Natalie
From the series — Cinematic Conversations.
A series of photographs of actor, dancer, and model Natalie Urelle.
There is a particular kind of confidence that does not announce itself. It simply inhabits the person who carries it. Natalie Urelle possesses this quality: warm but disciplined, quietly assured, entirely at ease with herself—and yet remarkably willing to become someone else.
Natalie has an almost chameleon-like ability to transform before the camera. We worked for hours, moving through changes of look, gesture and mood. At one moment she appeared disarmingly young, almost adolescent; in the next, she carried the presence of a considerably more mature woman. I have no idea how old she is. I did not ask. In the world of the photograph, age seemed beside the point.
Her eyes are unforgettable. Exceptionally dark and penetrating, they repeatedly brought to mind Irving Penn’s celebrated portrait of Picasso—that extraordinary gaze in which intelligence, suspicion and theatricality seem to coexist. I thought, too, of Georges de La Tour’s wonderful painting The Fortune Teller, where innocence, deception, youth and experience seem to inhabit the same faces. Natalie could be several of those characters at once.
The transformations are not merely physical. Something shifts behind the eyes, in the posture, in the smallest movement of the face. The photograph becomes less a record of appearance than a glimpse of possibility.
And then, inevitably, conversation breaks the spell. Her remarkable knowledge and enthusiasm for music, fashion and film reveal another dimension: a genuine, almost infectious curiosity about popular culture in all its forms. There is no cynicism in it, only appetite—a desire to absorb, understand and embrace the world around her.
Perhaps that is what makes Natalie so compelling. We often speak of portraiture as an attempt to reveal the person behind the image. With Natalie, the opposite may be true. She does not offer the camera a single self, but a succession of selves, each fleeting, each convincing, each entirely her own.
She is beautiful throughout. But beauty, here, is only the beginning.
Scroll down or click through...
