My Work | The Ingénue

the ingenue by Tewfic El-Sawy on Exposure
I've recently been following a number of Japanese photographers on my Twitter feed; some specialize in fashion, others in landscape photography...and I was struck by how many are fond of color-grading their work.

Wikipedia tells us that "color grading is the process of improving the appearance of an image for presentation in different environments on different devices. Various attributes of an image such as contrast, color, saturation, detail, black level, and white point may be enhanced whether for motion pictures, videos, or still images. Color grading and color correction are often used synonymously as terms for this process and can include the generation of artistic color effects through creative blending and compositing of different images."

While color grading is generally used in movie-making, it's also used in still images, and I decided to dip a toe in the process. I chose a sort of greenish tone to photographs I had made of Tian Yiyi at Film Park in Chendun that has movie sets of urban 1930 of Shanghai.

The ingénue is a stock character in literature, film and a role type in the theater; a term that has long been used to describe both a young, beautiful, bright-eyed starlet who's relatively new on the scene, and the kind of character for which such a woman might predictably be cast. The word comes from the feminine form of the French adjective ingénu meaning "ingenuous", or someone exhibiting naïveté.

There's no story in The Ingénue. It's just a gallery of photographs of Tian Yiyi. She had modeled for me for the production of The Immortal, the story of Ruan Ling-Yu who was known as the goddess of the Chinese silver screen.