YSL L'Homme
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Liquid
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Shiny
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Glass
YSL L'Homme.
L'Homme is a bottle most people have already seen on a shelf, so a straight packshot adds nothing to it. I shot this as a visual exploration of the fragrance, on my own, treating the monogram as architecture rather than as a logo. A monogram is flat. Print it, light it, and it stays a graphic sitting behind the product. So it was built as a physical object, a stone and metal monolith standing on a slab in shallow rippling liquid, and shot as its own hero rather than as a device behind the bottle. Scale is the whole argument of the frame, so the monolith had to be a real thing with real edges catching a real light.
The bottle was then lit to match that scale. A hard beam rakes a curved sweep behind it, split blue on one side and warm gold on the other, with the gradient falling into a heavy vignette so the black holds rather than going grey. Two colours meeting on one curve give the frame depth. The slab stands in rippling liquid, with the reflection under it carrying the light back into the base of the frame. The same set-building runs through my other mens fragrance photography, including the Musk series. Shot in London by David Lineton.
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