Domino (2008)

Domino
Front Royal, Virginia
January 7, 2008

 

Domino is one of my all-time favorites. To me, it is the merging of many perfect elements into one photo. I could best describe it as rustic erotic surrealism.

W--- prepping for the shot.

The rustic enviornment was key. My friend W--- and I found ourselves with the advantage of shooting in an old carriage house on the property where I lived at the time. The desolate - yet warm and oddly inviting - background gives a striking contrast to W---'s outfit and the mask. The character wants to stick out from the dreary norm. However, notice the similarities between her hair and the wooden wall behind her: parallel streaks of varying degrees of brown. This suggests the real roots of the character. Here you have someone with human normality at her core, but is striving to break free from assimilating into society.

The mask on the ground was, as I later discovered, more than likely a subconcious reworking of Billy Joel's album cover for The Stranger, which I would often find myself absorbed in as a child. The mask on The Stranger represents the illusionary front people in relationships put up for each other.  In Domino, the mask is completely personal - in fact, almost a mirrored foreshadowing of how the character is to develop. We do not see the her real face, only the ornate falsehood she wants the world to see her as staring back at her. Her true self, it seems, is all but lost.





Unused test shot for Domino.

Underlying all of this is the photo's sublime sensuality. The character's upper body pose and position of her hands suggests that she may be getting ready to crawl on top of the mask's "body" as some sort of psychological initiation rite. Her right arm severs the photo down the
middle, seperating the top half of her
encroaching body from the more passive bottom half. The sexy
strapped heels, the intense blue
tights showcasing the sensous curves of her legs and the temptress-inspired scalloped mini-skirt, reveal the allure that the character is trying to develop to escape from the hum-drum world.



The name Domino is a reference to the Stanley Kubrick film Eyes Wide Shut, in which a prostitute (named Domino) lives in a small apartment with a collection of masks on her walls. Domino isn't happy in her world either and her masks partially represent the face she wears to get through life.

Domino's apartment in Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut.

Domino represents those of us who don't feel as if he fit into the world and spend our life trying to carve out our own niche, no matter how difficult and painful it may be at times.