Zombie Spongebob with spectators — Mons, Belgium (2015)
This picture has to be one of my absolute favorites. It’s been hanging in my office and at my apartment for months and it consistently gets more positive comments from people than any other picture.
A little background first. In 2015, Mons, Belgium was selected as the European Capital of Culture. Mons has always had a reputation as an art city, but in 2015, the city opened many more art museums and the city filled with regional and imported artists.
The two of my favorite street artists in Mons during 2015 were Zacharie Bodson who put hundreds of big and small “crazy Jack Nicholson” stickers all over Mons. He is based out of Lille, France but seems to frequent Mons a lot since I regularly see fresh stickers from him in Mons. I captured a cool picture of one of his stickers, that I’ve posted below but is also viewable on my Instagram account.
The other street artist that frequented Mons was Georges Clowney, a Wallonia region street artist who goes by the artist call-sign, trollux2luxe. It is trollux2luxe‘s art that is featured in the above picture. Most of his art is smaller in size than what’s shown above, but I found his art all over Mons on walls, buildings and fire hydrants, just to name a few locations. Each of his art pieces is different, but they are of the same style.
As of 2017, both Zacharie Bodson and trollux2luxe‘s work could be found throughout Mons.
The picture above was taken when my wife and I were walking around and she wanted to go into a boutique home goods store. I had seen trollux2luxe‘s art, Zombie Bobey, on that wall before, but never thought to take a picture of it. But that morning, I didn’t want to go in the store to shop for colorful drinking glasses so I stood outside with Zombie Bobey right across from the shop and across where I was standing.
I opened my camera and started taking pictures of people as they walked by Zombie Bobey. Most of those pics were not worth keeping. This one, however, was perfect. I love the massive poster of Zombie Bobey and the woman looking at it while the man walks through the frame taking a large stride. This is one of the few pictures I look at over and over and never seem to get tired of seeing it. The Zombie Bobey poster board has been posted all over the city and each time I saw the board, it had more graffiti on it. This link has a picture of Zombie Bobey when trollux2luxe just installed it in the location where I made the picture.
Equipment
Fujifilm XT-1
Fujinon 18-55mm (55mm)
Settings
1/250 sec, f/4.0, ISO 400
Processing
Adobe Lightroom
Nik Silver Efex Pro 2
Old lady and Crazy Jack — Mons, Belgium (2015)