Written by Zack Seckler
Edited by Joann Jovinelly

Clients ranging from McDonalds to Rolling Stone seek out Chicago based photographer Saverio Truglia for his distinctive brand of ironic and often dark sense of humour. His signature images include a cow standing in a grocery store aisle stocked with ground beef and an open casket funeral displaying only the fashionable shoes of the deceased. Truglia’s imaginative humour along with a penchant for creative problem solving have been fruitful, winning him many awards and a long list of repeat clients.

His problem solving skills are particularly apparent in our featured image of an innocent young girl lying in her bedroom next to an ominous looking snake. The image, a self-promotional work created for marketing purposes, is deceiving. It appears to be a well-executed location shoot but was actually shot in Truglia’s studio following a week of production. One could imagine doing this for a deep-pocketed commercial client but Truglia pulled it off on a shoestring budget of only $1500.

In our interview Truglia starts out by revealing all the details of creating the featured image; covering everything from production to lighting. We then learn all about his marketing strategies, his creative process and his advice for young photographers.

Seckler: Please explain how you came up with the idea for our featured image - your self-assigned image titled Yellow Bird and the Snake?

Truglia: I had been working on a series of pictures about kids. I wanted to make a picture about a young girl on the verge of adolescence and toying with something dangerous. I had an idea of a girl on the floor of a bedroom with a snake. The inspiration for the details came from different places. I was inspired by the idea of recreating a tiny kid’s room in an attic with slanted walls. The photo was taken on a set that I designed and built.

Seckler: This image involves many expensive elements: custom-built set, set design, exotic wildlife, talent, etc. and you were paying for it all out-of-pocket. How did you bring this together on a limited budget?

Truglia: I started by painting with a really big brush, trying to put the bigger pieces together, like the set and talent. I’ll often look for talent on Flickr by searching with keywords to get ideas. I found a series of self-portraits of a young girl who photographed herself in abandoned spaces like old warehouses and broken down apartments, looking innocent and all sprawled out on the floor. I sent the images to Angela Finney, a prop and wardrobe stylist I work with in Chicago. I explained that they represented the kind of spaces I wanted to recreate, especially the lighting, and we discussed it. Meanwhile, I kept going back to the girl’s Flickr page, thinking, ‘Wow, photographing this girl would be great. She’s probably in her early twenties, but she looks like she’s twelve, and I can direct her into something that’s a little sexual without it being totally inappropriate.’ I learned that she lived in Chicago and wrote to ask if she would consider being in my photo. She said she’d do it.

The set was built in my own studio. I made some drawings for my set builder. He combined those ideas with wall pieces that I owned and wall pieces that he fabricated to make the diagonals. It was assembled in one day. Angela, my stylist, brought a window that she had owned and we added it. Styling the set took three days. We thought about who the girl was and what her hobbies were, how old she was, what time of day it was, and the overall color pallet.

[Next] I needed a snake, so I found the Chicago Herpetological Society, which is a group that handles reptiles. The next day I got an email that included seven or eight photos of snakes. I requested several, a yellow albino snake and two different Pythons. I didn’t know how the girl was going to deal with the snakes. I had told her she was going to be photographed with a snake, but I didn’t provide details. Fortunately, she was comfortable.

Seckler: Tell me about the lighting…

Truglia: My plan was to make a warm sunlit room, so I chose to use as few lights as possible.  When you’re shooting in the sun there’s only one sun. You often don’t need more than one light. I used a pair of Speedotron 2400 Ws packs powering a quad tube head with an 11” reflector and a layer of ½ Atlantic frost, set 11’ feet from the subject and 11’ high. This served as my sun.  I pointed it through the window to cast a patch of light on the floor and project natural shadows around the room. We used several 4’ x 8’ white bounce cards off set to reflect this light back onto set and open the shadows as a small room would.  The only other lights were one coming from camera right bouncing into a white v-flat.  This light was another Speedotron 2400 Ws pack and a single 202 VF head and standard 7” reflector. A Speedotron 1200 pack with a 20” x 24” Photoflex soft box was outside the window illuminating the fake tree and a small white flat. There was a tiny Morris slave light gelled pink in the clip lamp you see above the aquarium illuminating the alligator. This was the little guy’s “heat lamp”.

The exposures were 1/125 @ f8 on a Canon 1Ds Mark III using a Canon EF35mm f 1.4L USM lens. The only significant plate I used was a nice bright patch of sunlight from a clean plate exposed a stop brighter than my main plate.  Retouching was relatively simple and consisted of manipulating color and I did it myself. Since we built the set so specifically there was nothing I wanted to dramatically alter in post.

