The optical & chemical distortions of Christopher Soos – Title
I was first introduced to the work of Canadian cinematographer Christopher Soos back in the late 90s, through his collaborations with then photographer-turned-music-video-director Floria Sigismondi. Sigismondi’s photographic work had been a vast source of inspiration for me throughout my own studies, aided in no small part by her work on some of my favourite music videos of that era; Marilyn Manson’s fascist-fetish tour de force, The Beautiful People, as well as Tourniquet, the horrifyingly paranoid ode to Les Jeux de la Poupee, by Hans Bellmer; the claustrophobic nightmare tableaux of David Bowie’s Dead Man Walking, with its fragmented and overly saturated palette; and the lurking, subcutaneous reptile creep of Tricky’s Makes Me Wanna Die. While I always admired Sigismondi’s directorial vision, I was far more intrigued by the photographic techniques used to commit these images to film, and learning more about the individual responsible for the conception, and expert execution of, these equally cerebral and visceral techniques …