Flamenco Editorial Bajo El Sol
Miranda Penn Turin
Bajo El Sol – Compás of Desire, Extended Play presents a Flamenco Editorial beneath the Los Angeles sun, where tradition and contemporary fashion come together through dancers, models, and image-makers.
I love collaboration. For me, part of the joy of creating fashion stories is found in bouncing ideas back and forth with other creatives. Loved and respected ride-or-die collaborators. This flamenco editorial was a result of hours of musing, daydreaming about casting, watching flamenco videos, and then a last-minute casting shift that changed everything. After all, a creative shoot is nine parts planning and one big fat part variables: weather, the models’ enthusiasm, everyone’s energy and more. All things considered, this day was the perfect storm: an incredible cast, fabulous talent and flawless weather.
Riku Campo, Makeup Artist:
Miranda: You and I spent some time evolving this flamenco editorial. Initially, it had started as an homage to the Bardot movie “Contempt”.
Riku: Yes, Bardot, or Sophia Loren, so it would have had a much more ’60s vibe.
Miranda: Then maybe a week before we shot, Carlos (Ortiz) introduced me to Lucy Tilden and suddenly the whole concept pivoted dramatically to flamenco. She’s got such an incredible face – what was your inspiration for the look you created?
Riku: Of course I wanted to create a strong makeup look. It couldn’t be just a little bit of blush and no mascara. The model already had a very strong face so I wanted to give her a character to play.
Miranda: You did such a beautiful job. And then, we always knew we wanted Castillo to be part of the story. He’s very much a muse for me. But when Lucy came in, it changed the whole tone. She is just magic. And Timo was amazing. In fact, he was a flamenco god.
Riku: He was perfect. So precise – the way he posed.
Miranda: It was such a crazy coincidence. We had talked several times about shooting together, and then he DM’d me the day after we shot with Lucy and Castillo. I asked him to do a pickup shoot, and Castillo was available, so we made it happen. And then, the on-camera chemistry between Timo and Castillo was really powerful. They were so immediately comfortable together.
Riku: Everybody wants realness right now. Especially now, it’s important for the younger generation to see that not everything is AI. It’s essential to capture something raw and edgy, something that can touch the audience, something emotional.
Miranda – Timo’s talent and flamenco know-how were massive additions to the story. His strength and beauty as a dancer, the way he understands the movement of fabric, added an unexpected layer to the way the images were composed. Here’s this beautiful man doing this thing that I love – the shot of him with the cape and the horizontal shot of him with the skirt – I love those. And it’s in camera. No tricks, just a dancer in the sun.
Nonja McKenzie – Flamenco Editorial Stylist
Nonja: When we went in the flamenco direction, I thought it should be a modern but classic take on flamenco. We were shooting models with lots of tattoos, so it was a nice fusion. I combined a lot of vintage and costume house pieces with current fashion from PR showrooms. The fans, the haircombs came from costume houses – the good combs are hard to find. I did a little research.
Miranda: The styling told the story perfectly. And you brought mainly black and red, which I loved.
Also, the pieces that Timo brought blended so well – it was great to have the perspective of an actual flamenco dancer, and then layer that with John Varvatos and Celine, Helmut Lang – it was a great fusion.
Nonja: I wanted to control the colors, I didn’t want the palate to be too open. Those colors are classically flamenco, I thought it kept the story consistent.
Miranda: Yes, it really did. I’m a little obsessed with that long red dress – I have an obsession with taking photographs of women as giants. So we got this opportunity to make Lucy a giantess.
Nonja: The designer is Kristina K – that gown allowed a modern take on flamenco. Of course, all the accessories were important features with the story too, they helped tell the story. And then, Timo’s custom flamenco pieces especially broadened the emotional spectrum.
Carlos Ortiz -Hair Stylist
Carlos: I wanted to make it very Los Angeles – real Los Angeles, not so super polished, more like what I grew up with – authentic and not too perfect. I loved loosening up the styles on Lucy, leaving them imperfect.
Miranda: The guys were perfect. With Lucy, however, each style was epic but you let some come out, gave her a halo of frizz – the result was gorgeous.
Carlos: And then Timo was super masculine and beautiful, and Castillo has such a uniqueness – I thought that softening that up with roses would really bring something to both of them, and they were into it.
Miranda: Unquestionably. The roses were all you, you were adamant about having roses.
Carlos: They made me think of a true East LA moment, an authentic Los Angeles vibe. For instance -when Frida used banners and flowers and thorns in her poems, it was about heritage and history – it was the whole feeling of that mixed in. The whole story was very loving in a most beautiful way.
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Miranda Penn Turin is a freelance photographer and director who has been specializing in portraiture, fashion, music and beauty for decades. She first picked up a camera at about eight when her mother gave her a grey Polaroid Swinger for her birthday - she misses the smell of those squeegee tubes of fixer that came with every pack of real Polaroid film.
She graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with a degree in creative writing, but her passion for photography overrode her major. In her summer breaks she interned with Boston photographers and began assisting once she graduated. (She still believes assisting is the greatest photographic education anyone could possibly get.)
She added Director to her title in 2007 when she directed her first music video for Warner Bros, and has since directed many commercials, music videos and fashion films. She works with a diverse range of clients including Coty, Max Factor, Sony, Universal, Bloomingdales, Fox, Warner Bros. Records, Converse, Conde Nast, the Four Seasons, Chase, MTV and many others. She is the official photographer of Voices4Freedom, a humanitarian organization committed to abolishing human trafficking all over the world. She is a board member of APA-LA and has been honored with awards from Communication Arts, Adobe, The Art Director's Club, APA, etc. None of this would have been possible without her team - she is deeply grateful to have the best crew on the planet.
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