I shot 300 or 400 frames [during the shoot]. The snake kept changing positions. Eventually it stayed still and I could reposition it safely. Snakes are like lumps of meat—you can pose them however you want.

Seckler: In the end how much did this all cost?

Truglia: [The budget for this shoot] was about $1,500, which included building the set, paying a donation to the Chicago Herpetological Society, buying lunch, plus a little honorarium I gave to the talent It takes a lot of begging, borrowing and stealing to bring everything together.

Seckler: Was the photo meant to be self-promotional or something that you wanted to do creatively?

Truglia: It was self-promotional. Usually, even if I do something great for a client, there is always a lot of lag time before I can use it. When I take photographs, I like to think that I set out to make pictures that haven’t been made before, which is the ongoing exercise. I wanted to recreate, in a technical sense, a simple lighting situation that wasn’t going to hem me in creatively.

I also think about what I’m telling the market. What do my images reveal about me as a photographer? In this case, I wanted to make a picture that didn’t look like the lighting was laboured; I didn’t want it to look artificial. I guess it’s a response to a lot of the work I see in the world—I unconsciously made a decision to go against that.

Seckler: You created this self-promotional image been successful for you?

Truglia: I shot it in the spring of 2009 and used it in a promotional poster. It has become one of the images to which people, even non-professionals, most refer. I think something about animals and children resonates with most people.

Seckler: Where do you market your work?

Truglia: Even when I’m not shooting there’s always some promotional effort going on in the background. It could in the places where I pay to advertise, such as At-Edge.com, workbook.com, and wonderfulmachine.com.

Seckler:  How valuable is that paid advertising for you?

Truglia: That’s the million-dollar question that I cannot answer. Art directors who want to work with you won’t tell you how they found you. If you’re chosen to work with somebody it’s probably because they saw your images or heard or read your name repeatedly—multiple references to you or your work that happened in unison. Maybe they’ve read your name in a blog or maybe they saw your image in Archive. Eventually those media references reach a critical mass. Getting hired is never from one reference. No one has ever told me they hired me because they saw my image in At-Edge. If a photographer is chosen because his or her work appeared in one place, art directors still won’t trust you. They need to see your work in lots of spaces.

Seckler: Why do you think that is?

Truglia: The market is saturated with talented photographers. Art directors want to work with people who are most committed to their craft. I don’t think that photographs occur to art directors any differently than Pepsi occurs to a consumer. Why do you think MacDonald’s needs to continue to advertise? They need to keep on advertising or their sales would drop off sharply. As a photographer, you have to be everywhere. Whenever possible, you have to be on art directors’ minds, which is probably the greatest challenge. There are just so many good photographers.

Seckler: What else do you do to promote your work, aside from advertising?

Truglia: There’s my website, which changes every couple of years. The website I’m currently using is two-years-old. It will be completely replaced by May 2010; I’m already working on a new one with a different design, look and feel from the current site.

I meet a lot of young photographers who are active in Chicago, including in the art and trade schools and the trade groups, like the American Society of Media Photographers (ASMP) and the Advertising Photographers of America (APA). I always tell them this business is about photography. It’s about being an artist, but it’s a battle of perception—trying to win the battle of perception. There are a lot of talented photographers who go unnoticed because they didn’t win that battle of perception, which has everything to do with marketing—how your work shows up or how often it is seen. It has everything to do with your Facebook postings. You have to build your profile. We all have a public face that must be maintained.

Seckler: How do you use Facebook to market your work?

Truglia: Facebook is just a supplementary place for marketing. I use Facebook as a business tool. I communicate with friends, but I keep those conversations offline. If you read my wall posts, they all have something to do with my business. Sometimes I use Facebook more than I use my actual blog, which is yet another outlet for marketing, such as posting videos or behind-the-scenes photos.

Seckler: Do you do any other direct self-promotion?

Truglia: Books are still important, though I think they are less relevant today. I made five copies of my last book. For a short while there they were all circulating, but nowadays I can’t remember the last job I got where they called in my book. Repeat clients don’t need it. Book requests sometimes come from new clients who want to be involved in choosing a photographer.

Seckler: When did you notice that people stopped calling in your books?

Truglia: It stopped two years ago, shortly after I made some bound books. Now I don’t invest a lot of time and money into revamping bound books. I keep one book up to date; if I make a new picture I will print it and put it in there. Bound books are useful only for a limited time.

Seckler: What I love most about your photography are your clever, unique ideas. Can you describe your creative process?

