Photographer Explores the “Velvet Kingdom” That Is Southern Europe

The fields and forests of southern Europe have a cinematic quality. From mountains to villages, photographer Henri Prestes has traveled southern Europe photographing landscapes with a fantastical good quality. The Portuguese high-quality art photographer’s perform contains a couple scattered humans—lonely figures who just about appear element of the melancholy landscapes around them. His series The Velvet Kingdom is an ongoing exploration of these moody, majestic landscapes.

It took the solar going down for Prestes to locate his artistic voice. “Once I commenced heading out at night time to get images I immediately found myself in enjoy with this medium,” he describes. To develop his perform, he primarily shoots with wide-angle lenses—24mm or 35mm. “If it’s nighttime I constantly use long exposures, most of the time only relying on the ambient light current in the scene,” he mentioned. With some tweaks in Lightroom and Photoshop, these photographs turn into dreamscapes.

Prestes likes to take a look at remote regions at night time or in inclement weather. These explorations remind him of his childhood exploits. Although the resulting pictures are familiar to any person who has traveled southern Europe, their magical high quality is common. No subject where you stay or roam, The Velvet Kingdom is an escapist fantasy with all the drama of traditional cinema.

My Contemporary Met had the probability to sit down with Henri Prestes and converse additional about his ongoing series. Examine on for the exceptional interview. To order prints of Prestes’ photos, check out out his studio store.

Read through on for My Modern day Met’s exclusive interview with photographer Henri Prestes on his The Velvet Kingdom collection.

You journey southern Europe for your photography. Why did you start off The Velvet Kingdom series? What about southern Europe encouraged you?

The most important reason I began this sequence was that I’m from a little Portuguese city near the Spanish border, and considering that I was a kid I experienced this concept to make stories that associated these landscapes of the southern region—somewhere that I felt at ease exploring and that I understood would be effortless to find attention-grabbing spots.

I also required to go again to the villages, fields, and mountains that I try to remember touring by as a child with my loved ones and required to depict the solitude but also the elegance that exists there.

The colours of The Velvet Kingdom are pretty painterly and cinematic. What lights disorders do you glance for to accomplish this dreamy impact?

Thank you. I’m incredibly considerably affected by painters and videos, so accomplishing that variety of appear was really purely natural to me. I largely test to shoot all through foggy conditions—I find it provides an otherworldly emotion to an or else everyday location, and also I enjoy how it simplifies a landscape pushing the most significant parts of the image towards the viewer, generating irrelevant facts disappear into the distance.

I have also experimented with capturing throughout daylight which was a thing I was not way too applied to at the time—most of my function then was created at evening trying to capture the daylight that seldom exhibits up throughout the foggy times was an physical exercise in endurance that sometimes compensated off.

The persons in your series nearly appear to be from a diverse era, with hats and overcoats out of a classic motion picture. Can you inform us much more about the stories you see in these images?

I by no means consider about stories just before making these images during capturing, I’m typically intrigued in capturing a specific temper or an interesting composition. If I’m blessed I’m in a position to uncover a trace of a story, but that only happens immediately after the image was taken, when I’m sitting by itself modifying, and that ideally transposes to the viewer as very well when they see my images—that’s my key purpose.

In regards to the hats and overcoats: it was the variety of clothes that I remember seeing the elderly types in my spouse and children put on when I was growing up, particularly on my grandparents and his good friends and I wanted to recreate that feeling of nostalgia.

Why did you select the title The Velvet Kingdom? 

The identify is influenced by a selection of tales that a individual quite shut to me utilized to inform me when I was a kid. She is the older woman who seems on some of the photos and she has known me because I was born. She grew up for the duration of the 1930s and these were being quite rough instances in this region the poverty was rampant and people were genuinely battling to survive, but these tales were anything that her family members handed along to her and it gave her and her sister consolation and joy. She preferred to pass them together to me which as a kid I discovered exceptionally haunting and frightening but also pleasurable and with the title I wished to shell out homage to these stories.

Henri Prestes: Web site | Instagram 

My Modern-day Fulfilled granted authorization to aspect images by Henri Prestes.

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