The new editorial captured by Elsa Melero’s lens moves into a land of subtraction. Something About Her is a project that emerges against the background noise of contemporary life by focusing on the essential. A project that, in the photographer’s own words, seeks to capture ‘the raw, unfiltered presence of a woman within her own space stripped of artifice: no make-up, no staging, just light and presence.’
Gemma Ferri completely decontextualises garments with high-sounding names and complex architecture. Loewe’s pleats and the tactility of Loro Piana and Dsquared are placed in an anonymous, almost clinical domestic space defined by white walls, ordinary skirting boards and flat lighting that neither extinguishes nor illuminates. The designer garment ceases to be a status symbol and becomes a second skin, worn and crumpled on the floor.
And it is precisely the floor that is the real stage for this micro-story. The protagonist has that rare and indefinable quality, a “something about her” that defies definition, while her body is simply resting in the space in an apparently random manner. She is photographed crouched in a corner, sitting on a wooden chair or lying down, almost abandoned like an object left in a room waiting to be moved. “Her elegance emerges from stillness,” notes Melero, ‘and her beauty from honesty.’
Elsa Melero focuses on capturing images that highlight women rather than their clothes, favouring moments of apparent carelessness. The aim is to reveal authentic, intrinsic beauty, beyond performative constructs.
