Imagery, music, and cinema from our childhood often reemerge as nostalgic symbols later in life. And rather than just re-consume them, we often love to recreate some of that nostalgia in our own work.
I remember Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino talking about how they were inspired by old exploitation movies, which brought about their Grindhouse collaboration. The movie and everything down to the trailers and marketing had the old B-movie flavor. But you can find the desire for nostalgia just about everywhere. I was at Target the other day and noticed an aisle-ender with makeup and bath products that look like they were packaged for the 50s market.
Of course many photographers, like myself, love to play with the ideas and elements of old “vintage” imagery. For the image above, and others in a series I am currently working on, I’m drawing on lots of imagery I remember from my childhood. Many things that, when I first saw them, I was really unable to process (think, Russ Meyer’s Beyond the Valley of the Dolls). But, they were etched into my mind and forever play a little part in how I see my own work.
