Palm Beach Girls (Colour)

"The corollary of Palm Beach being the most exclusive enclave of wealth and privilege in America, is that it draws in the beautiful people. This is the way it works the world over, but maybe no more so than in Palm Beach. Love, lust and ambition are never too far beneath the surface. This may not be a place of work ethic, but it is a place of desire.

In 1873 a shipwreck brought coconuts to the area leading to the planting of palm and the renaming of the area from Lake Worth Country to Palm Beach. But unfortunately these days there are not so many palm trees on the beaches—the town’s name cannot be taken too literally. But a couple of miles north of the island there are a couple of ideally positioned palms on Riviera Beach that have long grabbed my attention.

The premise of photographing girls on a beach is something that slightly unsettles me. I am not a glamour photographer or indeed a fashion photographer, and it’s hardly a novel place to focus one’s lens. If the key to art is authenticity, the alarm bells start to ring when I walk onto a beach at sunrise with two models.

But on this one occasion, in Palm Beach—the most idyllic and rarified of places to live—I felt that under these three lonely palm trees I could play to the vibe of Palm Beach and celebrate the beautiful world. We just needed to bring the right car onto the beach and work around that prop at sunrise.

I needed compositional tightness and the right use of space; this was not a brand commercial and there was a necessity to make sure that we did all we could creatively. The girls understood my directive leaning and this helped enormously."

- David Yarrow