Belgian photographer Kurt Stallaert imagery is as broad as it is idiosyncratic. He shoots fine art, fashion, advertising, and more recently motion pictures. His work is
united by a shadowy cheer and quirky humor in striking images. For these reasons, and because of his inexhaustible drive, his work is distinctive and has earned him dozens of major ad campaigns and from many top industry publications. Few of his images demonstrate his creative prowess and his tenacity on the set more than our featured image which was featured on the cover of Luerzer’s Archive.
Advertisements for paint companies are typically about as interesting as watching paint dry. This campaign for Belgium-based paint company Levis certainly splashed new color on the genre. Ad agency TBWA had the idea of promoting the “Fashion for Walls” concept (paint colors inspired by the latest catwalk trends) somewhat literally: turn the paint into a dress. The idea was brilliant and the execution of creating the image had to be similarly brilliant or it would fall flat. Stallaert approached the project initially thinking CGI was the answer but quickly realized that that technology was best for reproducing something that already exists and that wasn’t the case here. Once the decision was made to do everything in camera he started out by putting fabric on a mannequin and blowing it in different directions with a wind machine to get an idea for basic shapes that could be made with the “paint dress.” Once he and the ad agency were happy with a shape they proceeded to get down to the dirty work.
Stallaert and his team built a basic set consisting of two Chimera soft boxes attached to one Broncolor power pack each. One soft box was placed about three feet directly above the mannequin (which was used in place of the real model ) and the other about 12 feet to the left of the camera position at about four and a half feet above the mannequin. A Hasselblad with an 80mm lens and a Phase One P45+ digital back was brought in for image capture. After the gear was in place came the plastic tarp. The whole set was meticulously covered in plastic to prevent any of the splashing paint from wrecking the gear. Once the set was done came the fun part: the team proceeded to throw about 25 gallons of red paint at the mannequin as Stallaert snapped image after image of mid-air paint mayhem. The goal was to get a range of splashes that could then be melded together in Photoshop to create a whole dress.
Afterwards they setup a duplicate lighting setup with a human model
and created images that would be composited onto the paint dress.
The shoot went as planned and the client was happy with how things turned out but Stallaert and his creative partners at TBWA weren’t quite satisfied with the shape of the paint dress. So a week of work was scrapped to start the whole process over again. The second shoot fortunately produced a more perfectionist pleasing range of paint shapes. They used the paint images from the second shoot along with the original model shots to create the final image in Photoshop.
The amount of planning and dedication Stallaert gave to the Levis campaign is no less then what he puts into a personal project. He recently shot a big budget personal shoot based around the concept of children with large bodybuilder type
bodies. He captured these beings, existent only in the world of Photoshop of course, in somewhat surreal situations—carrying each other like surfboards, oddly squeezed into a housekeeping uniform, or seated at a card table with bulging legs visible and Bicycle cards swallowed by their tan, oiled hands. The personal project began as a passion, and evolved; Stallaert says the same thing about his start
in the business, which he calls typical. “You have to be a little bit lucky to get the good jobs and to make good pictures. Yet continuously, I’m looking for new techniques, new evolutions, that’s something I have to do to do all time. I don’t want to doind a technique and to keep this technique for the rest of my life.”
