Absolutely beautiful shot.
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| Photo: Walter Iooss Jr. |
This Monique shot is in the same vein as Coco’s: swimsuit enhanced by environment. It’s a frame of Wes Anderson symmetry, with a brown wedge of boat and skin thrusting into a breathtaking landscape of giant lily pads, featuring a perfect bikini design (and derrière).
There’s a certain something to a shot where you don’t see the model’s face. To me, it’s kind of like a lite version of the body-only shots, but a bit more subtle and moody. When I used to update the title banner on this blog every month, I cropped the photos so you didn’t see the girl’s eyes — or occasionally one eye would peek out, but not the other. Just seeing the swimsuited body under a smiling mouth taps into the thrill of objectification I mentioned in my last post.
In discussing his book “Heaven,” Iooss talked about this photo:
“The lily-pads picture in Brazil is one of my favorites.... This was like the swamp of swamps. This is where the first creature crawled out of, that’s what you felt like.... I’m on the boat, and you’re straddling it, and the boat’s just wiggling. Someone’s trying to hold it in the back, but it was very difficult.... This was the perfect suit, the little green-and-yellow suit. We put her in a hat, and bingo. You know, things happened.”
The guy knew what he was doing.
If I remember correctly, this photo was taken during the same photo shoot that produced the famous Cheryl Tiegs see-through fishnet photo. Everyone remembers the latter, but the former is an infinitely superior photograph.
ReplyDeleteTruly one of the iconic pictures in swimsuit issue history. No idea whatever happened to Monique but this picture lives on.
ReplyDeleteThis picture was a big part of my development as I was 13 and I found it mesmerizing. I was also quite affected by the pic of her in red. I found a copy of the magazine on ebay a few years ago and bought it.
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