HyperColor Retro Glam Photo Shoot at the Hicksville Trailer Palace
I have waited long enough to blog about this shoot! This shoot was my BABY last year (and still is one of my most favorite shoots EVER) and we had to keep it hush-hush until it was published in both Modele Weddings Magazine and PDN Magazine, for winning their Top Knots International Wedding Photography Contest. It was my first large production shoot that I co-created with the FABULOUS Kristin Banta and Tara Dowburd-Luftman and I learned how valuable putting together the most bad-ass team can be. Not only was all of our hard work worth it, but we had a BLAST doing it. We had to rent out the entire Hicksville Trailer Palace for the night to do the shoot, so after a long day of blood, sweat, tears and lighting things on fire, we all had a huge slumber party and stayed in the airstream trailers and celebrated! I am SO excited to be working with Kristin again in June on the Home and Family Show and with Pauline, our fabulous model, who will be yet again modeling for me next week at the Anaheim Hilton’s Bridal Shoot.
“Staged in Hicksville, a “trailer palace” hidden deep in the desert scrub near Joshua Tree, miles from the paved road…it was here that we created the set for what was designed to be an all-american scene, staged in a “post-apocalyptic” desert setting (think Mercury, Nevada bomb test site), styled as retro-glam in hyper-color.
As the scratchy old radio played Loretta Lynn on repeat, the set echoed an oversaturated, cloying, dripping over-the-top 1957 scene. The bride is celebrating her perfect day, her perfect husband, her perfect fantasy life. Heavy-handed, blown out hues – you can almost taste the saccharined cherry pie and intentfully cliched props setting the stage for our protagonist to celebrate her dream moment.
Oblivious to her surroundings, she poses in exaggerated domesticity while around her time and life has been shattered. It’s Mad Max 30 years earlier and she’s the last hold out of a forgotten life. She serves and preens, desperate to fulfill the role. Slowly she winds towards emancipation. The fantasy starts to unravel. The idealism fractures, and by the end of our story she casts off the foistered role. Screw him. Screw this. She tears off her chains to the obligations of the past (symbolized by her apron), turns to face the future and realizes it’s too late.
Life is not perfect. We are unapologetically imperfect women in imperfect times still in pursuit of our perfect unions.” – Kristin Banta
