Color Is Life — How Muccassassina Changed the Way I See
Before Muccassassina, I was nobody in particular.
That's not false modesty — it's just the truth. I was shooting events, doing what photographers do when they haven't found themselves yet. A little of everything. Nothing that was mine.
Then I walked into Qube on a Friday night and everything changed. Not immediately. Not kindly. But permanently.
They told me I couldn't do it
The artistic director, Diego Longobardi, didn't welcome me warmly. Neither did the performers — Farida Kant, Melissa Bianchini, La Diamond, Fucsia, La Petit Noire. These are artists who know exactly what they want from an image. They've spent hours constructing their look. They expect the photographer to be worthy of it.
I wasn't. Not at first.
They told me directly: you don't know how to shoot us. I took it as a challenge. I watched tutorials. I studied. I practiced every Friday. I failed better each time.
Slowly, week by week, I learned to manage three things simultaneously: a complex location with almost no light, subjects who demanded technical excellence and artistic vision in equal measure, and a creative director who accepted nothing less than your best.
I am more grateful for that difficulty than for almost anything else in my career.
What they gave me
The drag queens of Muccassassina don't dress in shades. They dress in declarations. Every outfit is designed and constructed by hand.
Most portrait photographers retreat to black and white when they want to be taken seriously. But Muccassassina made that option impossible for me. They contaminated me. The color entered my eye and never left. Now I don't just preserve color in post-production — I push it further. I increase the vibrancy. I look for the version of the image that feels most alive.
The color is not decoration. The color is the subject.
Farida Kant, acid green, pink latex
The session I keep coming back to happened in my studio.
Farida arrived with a latex outfit she'd made herself — pink, structured, somewhere between Barbie and fetish couture. I went straight for the acid green backdrop. In my mind the image already existed. I just had to make it real.
For this kind of portrait I work with Profoto strobes and a beauty dish. The technique is called shutter drag: I keep the shutter open between one and three seconds, then the flash fires at the end of the exposure, freezing the subject sharp while the slow shutter captures movement and atmosphere in everything else.
That image of Farida was published in Il Venerdì di Repubblica, alongside six other photographs.
Claudia and the BANG
Claudia is not a drag queen. She arrived wearing bodypainting — nothing else. The work painted directly onto her skin.
It would have been a crime to shoot her any other way than fully, explosively, in color. The neon greens, the pinks, the graphic forms on her body — these weren't styling choices I could neutralize. They were the photograph.
The only rule
People sometimes ask if there's a limit — a point where the color becomes too much.
My answer: not if it's done with taste.
Color, for me, is life. It's the desire to transmit energy through an image rather than simply record what was there. It's the thing Muccassassina gave me that I couldn't have found anywhere else.
I was nobody in particular before those Friday nights.
Now I know exactly who I am.
Nicolas VS is a photographer and film director based in Rome. Available worldwide for editorial commissions, portrait sessions, and visual storytelling.