Truglia: Usually, when I get the inclination to make an image for a personal project or a get a layout or concept from a creative, I try and disconnect my brain and my heart so for a moment so I am free. I push the concept as far as I can go with it—even into the realm of the absurd. I learned how valuable it is to push your ideas beyond practical reality so that when you come back and settle on something it’s already out of your safety zone. I consider where am I most comfortable making a picture, how comfortable I am while directing that talent, how am I explaining the concept to people. Some people don’t pitch risky ideas because they won’t actually go through with them. I push myself to the point where I am uncomfortable with the whole undertaking.

Seckler: A situation where you know you’re challenging yourself…

Truglia: Yes. I like to challenge myself. For example, I shot this cover of a magazine last week and I had to replicate a Playboy cover. In the end I wanted to create a picture of a pin-up girl holding a stack of books. It was a story about a librarian who collects Playboys. We were doing this conceptual picture of a bookish girl, which they ended up not using because the headline changed. But the situation put me in a place of discomfort—like the Snake picture was a little uncomfortable—because I didn’t know what the snake was going to do. For that reason it was like a logistical discomfort. I knew I had to give up some control and that’s when good stuff happens. I prefer situations where I can potentially lose control.

Seckler: How did you get started as a photographer? How did you break in?

Truglia: I went to college at Mass Art in Boston from 1990 to 1994 where I studied photography. I originally became interested in photography by an exhibit, Polaroid 20 x 24 Portraits. Up until that point I was a graphic design major. I immediately changed my major to photography. In 1995, I moved to Chicago because I had friends living here. I was 23, and I started working at an art gallery photographing art. Years later, I worked at another art gallery, a very blue chip gallery, where I photographed Picasso’s and such. That exposure launched my first business—photographing artists’ sculpture and paintings. Although I was earning money, the work was tedious.

I almost gave up photography completely until I reinvestigated what I was photographing in college. I had always made portraits, so I decided that’s what I wanted to do. I had been experimenting all along with a Polaroid. I always had a camera with me, but I never took it seriously. I threw together portfolios, made postcards and sent them out, and a couple of them hit. My career started in 1999 when I started doing editorial work. By 2004, I landed my first advertising job.

Seckler: What were those first four years like? I think people always wonder about those “in-between” years…

Truglia: Fortunately I didn’t assist anybody, because if had I, I’d probably would have given up on photography. I would have realized early on how hard the job was and would have been dissuaded from pursuing it. I had to figure out everything I needed to learn from first-hand experience. I spent a lot of time with Vanity Fair looking through the eyes of Annie Leibovitz, trying to figure out how she might have lit something.

Seckler: So you did a lot of self-teaching?

Truglia: I bought a digital camera and started using it exclusively. You can teach yourself much faster with a digital because you have an immediate response to your technique. Digital photography has made me a better photographer, because what used to be a risk—like moving a light somewhere or bouncing it off something—was no longer risky.

Seckler: You started out in fine arts and ended up doing largely commercial work. Are you still interested in fine art photography?

Truglia: I don’t participate in that world. If I make a picture for myself it’s always a picture that I think could hang in a gallery, like the picture of the snake. That’s the sort of image I would make if I were to remove the commercial aim from my work. That image interests me as an artist. My personal work would not be a radical departure from my commercial portfolio. I try and have my photography be all one thing, a reflection of who I am.

Written by Zack Seckler
Edited by Joann Jovinelly

For photographers who dream of shooting fun ad campaigns for international brands Mat Baker is surely a source of inspiration. In less than four years Baker made the move from shooting headshots of models in his native New Zealand to traveling around the world shooting campaigns for top ad agencies. In those few short years he’s shot dozens of campaigns and in the process has been showered with awards from Cannes, the Clio Awards, D&AD and The One Show to name a few.

Mat Baker is always picked to shoot the funny campaigns – from a construction worker wearing panties to a twenty-year-old computer sporting an old mannish looking toupee. The one thing that is never the same is his aesthetic. Instead of making his name with a specific vision or signature lighting or retouching technique, Baker has done so with a style that adapts to fit the concept.

How has Baker become so successful in such a short period of time? His humorous answer in our recent telephone interview “I like drinking beer and socializing” hints at an easy-going personality and savvy networking skills but there’s of course more to it then that. During our chat Baker discussed how he turned a very difficult location shoot into a campaign that ended up winning a Cannes Silver Lion. The description of shooting this commission, which is also our featured image, showcases Baker’s creative approach to image making and ability to improvise in what turned out to be a very tough situation.

