“Imperfection is beauty, madness is genius and it’s better to be absolutely ridiculous than absolutely boring.” (Marilyn Monroe)
Onnida was a current student of the International MBA at IE Business School in Madrid who contacted me on a beautiful day. We have a Vietnamese friend in common who connected us, due to the fact that Onnida greatly admired my photographs taken of Vietnamese women in traditional dresses and wanted to speak with me about my inspiration. Onnida is an artist herself: she is a singer and salsa dancer who won the IE Talent Show Award in 2014 and went to the finalist for World Dance Championship 2016, salsa category. A true artist with a gentle, loving and romantic soul behind her pure, beautiful, sparkling Asian eyes.
When we met and we spoke for the first time, we realized that we both would have a free afternoon on that coming weekend. You know it happens a lot in the artistic world that when the artistic souls meet and mutual inspiration kicks in, things just flow. As a result, we planned the shooting just a couple of days before the shooting date. Being a very well planned photographer (due to the fact that I have a hectic full time job in an office), I almost never photographed anything without very proper planning that could take me up to three months to prepare, yet I just felt inspired by Onnida´s beauty, artistic soul and motivation to make it happen. Onnida was shivering in the cold water of the late summer afternoon, but the excitement was what kept her in the frozen water for 2 hours posing in different dresses, always with a beautiful and express smile on her face.
That quick 3 hour shooting when there was barely any light left in the West Park of Madrid was perhaps one of the most efficient photoshootings I´ve done!
