Vanesa Lu – Interview
First of all tell us more about yourself.
My name is Vanesa Lu, I’m an actress and I’m currently pursuing my Master’s degree in Photography.
For me, acting and photography are closely connected and I believe that everything true and gentle in life leads to other beauties and revelations, and thus forms an infinite labyrinth of art.
Your technique is very interesting so we would like to know everything about it and about your creative process.
I have this obsession with golden acrylic and I often include it in my work. I really like the way it looks, especially combined with black and white photography. I love the golden acrylic because it easily misleads. I want to make the viewer look deeper, beyond the gold that attracts with its beauty. Golden acrylic is a trap.
I like to touch the photos with my hands and let my spirit decide what to do exactly with them.
How do you process your films? You do it yourself? How do you paint over your photographs? Do you print/paint/scan?
If the films are black and white, sometimes I process them myself, but if they’re not, I send them to a photo lab that I work with.
The thing that I like most is manually copying the photographs in the lab. All of my black and white work is done that way and sometimes I paint them directly with pastels, paints or write text with markers or ink.
For example, these photos (below) are shot on 35mm black and white film, which I processed in the lab, scanned the frames, inverted and printed them on transparent plaques.
Can you walk us through the process of creating a cyanotype?
First, I digitally print the flowers on special paper and afterwards I work with the traditional process consisting of ferric ammonium citrate and potassium ferricyanide. In order for them to dry, I simply expose them to sunlight or to special lamps, if there are no sunny days.
Do you plan ahead your shoot?
I don’t usually have a preliminary plan, especially if I shoot someone for the first time. Whenever I am asked if I want them to wear something specific for the shoot, I tell them that I only want them, the way they are, nothing more, nothing less. I like seeing my models through the lens just as the day brought them to me: natural, grumpy, shaggy, frowned, angry, sexual, melancholic..
What do you like to photograph most and why?
I adore shooting women because of all the feminine manifestations such as forms, movements, moods and vibrations. Women are artworks themselves and I like to capture this and turn them into a document of time. I love to discover in myself parts of each and every woman I photograph and to encounter different universes this way.
How do you choose your models?
I choose my models based on my intuition.
Vanesa Lu is an actress and photographer based in Sofia, Bulgaria.