Our interview begins on the creation of our featured image and continues on to cover many other interesting topics.

Seckler: Tell me about the ad campaign you shot for Science Diet and how you were awarded the job?

Baker: I had been shooting a lot of funny stuff, especially with dogs and cats, so we had done a couple of shoots beforehand and the agency had seen that work. I had photographed dogs from weird angles, so the agency initially came to me with the job because they wanted me to duplicate those ideas. I had to do some research to ensure that no one else had done anything too similar. The big thing was getting the right sized dogs to make the photos funny. We [also] thought if we used a really small dog and had this little tiny light beam and contrasted that with a much larger dog and a much bigger beam, that would make the photographs funnier.

Seckler: What was your technical approach to creating this image?

Baker: This was always going to be a component based shoot, its just one of those things when you shoot animals. You can get the best animal wrangler around, but animals will always be unpredictable. So then it comes down to timing, doggy treats and a fast camera. Deconstructing the ad we needed the scope and elements to push this image to be as funny as possible. Main dog image, mouth open, tail up, our vet, torchlight and main plate shot. The vet space that ended up being available wasn’t our first choice. We wanted something a lot bigger. But as soon as we saw this though, we thought, perfect…more intimate and less distraction to draw the viewer into the comedy of what was happening in the shot.

Seckler: Did you add props or change the location in any way?

Baker: No, I changed very little. The walls were quite clean and the x-ray machine and the background above the vet’s head were original. I did shoot a couple of extra components like the stuff on the right hand wall—just to add a little bit of interest to the shots—but that’s it. What you see was the exact layout of the room.

Seckler: Tell me about your approach to the lighting.

Baker: Lighting the shots was a challenge. I was aware that I had to show the torchlight shining through, so I knew that I had to darken the shot enough to do that without losing any other details. It was tricky. That’s among the reasons why the second location ended up being a better choice. I was actually crammed into a corner and slightly out the door, so I didn’t have the biggest amount of room to add lights. I had a couple of assistants holding lights up in the air. We bounced a lot of light off the ceiling and combined that with soft light from the outside and a little from off the roof. I wanted the environment to look institutional—to have that sort of floor lit look—you know, like when a vet examines a dog, with the x-rays and other machinery, there is always a very slight light coming from the ceiling. I just wanted to emit that familiar feeling.

Seckler: So what kind of equipment did you use and how did you put it all together?

Baker: When it came to the plate shots, we darkened the shot down to put emphasis on the light beam which was the most important element in the shot. For this I used three Broncolor Pulso Gs and two Broncolor A4 Grafits. I focused one light with a 10 degree honeycomb for the rear wall (I wanted to create the foundation for a vignette). For the vet and dog talent we used a 80 x 80 Pulsoflex EM softbox angled towards the ceiling. For the right wall we used a P70 with diffuser. I shot with a Hasselblad H2 with a Phase One P45+ Back with a 55 to 110mm zoom lens set at F8 @ 250th for the animals and F8 @ 15th for the plate shots.

Seckler: Given the tight space it seemed like a really tricky lighting situation…

Baker: It really was. I mean, obviously you want every single advertising job to look kick ass, and I think that’s among the coolest things about working in advertising: You get so much stuff thrown at you all the time. You need to be able to come up with solutions very quickly.

Seckler: Tell me about the flashlight source. Did you actually use a flashlight?

Baker: I totally used a flashlight. At the time, I was trying to quit smoking. I experimented with just shooting the light, but obviously you need another element to highlight—or make it more humorous—so I actually blew a little bit of cigarette smoke into the torch light. I shot those components and then tweaked them a little. Basically, I stayed true to the different light sources.

Seckler: Tell me more. There are obviously two separate beams of light…

Baker: Yes. I think I used three or four different-sized torches with different-sized beams. Through a process of elimination, I went through every different-sized torch and matched each up to the size of each dog.

Seckler: How many components are in this shot?

Baker: I would say five or six—the vet, the room, the dog, its jaw, and the beam.

Seckler: Tell me about the retouching.

Baker: It was a straightforward retouch, just adding the components together and the look that we wanted. We wanted it to look quite plain and gritty. I basically used the film grain filter and added a grey, soft light blend mode so you can control the opacity of the grain to the image. It was actually the first time I actually added grain to a shot because I largely prefer my images to be clean.

Seckler: In an earlier conversation you mentioned your younger brother does most of your retouching right? How did you begin working together?

