Rei, behave!

The cosplay shoot: Rei, behave!

I shot this in the studio, on a white background, with soft and very diffused light that flattens the shadows and leaves the floor almost without edges: the whole space becomes a bright surface against which the matte black of the metal cube hanging from the ceiling and of the chair stands out. The only shadows I kept are the very short ones under her feet and under the chair's legs, just enough to say there is a floor and not a void.

Nanami plays Rey Ayanami in a cyberpunk key: blue wig, dark face mask, sheer white veil, straps and tall platform boots laced to the knee. It's a costume reduced to the essentials, made more of lines and lacings than of fabric, and for that reason it lets the body be read in full, with the tattoos entering the composition as another graphic mark. The veil, extremely light, is the only element that moves on its own: it falls, opens, stays suspended for a moment after everything else has already stopped.

The suspended cube let me bring out her aerialist skills, with the upside-down hangs and the holds where the body wedges into the corners; the structure sways slightly and she inhabits it as if it were weightless, looking for balance without ever appearing strained. On the chair the game changes, becoming a reversed arch or a frontal, symmetrical pose: from floating we move to weight, to support, to a more direct and static relationship with the space.

The palette stays reduced to white, black, skin tones and that single cool accent of the hair. On one of the images I added the character's name in Latin and Japanese characters at the bottom, like a cover: a small nod to the source world in a set that is otherwise all geometry, body and light.