Intro

Being in Italy always allows me to photograph statues. Up to now most have been religious sculptures with a few war memorials. This year, because we toured Ercolano – Herculaneum – the Museo Archeologico Nazionale – National Archeological Museum – in Naples and the Forum in Rome, I was able to shoot many of the ancient statues. At the Museo Archeologico Nazionale, the bronze pieces were small compared to the colossal marbles of Hercules and Athena. I also discovered a set of bust-pieces and some of them were amazing in their facial expressions.

The issue has been to find a unifying theme that would allow me to group the statue images into one photo-essay. (I wanted to do an essay, because I could comment on the pieces rather than just display the photographs.) The solution came while thinking about a different collection, but once I had it, I hit the photographs and created the set. I’m using the lyrics from Madonna’s song Vogue.

With this group, I also used a new Photoshop process I’ve been trying to get better with. For years, I’ve wanted to capture the section of a photograph that was best shown when I zoomed into the image. (I would zoom in, discover that the zoom identified a really neat piece of the photo, but I had no idea how to capture that zoom. With some help from my Photoshop experts, I learned how to isolate the zoom and create a new image.)