Baker: He retouches about 90 percent of my shots. Basically, Karl, who at 28 is six years younger than me, has always been interested in photography. Working together happened organically because we love hanging out with each other. He was always into computers, and at the time I think he was going to get into graphic design. And at that early stage, I was still shooting film. As I moved into digital photography, our collaboration was gradual. Everything fell into place quite beautifully; it’s been five years now.

Seckler: Where are you based?

Baker: We are based in New Zealand, but we do 80 percent of our work offshore. We do a lot of traveling, about 48 flights a year; we are on an airplane all the time. We didn’t envision it was going to be this way when we started. We used to do a job in Sydney every now and then, but after winning a few big awards, it has gone pretty ballistic. It’s been pretty cool.

Seckler: Do you travel mostly in Australia or do you go other areas of the world?

Baker: We just came back from shooting for Coca Cola in Hong Kong and just before that we did another job in Melbourne and Sydney. We travel all around Australia and Asia. We did a job in Shanghai about six months ago. And we shot the Singapore Bank campaign throughout Singapore and Thailand for two weeks, which was amazing. We are focused more towards Asia right now, but we do want to work in Europe and the United States as well.

Seckler: How do you view the different markets? For example do agencies in Asia like a certain style, or a certain approach or sensibility more than your clients in Australia or in New Zealand?

Baker: I think there is quite a big difference in the Australian and New Zealand markets. You can really push the humour; you can push your ideas really far. Australian and New Zealand clients also seem to be more willing to take risks and that’s what I love about them. We dig doing funny stuff; we really like shooting humour, so the further I can push it the better. But there are limitations, especially in China because it’s Communist. You’ve got to be careful.

Seckler: Are there specific cultural shifts that influence your methods of working? Can you give me an example of how an Australian client has let you push something further.

Baker: We did a job for Vespa, which is a good example. The job was for the new GT 300 CC, which is the first time Vespa had actually put out an engine of that power. So the idea was to shoot really obese people, just with a Vespa helmet to their right, no bike, nothing—just the logo, the all-new powerful 300 GTS Vespa. So, it’s pretty borderline, and when it came to retouching, we actually made the people sort of larger than they were initially, and they were pretty large initially, so it was a case of the bigger we make them the funnier they’ll be. The other thing is that the clients who we shoot for in Asia are more commercial; they cater to a wider audience so we need to be more careful about where we take an idea there. And personally I am obviously careful about where I try to push my ideas, so I try to take what I can from facial expressions and body humour—as opposed to other outside influences; I think that’s the main difference.

Seckler: You were saying that most of the work that has taken you overseas has been the result of winning many awards recently, is that right?

Baker: Winning the awards definitely accelerated how much work we get, especially through word of mouth. The first year we shot for five clients. We were very lucky that we got involved with amazing creatives with really amazing ideas.

Seckler: What is your photographic background?

Baker: My background was fashion. I shot as a fashion photographer for a number of years and I was bored with fashion because it restricted what I could shoot. It was very commercial in New Zealand. There were fashion magazines, but on the whole, to earn money in New Zealand, you have to shoot commercially. I started shooting fashion when I was about twenty, but even before that I was a press photographer. I was a newspaper photographer from about eighteen to twenty one. And then from twenty-one I got into fashion and then it was roughly around age 30 when I started getting into advertising.

Seckler: How did you start as a press photographer and how did that that career lead you to fashion?

Baker: I freelanced with different newspapers and it got to a point where I was shooting mostly car crashes and house fires, mostly news stuff. And I was getting a little bit down about it, because there is more to life than just seeing ugly stuff, so I wanted to photograph stuff that was more upbeat. After awhile I met a girl through a mutual friend whose mother was a fashion designer in New Zealand. The girl, who was also a photographer, became my girlfriend for four or five years and she had a massive impact on my photography. We went to fashion shows and shot backstage, met models, and that is how I fell into the fashion thing. I found work shooting head shots for local modelling agencies. After I shot like 100 girls—basically all the girls that they had—I started showing my book around to magazines and ended up getting editorial work.

Seckler: Do you consider yourself mainly an advertising photographer, or do you still do editorial work or fine art photography?

Baker: I do now, but a year and a half ago I would have said, “Yeah, I am just an advertising photographer.” At that time I was so prolific. I was shooting campaigns all the time that I actually didn’t have any time to shoot personal stuff. I was shooting four times a week at one stage, non-stop, then we would retouch images in the evenings. We were working twelve to fourteen hour days for a long time. But I missed shooting personal stuff. When I shot in Shanghai in the middle of last year it was the first time I cracked out my camera and basically walked around and shot. Since then I have done a nude study. I basically work on about seven or eight different personal projects in between conventional jobs. Working on personal images has revitalized my passion for wanting to experiment and push my craft as far as I can go.

