Nick Fancher is a portrait and commercial photographer based out of Columbus, Ohio. His clients include The New York Times, ESPN Magazine and Forbes Japan.He graduated from The Ohio State University with a BFA in fine art photography in 2005. He specializes in a no-frills, run and gun approach to lighting. He began his photography education in high school in 1997. He attended Ft. Hayes High School’s career center for Commercial Photography.

Fancher seems to take an interest to an unusual form of portraiture, this being a wide variety of distorted imagery techniques, using water, oil, plastic bags all incorporated with the model.

Image Analysis

This photograph depicts a coloured portrait recently taken by Fancher. The overall feeling from this photo is that the meaning behind it is quite dark and sinister, this can be supported by that dark tones created by low levels of lighting complemented by the dark clothing the model wears. The artificial lighting used is extremely beneficial to the overall mood as Fancher used the manipulation of light intensity to his advantage.

From the title, we can presume that Fancher used honey running down glass to create the dripping, distorted effect. I reckon that he used honey as it has a high viscosity, meaning it isn’t so runny, giving Fancher more time to set the camera up and get it in focus. Looking at it from an anthropocentric view, the honey could resemble oil and the distortion it is bringing to the ocean and sea life.

As the photo has a short field of view, there is a big focus on the model in the center. The way that the tone is so dark contrasts against the models paler face, drawing the viewer attention to the face, where the honey is found in it’s main movement of running in a downwards direction in the foreground.

Contextually, The model in the photo is Chelsea Wolfe, who Fancher was a fan of and has now been in collaboration with her since 2013. This photo was inspired by Wolfe’s song, ‘ When anger turns to honey’ as it complemented his Strata honey explorations. Taken through pexiglass and honey and using only one light. On his blog, Fancher states that his ‘favorite thing about honey is how it refracts light.’