“What’s in a Bottle?”

First impressions go a long way.

When the Dom Pérignon rep came to speak to our school in the spring of 2006 to talk about having the opportunity to participate in the competition it was the gold ingots that ran up and down the sides of the bottle that Karl Lagerfeld designed that piqued my interest. If the hadn’t reminded me of a starry sky I’m not sure I would have bothered entering.

The parameters for the entries to the Dom Pérignon-Karl Lagerfeld ‘A Bottle Named Desire’ Photography competition were simple. Create a series of images that interpreted the bottles which Karl Lagerfeld designed to commemorate Dom Pérignon’s 1998 vintage. There had to be three images, they had to work together and couldn’t be larger than 8x10. Otherwise we were pretty much given free range. I bounced a lot of different ideas around my head as the weeks rolled on most of them were complete crap. I really wanted to create a unique experience that said something about the bottles. In the end I took an idea I had been developing as part of another project and decided to expand it.

In the gallery at the International Center for Photography in New York City

Once the bottles arrived and I got into the studio I kept it very simple. I only had a few weeks two weeks to work on my “final images”. Digital imaging and Adobe software was still pretty new to me at the time so I was learning as I went. I was really excited about the digital aspects of project but I also really didn’t want it to be more about the technology than the bottles. The final step was printing and while challenging I worked really hard to have the images retain the same luminous quality I was looking for in the prints.

In the end my final Dom Pérignon Abstracts did not stray too far from my initial design. The entire project took just under a month to finish from the initial meeting to dropping off the finished, matted project. There are three images in the final series which are numbered and are meant to work both as individual images and together as different parts of the story.

My Dom Pérignon Abstracts explore the idea of the iconic brand as a timeless ethereal entity that bridges the gap between past, present and future. By using a combination of traditional and non-traditional photographic processes this series reflects on the inception, culmination and conclusion of the creative processes as part of our ongoing natural and creative cycles.