We put up galleries from main cosplay reveals on a regular basis, and so they’re all the time wonderful, however for the current New York Comic-Con one photographer wished to do issues a bit in another way.
Wanting to attempt one thing past simply taking good images, veteran photographer Andrew Boyle (disclaimer: I wrote the foreword for his ebook) thought that for this 12 months’s present he’d try to make the cosplayer “the sole focus” of his work.
“After my cosplay photo book ‘Heroes & Villains’ came out in 2017, I thought I’d relax it up a bit with the subject matter, but it kept pulling me back; the effort, the enthusiasm and the sense of community amongst the costumed fans”, Boyle tells Kotaku. “I shoot in a uniform style inspired by the portraits of Richard Avedon, so that the sole focus is the subject without background distraction.”
“I also work in collage pieces and motion I wanted to integrate a unique hand made feel for each selected subject. For some, I used cut out pieces that referred to the character, others were repetition of shapes, or color blocking with paper and textures. It was a way to differentiate from other cosplay photography, all of which has it’s own approach, and take a different feel to celebrate all the effort and energy the NYCC crowd brings. Plus I love reading the reactions people have to seeing themselves portrayed in such a way.”
The result’s this heavily-stylised gallery which, by eradicating the same old conference background, actually lets every cosplayer, their outfit and their efficiency shine.
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