In an attempt to escape the seemingly never-ending winter blues, and to herald the official beginning of spring in exactly one month’s time, we present Colortubs, a series of analogue photographs depicting women bathing in coloured water. The artist behind these images is Italian photographer Francesco Vezzola, whose practice makes a strong case for finding inspiration in the spontaneity of everyday life. Colortubs emerged after he instinctively brought his analogue camera along to shoot with a model. Having indulged an impulse to shoot Sarah in a bathtub full of water, Vezzola – for no apparent reason – decided to add some pink colouring to it, and an entire photographic series soon followed: “The idea behind it was to capture a raw feeling, a pure sensation of an instant,” he explains.
Some of the women portrayed are friends of the artist, and some are models he had worked with on previous projects. As the series emerged out of a concept relating to spontaneity, the artist only used natural ingredients to tint the bathwater with pastel hues: “It took a bit of experimenting in my kitchen to understand how to liquefy spinach or how to not curdle milk once I added tomato juice,” he explains. The colours were tailor-made to match the characteristics of each of his subjects, “the colour of Katharina’s eyes is the same as the green of the water she is floating in,” he says, for example, while for Jillian, Vezzola used oat milk to respect her vegan principles. There’s a meditative serenity to the resulting images, created either by the bathing process itself – which calls to mind Elizabeth Taylor’s decadent routine in 1963 spectacular Cleopatra – or by the analogue process by which they were made. A soothing start to the week indeed.
