Svetlana: Concrete & Fur

Red coat, fur hood, cold stone. City lights scattered below. She sits, crouches, leans — legs crossed on concrete ledges, gaze steady through every frame. String lights blur behind her. Evergreens close in at the end. The session was shot on a winter night above the city, on stone parapets and concrete staircases where the temperature made long poses uncomfortable. Svetlana didn't seem to notice. She moved between spots — a ledge overlooking the city lights, wide stone steps descending into darkness, a waterfront railing where harbour lights smeared across the water — and at each one she found a pose that felt authoritative rather than posed. The red coat is the visual anchor. It's the only strong color in most frames, set against grey stone, dark sky, and the warm but distant scatter of city lights below. That color isolation happened naturally — she showed up wearing it and the location provided everything else in muted tones. The mood progresses from confident to something more guarded and introspective in the mid-set frames — eyes closed against a stone wall, face half-hidden in the fur hood — before landing on imperious in the closing shot: standing dead center in a wall of dense evergreen, red coat punching through the dark green like a signal. That frame has a symmetry and a stillness that the rest of the set builds toward. All color, all available light — ambient city glow, harbour reflections, the occasional directional source from a stairway. Thirteen frames from a freezing night where the subject made the cold look intentional. "That spot above the city was freezing but Svetlana just owned it. The red coat against all that concrete — didn't need to direct anything, she just knew where to be."