We worked with photographer Yağmur Ersayın and our friend and creative director Ryan Barone to document Lara Sonmez’s Lune et Soleil collection.
The pieces are simple at first glance. Rings reduced to their most essential form. But they invite a longer look, more than just at the object itself, at what happens around it. Light becomes the subject. As Yağmur notes, “Lara’s pieces are not cluttered with ornament. They are forms that trust the circle completely, as both primitive and eternal.” She continues, “It’s easy to drop into a silent obsession… not necessarily with the forms themselves, but with what they do to light.”
Each image studies how the materials receive, bend, and release light. At times it burns. At others it disappears into shadow. Surfaces shift from sun-heated to distant and cold, like something suspended in space. “The inquiry became not about objects, but of physics,” Yağmur explains. “How a ring’s aperture mimics the eye of a solar eclipse… how gold catches and bends light the way a planet’s atmosphere refracts the sun.”
Lara approaches the work with the same intent. “When creating my pieces, I think very intentionally about the sensory experiences they should carry and the infinite changes they will go through with the light.” She describes the Soleil finish as something that “recalls sandy shores… reminding one of sun-heated sand and the warmth it transfers to the body.”
Lara’s forms trust the circle completely: ancient, continuous, and without excess. In that restraint, they open up a different kind of exploration. The ring becomes an aperture, or an eclipse.
Yağmur approached the work less as documentation and more as observation. The camera acts like a telescope, narrowing in on small interactions that feel expansive. As she puts it, “The camera, a telescope pointed at a fingertip.” What emerges is a study of scale, and how something held between two fingers can echo something much larger. For Yağmur, “the beauty of the universe operates at every scale one cares to find it.”
Across the series, the images carry a physical sensation. Heat. Absence. Density. “I think a unique achievement… is the effect of temperature,” Haris says. “The hot ones feel hot. And the cold ones feel like the vacuum of space.” You don’t need much context to feel them. As is often the case with Yağmur’s imagery, they eschew the need for explanation or description and are perceived almost entirely with the senses.
