Smoking Hot: Stefano Bonazzi's 'Smoke'
Far from clouding your vision, the issues at the heart of Stefano Bonazzi’s latest series Smoke are clear as day.
Through the striking black and white images, created using charcoal drawing, photography and digital editing, the artist explores the intensity of human emotion.
From happiness and pleasure to depression and despair, Bonazzi captures the spectrum of human emotion in each photograph. On one hand the naked figures are erotically charged, but with everything stripped away, including colour, they are also strikingly vulnerable.
The figures are helpless against the billowing smoke which claims their bodies and identities. This is indicative of the fleeting nature of human emotions, but also how we so easily fall victim to them.
“I tried with these compositions to enhance and capture the emotions in their culmination and greater intensity.
The smoke is not understood in these images as mere object, but as an extension of the body, an appendage, which culminates in nothing, vanishes into the darkness as our life cycle,” explains Bonazzi.
Is it necessary to use nudity or the female form to get these ideas across? Are the images made more effective as a result? Or do their bodies cloud the artist's intentions?
Let us know what you think below.
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The Huffington Post UK Brogan Driscoll First Posted: 21/02/2012 16:45 Updated: 21/02/2012 16:47