Seckler: You’ve won so many awards recently, how do you get yourself involved in so many award-winning projects?

Baker: I like drinking beer and socializing. Inevitably, you have a few beers with creative people and then you start to joke around and say this could be funny or that could be funny and you go on from there. I think that it’s important to just have fun and be light hearted, to not take life too seriously. If you begin to take everything too seriously, it almost stops that organic flow of the humour you want to achieve. It’s tricky.

Seckler: You mentioned traveling dozens of times a year, what’s it like being away from your family and trying to juggle that with your busy career?

Baker: It’s pretty hard. My son is a year and a half and my daughter is four. We use Skype to stay in touch, but it’s hard, especially because I am often traveling farther away for longer periods. The Singapore bank job took about three weeks; it was a really big job. During that time my son started saying “daddy,” so I missed out on a few things. I love what I do, but I have become more selective about what jobs I take. It’s one of those situations where you think, ‘I don’t want this to end. This is awesome, it’s like a dream.’ I get to travel to amazing places, but I think there is a point where you can burn yourself out. I’ve been shooting so much over the last three to four years; I’ve just become more selective about what I shoot.

Written by Zack Seckler
Edited by Joann Jovinelly

In the world of celebrity portraiture photography, where looking like plastic perfection has become the norm, photographer Chris Buck stands a world apart. Complicated lighting and retouching aren’t the tools of his trade, it’s the grey matter between his ears.

If you aren’t already familiar with the name, try looking through many major magazines, he seems to be everywhere these days. GQ, Esquire and The New York Times Magazine are but a few of his major editorial clients and in 2007 he was the first recipient of the Arnold Newman Portrait Prize.

Buck’s clever and often humorous approach to portraiture puts subjects in situations that are at once entertaining and revealing.  Concepts that oscillate between the tame – Tina Fey balancing on a stool – to mischievous – Billy Bob Thornton urinating on a photo set. Whatever it may be, there is always a sense of sophisticated wit in Buck’s imagery. His style is a breath of fresh air; one that would be nice to see more of in the genre.

I interviewed Buck a few months ago at his apartment in New York. Our conversation first focused on our featured image: Buck’s portrait of the Vice Magazine founders and editors he shot for Wired Magazine (check out the behind-the-scenes video). We then discussed a variety of other interesting topics: how he generates ideas, the psychology behind his photography, dealing with celebrities and their publicists and a few tips for budding photographers.

Seckler: Tell me about the concept for our featured image, your portrait of the Vice Magazine founders and editors you shot for Wired Magazine (above).

Buck: I write notes before any shoot. Sometimes ideas are connected to specific shoots. Others are ideas for photographs that I didn’t shoot, but that I am still interested in shooting. First I decide what I would I do with my subjects if I could do anything. A lot of those ideas are extreme. Most are visual and straightforward, but some are ridiculous. I have learned through experience to prepare a variety of ideas for every shoot, especially one that has the potential to be outrageous. You never know how things are going to go. I could be half way through a shoot and realize that my subject is willing to do anything. I try to be prepared.

Seckler: Let’s talk about the situation during the shoot. Which ideas worked and which didn’t?

Buck: The assignment was for Wired magazine, but I took the shoot because it was the Vice guys [Eddy Moretti, Shane Smith, and Suroosh Alvi]. I love Vice magazine; I love their attitude. I thought it would be fun to see if I could do something genuinely interesting and surprising, but when I talked to their PR people, they wouldn’t go for most of what I’d had in mind.

Seckler: What were the ideas they rejected?

Buck: I wanted one person to drop his pants in public while holding a video camera or all three men to pose nude while holding various pieces of meat in front of their bits [private parts]. Another idea was to pose them behind a wall with three glory holes and each man’s penis poking through each hole, which would have been awesome.

Seckler: What did they approve?

Buck: We shot with a baby. It was very straightforward. The men were photographed as a parent’s hand reached for the baby that one man on the end kissed. Basically, I thought, how can they say no to kissing a baby?

Seckler: Did you already have the baby on set?

Buck: Yes, they had agreed to it. We did four different shots. One was in the office in Greenpoint [Brooklyn]. The second was with the baby, which took the most time. We did another in a Chinese restaurant where the men are holding an actual MK-47 that we rented.

Seckler: Did you do all the prep work yourself or did you have a producer?

