Video: Chess Portraits by Italian photographer Francesco Ridolfi
2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55
Francesco Ridolfi explored the light and dark sides of the human character in a series of photographs of fashion models reincarnated as chess pieces.
The creative project "Chess Portraits" by the Italian portrait photographer Francesco Ridolfi shows how the chess King, Queen and Knave would look like if they turned into real people. For this purpose, the artist photographed some and the same models, first in a suit of "black", and then - "white". For Ridolfi, chess is a set of archetypes that reflect the inconsistency of human nature.
It took a total of nine months to prepare the project and shoot, including the process of finding the perfect costume for the right era for each of the twelve characters.
“I've always liked chess,” says Francesco Ridolfi. “When I was a child, my father explained to me the rules of the game, and then we often played together. I can't say that it made me an expert, but I still love to play chess with my friends. This is probably the source of inspiration for my idea."
The idea of “humanizing” different chess pieces first came to the photographer a few years ago, but it took quite a long time to form a concrete plan to bring the idea to life.
“For me, the most interesting part of the project was the opportunity to make a portrait of the same character in black and white; to emphasize the different and sometimes diametrically opposite sides of human nature, which often coexist in one person,”says Ridolfi.
He adds that the chess pieces motif provides an excellent opportunity to explore this dualism within the framework of the artistic portrait, the photographer's favorite genre.
In classical chess, each set (black and white) includes six types of pieces: king, queen, rook, bishop, knight and pawn (in English: king, queen, tower, bishop, knight and pawn, respectively). These six archetypes allowed Ridolfi to experiment with different emotions and "play with characters and costumes from different eras."
The work of other artists and designers drawing inspiration from the ancient game can be seen in our previous articles on chess.
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