Amour has been photographing people against a single sheet of seamless for ten years. The only thing that changes between sittings is the colour we point at the wall.
Founded
2016, Lisbon
Discipline
Portraiture, gelled
✳The method
Colour doesthe describing
Every frame in the archive was lit the same way. One head, one gel, one figure held mostly in shadow. At the size a portrait is usually looked at, that leaves you a colour and an outline, and we have spent a decade finding out how much those two can carry.
It is a deliberately narrow set of rules, and staying inside them is the whole discipline. Ten years of it means the archive reads as one body of work rather than four hundred separate afternoons, which is the reason the frames on the front page can be made to assemble into a single shape at all.
We shoot for magazines, record labels, dance companies, and for people who have never once been photographed properly and have decided this is the year.
Years in the room
10Years in the room
Frames in the public archive
40Frames in the public archive
Gels on the shelf
06Gels on the shelf
Sheet of seamless
01Sheet of seamless
✳How a sitting runs
Four steps,nothing improvised
01
The conversation
Twenty minutes, usually on the phone. We ask what the picture is for and who it has to convince, and that answer decides everything after it.
02
The colour
We choose one gel and commit to it. There is no second setup and no safety option waiting in the corner, which is exactly the point.
03
The sitting
Ninety minutes, no crowd, no monitor to crowd around. Most sitters stop performing somewhere around minute forty, and that is where the frame comes from.
04
The edit
You see every exposure. We select twelve, you keep three, and the negatives stay in the archive under your name for as long as you want them there.
✳In the room
Lucía Amorim
Photographer, founder
Opened the studio in 2016 after eight years assisting on fashion sets she describes as far too crowded.
Tomás Reis
Lighting and printing
Builds every setup and hand-prints the archive. Owns all six gels and will not be parted from the amber.
Selected credits
Aperture
Le Monde M
Dazed
Fantastic Man
Nowness
Kunsthal Rotterdam
National Ballet of Portugal
Verve Records
The room is warm,the wall is empty
Sittings are booked four to six weeks out. Tell us what the picture is for and we will send dates.