Buck: For magazine shoots, I generally do all the prep. Very few magazines will pay for a producer or a prop stylist.

Seckler: Tell me about the technical process.

Buck: I set up a backdrop so I could see part of the space, but much of it was blocked. Beautiful light was coming in through a skylight and I realized that I had to move the strobe because the baby was moving, as babies will, and that was blurring the shot. So, I moved the strobe and stopped shooting for 20 minutes. If you watch the video you will see that it’s inter cut between the shots with strobe and the shots with available light.

Seckler: So you first shot using only ambient light and then you brought in strobes?

Buck: Yeah, we brought in three Profoto 7A packs and three heads.

Seckler: To replicate that image?

Buck: Yes, we had one strobe over the camera that acted just as fill light. We had one strobe bouncing off the floor, like a soft box bounce or ambient light. And then we put one strobe behind the backdrop where the skylight was to reproduce a bit of a glow on the backdrop—a kind of flare—and we reproduced that.

Seckler: Why did you decide to reproduce ambient light?

Buck: I wouldn’t normally bounce light off a floor, but it looked good. I know my strobe is going to give me something I like if it looks good in the natural light. As a photographer you are influenced by the moment as much as you are interpreting any broader vision. I knew that the light would look good on film.

Seckler: And did you shoot film? What camera did you use?

Buck: I used Kodak Portrait NC 120 size film in a Mamia RZ 67. The film is 400 ISO, but I shot it at 200 ISO. I will use available light whenever I can. I’m not anti-technical, but I am not that interested in technique. I am interested only in how the picture looks. Knowing technical stuff is important. A good idea isn’t good enough. It must be implemented so the viewer can see what you want him or her to see.

Seckler: How did you first get involved with photography?

Buck: I studied photography in college, but I was more interested in music at that time, so I worked at a music paper as an editor and photographer. Before my final year of school I got serious; I decided to put everything aside and focus only on photography. Because I was already shooting for a publication during college, it became the road I took as an editorial photographer.

Seckler: So you got a few editorial jobs while you were still in college?

Buck: I was a photo editor for a music paper for a year and a half and I shot a lot of photographs for it. Most of the assignments were terrible. My execution wasn’t always bad; often it was because I was just starting out. Most of the better pictures I shot were self-assigned; I often photographed musicians who were coming through Toronto.

Once I finished school, I asked my professor if I should assist. He said, ‘No, that would be a step backwards. You are already shooting; you are already being published. Why you would work for someone else when you’re already working yourself?’ It was great advice. I never had to make the difficult transition from assistant to photographer, which I understand is tough financially and psychologically. However, I can see the value of assisting experienced photographers—it did take me longer to learn technique. It took me 12 to 15 years to learn how to light any situation well.

On the upside, I was building professional chops early in my career. Even when I was getting my first ad jobs, I had so much experience that I wasn’t intimidated by big budgets. I have 20 years of shooting experience going back to the 1980s.

I see both my assistants making the transition to being photographers, so you can learn from assisting and make useful contacts. Most people never use those contacts. If you assist more than two or three years, you probably don’t have what it takes to use those contacts. Most people who have assisted me haven’t asked me for contacts.

Seckler: Really? That’s interesting.

Buck: The people who typically ask for contacts are random people or interns who get serious about shooting. People who assist don’t realize that it often takes years to get regular work. Also, you’ll want to shoot for a couple of years for the experience. That is another two years. If you are really organized, you might work another year to transition from assisting to shooting. That’s a minimum of four years. For some people, the transition takes longer. Transitioning into shooting in your early thirties is much harder.

Seckler: What do you recommend for someone who is just finishing college?

Buck: I think that interning is far more effective than assisting. You can get many of the same experiences. Being an intern is very modest work, but if you are helping someone who is generous, you can ask questions and show that person your work. You can also take assignments; I give assignments to my interns.

Seckler: What do you mean?

Buck: I look at their work and give them tough assignments that challenge their abilities. If you are an intern for one year—with two different people for two or three months each—you can get as much experience as you would assisting over several years in a fraction of that time.

Seckler: Among the reasons why you’re a great photographer are your ideas. Tell me about your creative process.

Buck: My ideas usually come from discussions with clients. What is the angle of the article? What is the client promoting? I research; I really throw myself into it. I go and scout locations. Today I went to Martha Stewart’s studio to see the physical location. That does two things: First, I actually get to see where I’m shooting, and two, it immerses me in the shoot. After I left her studio I immediately developed ideas. I also research the person’s life and interests so when I am on set I can say, ‘Hey I read that you are interested in such and such…’ and even having that kind of banter is helpful. It may not affect an individual picture, but it might positively affect the relationship and they might just be more giving during the shoot.

