The cover shoot for Latina magazine was the perfect combination of magic, nostalgia, and voyeurism.
Magic, because we shot at Harry Houdini’s old house in LA.
Nostalgia, because the inspiration came from some pictures of my mum her boyfriend shot of her in the 70’s.
And the voyeurism, well, you’ll just have to keep reading.
Before I go any further, I just have to say that Eva Mendes is one of the coolest celebrities I’ve ever photographed, and I absolutely adore her. She’s very relaxed on set and in front of the camera, and is really just a genuine person. It also doesn’t hurt that she has very nice things to say about me:
"Working with Warwick is a dream. I trust his vision and composition.
All I have to do is make sure that I have emotion in my eyes and he
takes care of the rest. He makes every photo feel like a work of art."
—Eva Mendes
But I digress.
In prep for the shoot, Eva and I exchanged a few emails, and she told me that she’d done a few sexy shoots recently and wanted to kind of step away from that this time around, which I completely understood.
I remembered some pictures of my mum from the 70’s that her boyfriend had taken—pictures which I think are gorgeous, as you can see. I sent Eva the pics as reference and she also thought they’d be a great inspiration for her shoot.
I wanted to backlight her in a garden of flowers, to give the images a vibrant, dreamlike quality. By using a long lens, you get a voyeur’s perspective, since I’d be far away, but still give the viewer the sense of looking through a keyhole (voyeurism). I asked Eva to be in her moment showing emotion, and I’d capture it. Shooting through plants gives you nice globs of color in the middle of the frame, a real sense of depth, and gives you the feeling that the viewer is hiding and the subject is not aware that you are there. So in a way, you are the voyeur, stealing an intimate moment.Normally when I shoot celebrities, I like to be really close in to them, to get in their space, and be close enough to direct them. But shooting Eva on a longer lens, I was a bit further away, which made giving direction a little more difficult. So I just gave her the vibe, she did her thing, and I captured it, without her really knowing when the shutter was being pressed. I think that definitely added to the intimacy you feel in the final shots. You can check out footage from the shoot here.
