Nerd Lover

The glamour shoot: Nerd Lover

Six images set in a gaming room saturated with purple and magenta, where the artificial light bounces off the walls and tints the pale floor with pinkish reflections. The centre of the space is taken up by a white and purple gaming chair, while on the right one can make out the desk, the monitor, the cables, a round rug reading "Same shit, different day" and a wall covered with posters, figures and shelves of collectibles, including a large Gengar plush. The orderly clutter of the background becomes part of the story as much as the figure in the foreground.

Drew appears in a short white t-shirt printed with "I love nerds", red underwear and white knee-high socks, purple cat-ear headphones on her head and long dark hair falling forward over her shoulders. Her arms and legs are covered in black and grey tattoos: faces, flowers, geometric motifs that catch the coloured light and read as areas rather than as single details.

In the first two photographs she holds a green alien plush and a controller, seated between the arms of the chair in a gathered, almost domestic attitude, her gaze turned upward toward the lens. In the others she shifts, leans on the desk, stands beside the seat, turns her back to the room, occupying the space with broad, continuous movements, always in contact with some support.

The palette stays compact: purple, pink, the acid green of the plush and of the glow filtering in from the left, the white of the shirt as the only stable point of light. The atmosphere is that of a room lived in at night, with LED lighting that flattens the shadows and makes everything slightly unreal, somewhere between glamour and environmental photography.