Margriet 197

Alain from Paris was my first source of inspiration for portraying ladies

in extreme glasses. I discovered his great website "High Myopic Girls"

by coincidence on the internet, some four years ago and I was fascinated

straightaway. It was immediately obvious that his models were not shown

in their own glasses but that did not matter to me. In his work, Alain "creates"

ladies that exist and don't exist at the same time. Alain is a master photographer

with a great concept. Some of his models clearly struggled with the extreme

lenses but many other models achieved to produce quite natural looks in

myodiscs and I was wondering how they managed. When embarking on my

own project, it was tempting to follow his concept in a small part of a photo

shoot and see how it was done. Carla was my first model who was able to

explain how she achieved such natural looks in myodiscs. It has to do with

imagination, keeping the memory of what the model saw just before she put

up the myodiscs. Recently, Marieke posed for me and she was able to look

straight into the camera or rather, look right through her photographer. Very

intense portraits indeed. Marieke called it "a little trick" - once you have it,

you can go on posing that way almost effortless. A visitor at my exhibition

"Ladies behind Crystal Veil" (Vrijhof, Enschede, September 2010, see

You Tube lentilux) described the looks of my models as "quiet, bordering to

serene" and this made sense to me. Portraits are frozen stills by definition

and portraits in myodiscs often capture a moment of "introspexion" from the

model's side. 

Many models enjoyed the experiment but most of them declared that they

were happy not to be in need of such extreme glasses in real life. Margriet

said the very same thing after posing in these Depai myodiscs. Everything

is relative and some models made comments like, "my eyesight is not that

bad after all". A nice side product of my photo shoots!