The Stencil: Sale Ends Today by Banksy

This piece was released in 2007 as an oil on canvas painting, exhibited at Banksy’s ‘Barely Legal’ show in Los Angeles. It sold for $230,500 USD.

When I was selecting Banksy pieces to include in this project, I made a conscious effort not to include too many stencils that had text within the work because I felt like it would make my image too similar to the original paintings and not allow me enough scope to contribute much to the new work. With this project, I felt that it was really important to provide an appropriate context for the images rather than simply shooting a whole lot of costumed people against a plain brick wall (which is not very creative and kind of pointless). I included this stencil in the project, because I felt that it would work very well as quite a dramatic photograph.

The Location:

I knew I wanted to shoot this in front of a large-ish department store in Hamilton, but finding one that would be suitable turned out to be a bit more difficult than I expected. This was mainly due to the fact that shooting 4 models that far apart with a 50mm lens meant that I needed a location where the footpath was reasonably deep so I could shoot safely without having to go out on the road. This particular store is on Victoria Street in Hamilton (in the CBD) and we shot it early one evening when the store had closed for the day.

Wardrobe/Props etc:

When I was working on this image, I spent a bit of time researching religious paintings- just to make sure I used the right colours and shapes that would have been true to that style and era.

For this image I made the dark brown costumes from a pattern I found here. I needed a ridiculous amount of fabric to make them, and the fabric shop only had just enough of the dark brown drill to make three costumes instead of four, but it didn’t really matter in the end as I could only get 3 people to be my models on the day.

The Shoot:

This shoot was quite a fun one to do, however it was towards the end of a very long day of shooting so I was pretty tired and ready for it all to be over. We did get a bit of foot traffic while we were shooting, but everyone was pretty accommodating and let us just get on with the work.

The models in this photograph are three friends of mine who very kindly agreed to help me out with this shoot, and as I mentioned earlier, I only had three costumes made anyway, so it worked out perfectly. The final image was a composite of about 4 images in total, with each pair of ‘mourners’ being shot separately as I only have one strobe.

The models were lit with the octabox and the b1600.