Irene Pena Goes With the ‘Overflow’ in Costa Rica

You’d expect a fashion photographer like Irene Pena to be creative, and she is. What makes her unique, though, is her eye – and her ability to inject equal parts motion and emotion into her work.

Irene – who counts fashion and yoga photography among her top genres, right alongside lifestyle – put this skill to good use in a recent project combining fashion and fine art, titled “Desbordamiento” (The Spanish word for “overflowing”). Working in Costa Rica with a Holga camera, Irene teamed with local fashion designer Angela Hurtado Pimentel on a concept designed specifically to break fashion’s sometimes strict parameters.

“The concept behind the design of these dresses was the idea of ‘overflowing,’” notes Irene, who is herself a native of Costa Rica. “Fashion can become a rigid mold that sets boundaries for behavior, but people cannot be contained entirely in any of these molds. They simply spill out.”

While she often uses cutting-edge techniques and clever creativity to give her subjects a sense of motion, Irene found that Hurtado’s designs did that by themselves. “The restrictive silhouettes in these dresses are won over by this overflowing of textures and volume,” she says.

In a way, Irene adds, Hurtado’s dresses are “a representation of our inability to conform.”

“These dresses aim to discover that the fashion system can be subverted to create meaningful and carefully handcrafted pieces,” she says, “as unique as the people who may wear them.”

Click here to see more of Irene’s dynamic imagery.