I mentioned in a previous blog post that when it comes to geeky things I’m a fairly avid collector of typewriters. That includes the lovely Olympia SM3 seen in this image. I suppose it was only a matter of time before I incorporated one into a photoshoot in some way. Actually, I plan on incorporating a lot of typewriters into my photoshoots in the near future and turn it all into a long series, but for this image I thought I would take a little bit of inspiration from one of my favorite films, Naked Lunch.
I wanted to loosely mimic the poster art of the film, but in my own sort of way incorporating the human body. I probably should have used a different typewriter. The “Clark Nova” used in the film is clearly based on a Smith Corona 5-series machine and I own one or two of those, but I just like the Olympia SM3 so much better as far as looks. It happens to be my favorite machine to both type on and to look at so in this case it is a win-win photographically.
This image was made with a Hasselblad 500c/m and Ilford HP5 film. The session was super quick as the model and I just simply stepped into her backyard which had some very lovely open shade to work with. I knew exactly what I wanted so I just bracketed three frames of the same image for exposure and picked the best one as you see here.