Kickstarter

We had an idea to start a photography and design business so we could take control of our own creative ideas and goals. For our first photo shoot together we pushed ourselves to create something both visually and emotionally striking. We want to share these photos and experience with the art community and world, to show how things brutal in nature can be beautiful. We had to use friends as models and make-up artists, an apartment as a studio, and spent what little money we had for the shoot to buy proper (but cheap) lighting equipment. We would love to make this experience one our friends could be proud they helped us in, and show them that others appreciate their hard work as art. We ask for help to turn these beautiful photos into a book we can publish and share with the world.

For a more in depth story read below:

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My partner and I recently started DTL Design//Photography and we wanted to begin with something very bold and push ourselves to a new creative place. We both grew up listening to a lot of like punk and metal and goth and other alternative types of music. For me, this had a huge impact on me creatively! I began to listen to bands like the Misfits, AFI, Tiger Army, The Cure, Depeche Mode, Avenged Sevenfold, Atreyu and a ton of others. Their lyrics and music style ranged from dark and brutal to abstract and obscure. They spoke of love, lust, vampires, blood, fear, carnal desires, and human constructs. Over the years I sharpened my skills as an artist and designer and always tended to lean towards the macabre. Anything dark, mysterious, or just brutal always intrigued me. The only problem was the further I got into my career as a graphic designer, the more i realized, most of this kind of style isn't professionally acceptable. I lost a lot of the ability to art for art sake in design because it was my job. My job was/is to make things look appealing to the average person; convince them to use or buy something. I needed an outlet to get back to art for art sake and that was through photography. When I started listening to more metal and hardcore music around 2005, I stumbled upon a band called Bleeding Through from Orange County, right around where I'm from. They really caught my eye and ear. Their lyrics were dark and brutal as was their album art work. Their first major cd, titled "This is Love, This Murderous" featured a bloody and beating heart on the cover. The follow up album called, "The Truth" is one of my favorite album designs ever. Speaking as a graphic designer, it is perfection. The type layout is a perfectly organized chaos, that kisses the line between type mastery and mayhem. It also features each band member, photographed in a stark black and white, bloodied and carved up. These photos captivated me. The album was designed by a firm called Invisible Creature, who does AMAZING work for print, packaging and web. I researched into how they made the band members look like they were missing limbs, and discovered they carved out pieces of styrofoam and covered them in a fake blood and animal parts in order to achieve the gore they desired. As an artist you pull from people and styles you admire, and this is what I wanted to do. I wanted to take this idea they had and make it my own, and in a way make it better. The pictures were amazing, don't get me wrong, but I felt they lacked a story or purpose. They were brutal for the sake of them being a metal band. I wanted to give the models we used, a story, a purpose and life.

Our shoot was about the carnal and primal nature of humans. It's about love and lust and how these things eat away at us, no matter how much we try to deny them or make them taboo as a society. These needs and urges are purely human, they are part of us, and they are bold and defiant. They cannot be ignored, and for that matter should not be. They should be controlled, but never ignored or repressed.

We see repression of these things as a way to actually bring them to the forefront of human consciousness. By telling people these things are wrong and taboo and constantly trying to deny them, we as a society, are actually bringing them to the tip of everyones tongue and mind. So our shoot, in a way, seeks to alleviate this repression. With our highly contrasted and desaturated images, we sought to eliminate the distractions of color and other sensory perceptions and associations.

This was a black and white issue. We presented these ideas as they are: Primal, brutal, deviant, and simple. 

we want people to see our photos and understand there is beauty in this kind of primal brutality. There is meaning in these embraces. There is an underlying urge in every person to get dirty, and deviant and be powerful as our pictures portray.

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Here are all the final pics from the shoot.