Last Updated on 10/17/2019 by Mark Beckenbach
All photos by Eszter Sarah. Used with Creative Commons permission.
Everything retro and nostalgic remains a popular aesthetic for various creative fields, and photography is no exception. In particular, fashion editorials do a lot of retro styling and editing, and it looks like we’ll continue to see a lot of that. We’re not really complaining, especially if we’re seeing colorful and experimental approaches. Today’s featured series, by Budapest-based Eszter Sarah, is yet another fine example of that, with a lean towards a beautifully minimalist style.
If retro fashion is your cup of tea, you’ll fall in love with the clean and dainty look of Eszter’s Swimmer series. Everything about it is simple and stripped down to the essentials — from the retro-styled swimsuits by Philomen Studio, the styling, and the make-up by Barbi Nógrádi, to the location and poses. What really stands out in this series is the color grading. Her color palette is evidently inspired by the dreamy swimsuit ads of decades past and it would be easy to mistake these photographs as coming straight out of the pages of a 1970s fashion magazine — if not for the crisp and flawless image quality that gives the works true era away.
This superb cleanliness and image quality, is a noteworthy attribute of this body of work. The clean and fresh look extends to the scenes as well; all we see is the stuff that matters. There are no distracting elements, no stray bits of color that don’t match the scene and color scheme. There is not a styling element out of place. All these blend together nicely to elicit a feel of summer from decades past.
If you want to see more stylized and conceptual versions of this theme, we highly recommend checking out DREAMER POOL by Elena Iv-skaya and Pool Without Water by Maria Svarbova.
Don’t forget to check out Eszter Sarah’s Behance portfolio to see the rest of her projects.