a pearl. He probably has never owned a pearl. If he has ever claimed to have a pearl, that must have been a metaphor. And this is exactly what we wanted to explore.

His exploration of the pearl has two different sides. One is quite private, the exhibition of the single pearl that either is far away or out of focus. Alberto has a slavic side, and I cannot help but seeing the image of Aliosha Karamazov scared at the presence of the pearl. Why is this pearl over here, either far away -but in my hand- or out of focus -but haunting my sight in a way that I cannot even look at it?, would wonder Aliosha.

There is a different privacy and a completely different light altogether when color makes its dramatic entrance in the field. Alberto has decided to put some make up on, in order to redirect the attention of his interpretation to the mouth and the eyes of the girl with the pearl earring. Although the technical settings are similar -same light origin, lens set to the largest aperture to decrease the depth of field-, there is something behind the eyelids and in the mouth rictus that looks particularly disquieting

The second side is much more theatrical. Aliosha has disappeared from scene, and in his place, semi-undressed, the girl offers all of her pearls: secure, christ-like, or in movement. Don't forget to click on the thumbnails. 

According to Thomas Mann (although we never knew the source, and it might as well be an invention of Wendell Kretzschmar), prior to write the music, Beethoven would start writing about it, narrating it, probably until the moment in which he realized that the language he was using could not express what he wanted to express.

Four more pictures at Alberto's request: 

[The pictures from above are not the final pictures. They have not been edited, colors have not been calibrated, and black & white photographs have neither been dodged nor burnt. For those who are interested in mere technicalities, I have used Lightroom, but not yet Photoshop

This is only a study on what happened yesterday. The second thing I would like to state is that, in the end, I did not like the grey background. I should have used a black one. I made a mistake, and it shows. Finally, this text is not even close to the final texts of this photo-literary project. Again, this is a quick, meager description.

It took me more or less half an hour to install the lights. We used two photofloods with silver umbrellas. Sometimes, I used a bouncing flash to fill up some light gaps or to obtain a more dramatic lighting. I decided to stay in the 100 ISO. The use of the tripd was sometimes necesary, but it ended up being a burden, in as much as it broke part of the dynamics. I used a 50mm f 1.8, fixed focal lens, and therefore it required a lot of physical activity. We were shooting for one hour and a half, until we were quite tired. We ended up with almost three hundred images. Some of them totaly unusable, most correct, and a few interesting enough to start thinking about them.]