Medium Translation

Art Direction, Styling, Photography

A Studio HMVD initiated project

We're fascinated by the idea of translation through different mediums— what would that photo look like as an embroidery? Could that typeface be a house? In our studio's ongoing series, Medium Translation (affectionately called, "Paintings IRL," internally) we explore interpreting our favorite paintings as still-life photography.

This is an ongoing project.

Behind the Scenes

For our first photo in the series we translated René Magritte's The Memoirs of a Saint (Les mémoires d'un saint), 1960 as we were drawn to the structure and dimensionality. We added a body in the center to create a sense of scale and make the composition more focused on the environment inside the room rather than the existence of the room itself.

Our first iteration was rather flat, but creating more textural clouds and cropping closer brought us closer to the emotion of the original.