Shooting erotica and horror with French-Canadian model, Sara Marcoux!

Good day, friends! Finally feeling like I’m catching up on my workload after falling behind after Viva Las Vegas. This entire week I’ve been able to get to the coffee shop early and dedicate a good 8 - 10 hours to editing. Steemit always takes the first two hours of my day […at least], then I take my lunch and edit photos until @vermillionfox and @tarotbyfergus show up for Magic: The Gathering. That’s a glimpse in to the routine life of @kommienezuspadt.

Today’s post comes from a few years ago. It’s another shoot that somehow flew under the radar over my last year authoring on Steemit. This shoot with Sara-Isbabelle Marcoux came at a time in my life that everything was disrupted and unbalanced. My son’s mom and I had split. I was meeting with free lawyers at 7:00a.m. every day to ensure I’d have custody of @millsguthrie. I was staying with friends half the week while the separation was playing out. Bad times! I’ve never been through so much stress and haven’t since.

To be honest, I couldn’t even tell you how we got in touch. Instagram, maybe? That year of my life is a complete blur, but we did exchange admirations for one another’s work […her modeling, and my photography]. Sara was in St. Louis, MO. I’m located in Minneapolis, and we began discussing the possibility of making a shoot happen. The drive was 10 hours. Today, I probably wouldn’t have even considered it, but I think the timing was right for me to take on a big, ambitious trip and  collaboration. 

As plans began to develop, a friend I’ve made through Facebook and done hair for a couple of my shoots had expressed interest in contributing to the project with Sara. Her name is Soraya Dee and she specialized in vintage pinup stylings. Plans moved forward and Soraya and I were on our way to St. Louis!

We met Sara at a Millennium hotel right in downtown St. Louis. She was this stunning French-Canadian tattooed bombshell, sweet and soft spoken. We set up in the room and Soraya began hair while I took some hotel reconnaissance, scouting the lobby and other possible areas to shoot. By the time I was upstairs, Sara was ready and we began discussing our concepts.

The first was straight forward. We wanted sleek, deadly, sexy photos capturing her figure and intensity. We shot a series of images in the Millennium lower lobby. Even looking at these photos, I’m in disbelief I was using a flash. I’ve gone on at length addressing that everything about my style is based on diegetic and available light, so to see flash is just perplexing. It must have been a weirder time in my life than I thought. Experimenting with a shoot as high profile […at the time] as this doesn’t seem like something I’d do, although I still like the results. They just don’t “look” like my photos.

Once we were back upstairs, we started on the second concept. Sara wanted to shoot straight up horror, so prior to leaving Minneapolis, Soraya and I picked up all the necessary props for a bloody, gruesome bathroom torture scene. I haven’t been able to find the photos, but I even sculpted mock teeth to accompany the rusty pliers. We even hung plastic from the walls and shower, going for the Dexter look. We ended up with some terrifying, oddly erotic photos. I left that shoot being even more inspired and amazed by the depth of Sara-Isbaelle Marcoux’s creativity and talent.

We’ve stayed in touch since the fateful shoot in St. Louis. She went on to work with Kat Von D as a consultant for her make-up lines. I still talk with her and miss her to this day. I’m going to get in touch with her and look at a possible road map to get her to Minneapolis for another shoot. With more and more success on Steemit, I’ll be able to afford collaborations like this a few times a year. Nothing would make me happier than shooting with her again.

Thanks for reading. Follow me here at @kommienezuspadt for more photography, art, illustration and writings.