Juliette 150 - 152

Watching the selection of the contemporary glasses from my collection by the model is always an interesting part of a photo shoot. During my schooldays I wanted to become an optician. This dream was never fulfilled because my father was against it. He honestly thought that such a profession was far below my intellectual capacities. Fathers had far more power over their children in the 1960's than they have now so (after a long discussion) I followed his advice and went to the university. As a compensation for the lost horizon I started collecting glasses. These were mainly cat eye glasses which had become unfashionable during the mid 1960's. It seemed to make no sense - the emerging large frames looked far more attractive - and after a few years I brought the vast majority of my treasures to an optician as a donation to the Third World. In the 1980's I started collecting glasses again but kept it rather low profile as it did not seem to fit within any familiar setting. But "there was something" and it had to do with my sweet memories of images seen in the streets of "yesterday" when there were no contact lenses. In the 1980's, cat eye glasses had become white ravens, even at flea markets, but I was fortunate to come across some twenty pairs. Most of these cat eye glasses are now damaged beyond repair. The old plastic frames started to crumble, especially at the nose bridges. No doubt, the same thing would have happened with most of the cat eye glasses sent to Africa in the early 1970's so after all, it was not a big loss :). The pieces of the jigsaw puzzle only came together after making the acquaintance of my partner Nel in 2008. When taking pictures of Nel and other ladies posing in the vintage glasses from my collection, I noticed that something in the subconscious mind seemed to be at the wheel in a subtle way. It was just as if some images seen just before snapping were a fusion between the present reality and images seen in the past. My photo shoots take place at high speed so there is no time to stop and focus on a particular image registered many years ago, trying to make a new version of it. Some photographers work this way, trying to make their models look like Marilyn Monroe but this is not my way. Somehow it would feel like a sacrifice - I want to do justice to the glasses but also to the individuality and uniqueness of each model. This is why the model is given plenty of time to select her favourite glasses before we actually start shooting. The fusion between old and new images often happens during the photo shoot, regardless the model's choice of frames. It all happens in a split second.
Keith Richards once said "If you turn out to be a musician, anything you ever heard comes out in the way you play". Having been a musician since the mid 1960's, I feel that Keith was absolutely right. Translated into portrait photography, his quote would be "If you turn out to be a photographer, anything you ever saw comes out in the way you snap".
Cat eye glasses have long become iconic statements but they are still very much a thing of the past. The style never really came back into fashion since the mid 1960's. It's nice to see at least a few modern cat eye glasses in some optician's shops. It's great that Zenni recently came up with cat eye frames, following the "underground" trend in fashion. But above all, it's great to see that the appeal of the cat eye style to my models seems to be in an upward flow.
When Juliette did her first photo shoot for me last year, she made a very conscious selection of the glasses. This often happens with models who wear glasses in everyday life but many models tend to keep it on the safe side. Juliette was different. She had no hesitation and the vintage cat eye glasses were among the first that were selected by her. With this in mind, I brought along all the cat eye glasses from my modern collection, including three brand new pairs which will be shown later in this documentary.
The cat eye frame shown here by Juliette first appeared in the Zenni catalog in 2011 and the first to pose in them was a great professional model in her early forties called Claudia Allegonda. The frame became available in three different colours and many models posed in them. The pair shown here is a reject by a model who chose them for use in her everyday life. Apparently something was wrong with the prescription she sent to me before I ordered the glasses. This never happened before and my guess is that her optician did not write down the proper data, deliberately. The model in question sadly gave me back the glasses and I ordered the same frame for her, fitted with non prescription "dégradé" lenses so that she could use them as sunglasses over her contacts.
After seeing her portraits from this second photo shoot, Juliette said that these were among her favourite portraits and she was absolutely right. The more a model likes a particular pair of glasses, the better the results. And from my side, yes, there was that fusion moment when snapping. Usually it's vague bit in this particular case it was a vivid one. Great!