I start with the idea of matching the color of the room with the color of the model's hair and eyes. The sad, absent or provocative look of the models and the light add an erotic sense to the images as disorientation.

Erotic Colors

Four-color gum bichromate print
The gum bichromate is a printing process that has had its peak in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century. It is a contact printing process in which the negative must have the same final image size. The image is formed on a sheet of paper for watercolor where it is applied with a brush a mixture of arabic gum, pigment and potassium bichromate. The sheet is exposed, in contact with the negative, to the rays of a UV mercury vapor lamp .To get real colors I shoot these still lifes with four selection filters: red, green, blue, yellow, receiving four black-white negative and then I print every negative with complementary color; color photography was invented in this way.

Four-color gum bichromate prints

In The Silence of the night, in the empty city and in the walls, the human absence recounts our stories.

platinum and multiple bichromate gum print

Naked women standing

A series of photos taken in 1981. In September I walked the streets of New York recording my impressions.

1981, New York

All of a sudden I was greatly surprised by a nocturnal light and from an urban architecture uncontaminated by any human presence.
The intensity which is concealed in silence and in most total absence, has the power to represent symbolically petrified the impossibility of individual experience in our epoch which does not allow any space to the improvisation of events.


Insomnia

Rue Saint Denis is not comparable to the classics and sleazy red light districts of northern European countries but tries to preserve its own peculiar gaiety and French impudence.   My photographs taken over the course of several visits (I have 90 photos like this) , made for mere socio-cultural purposes, date back to the middle eighties and early nineties. Now the phenomenon has greatly reduced also because of speculation (the road is in the center and the value of properties is huge) and also to new neo-moralizing campaigns to which the organized movement of the Parisian prostitutes attempted to oppose organizing every year the "pute pride" kind of "pride of a bitch" along the lines of "gay pride".

Massimo Sormonta