Seckler: What research had you done for the Vice shoot?

Buck: I read a lot of interviews. Since Vice is centered on the idea of political incorrectness, a lot of my ideas came from that mindset, too. In a way, I knew they wouldn’t go for the more outrageous ideas because the point of the article was that the founders of the magazine are changing their image and being taken more seriously. I did first go by their offices to look around. In general, I like to come up with ideas that go against the grain, ideas that piss people off.

Seckler: Do you mean your audience, the publicist, or the subject?

Buck: I mean everyone. I mean whatever I can get away with. Even using the baby, for example. The baby was cute and I knew there were dangers in that because Wired might say, ‘We’re not shooting with a baby. This is Wired magazine, and we don’t do babies.’ I knew they might reject it. But I also knew that if I did it right, if I did it dry enough, it may be really interesting. I knew that the transgressive, and even sinister, Vice persona would come through if I just let them the three of them look serious and have the baby look almost actively cute.  And the baby’s expression worked out great because he looks so cute and googly eyed.

Seckler: What is your motivation for being provocative?

Buck: I have respect for the people I photograph. I think I successfully strike a balance between reflecting who the person is exactly and my own ideas about life. It’s an exercise in subtly and sophistication. It’s like my photo of Gary Oldman with red all over his face. It looks like he ate a person; it’s cannibalistic, but it is actually from him sticking his face in a pie. It was shot very cleanly. He’s not making a crazy face—it’s a straightforward expression—but it looks violent at the same time. That image is a perfect example of what I’m trying to do in my work. I love sexual imagery, too. I like exploring ideas about violence, but it’s very difficult to get those ideas into a photograph and have it look smart and sophisticated at the same time.

Seckler: What are you trying to tell people in your work?

Buck: I am an individualist. When I first started out, I ignored publicists and did whatever I wanted. That got me in trouble, so now I am respectful to publicists; I make them part of the process. On the surface I am much more agreeable, but I still like to go against the grain. I control things in small ways. I influence the current of ideas, which sometimes leads to sexual or violent references that I would rather explore in my work then in my life.

Seckler: How do you build relationships with your subjects?

Buck: Pete Weintz from the band Fallout Boy said that I knew more about him then half the people who have interviewed him. When I photographed the band Interpol, they said that I knew their names better then most people at their record company. And I think people respond to that respect. Pete Weintz got naked for me because I made him comfortable. He dropped his inhibitions.

Seckler: How do you relate to your subjects? Do you try one idea first and then push the envelope a bit more?

Buck: I am very careful about how I roll out ideas. Sometimes I share them, or if it just involves a simple prop, I will bring it along and spring it on everyone. I am friendly, but careful about how much I interact with people.

Essentially, I am a director. In a way, a portrait with a celebrity is like a medium-level director dealing with a huge star. Even though the director is running the ship creatively, if the celebrity is a bigger star then he or she can control what happens. As the director, I often photograph people who have much more power then I do. They can influence the shoot. I have to be careful about how they perceive me; I have to maintain control.

Seckler: Let’s say the client agrees to do what you want. How do you direct the shoot?

Buck: I work in a general way. As we shoot, I may get more specific in my direction, but if I am general, then they might give me something that I wouldn’t have expected or requested. Sometimes I will literally just say, ‘Do something’ and they will do something that I never even thought about. People have done crazy things when I said ‘Do something.’

Seckler: Like the portrait of Billy Bob Thornton…

Buck: …where he’s peeing? That was totally decided ahead of time. I keep a running list of ideas. Basically I had that idea while I was on set. My best ideas often come when I am shooting. For instance, I was excited for the Vice shoot, so I bet I will use those ideas later. And that Billy Bob portrait was exactly that: I had been shooting a businessman a few years earlier in a field—and I can’t remember if he took a pee in the woods or if I just thought of pee in the background—but I thought it would be interesting because it would change the color of the backdrop. It is a perfect union of vulgarity and beauty. The change in the color of the backdrop makes a subtle visual statement.

Seckler: What are the qualities of a great portrait?

Buck: A great portrait must have vulnerability. If there is no vulnerability, I don’t find it interesting.

Seckler: Why do you think vulnerability is essential?

Buck: Vulnerability draws you in. It’s just like a person who is humble—they make you curious about what they are going to reveal.

Seckler: What do you specifically try to capture?

Buck: I try to capture conflict in my images. I don’t think that’s unusual for a photographer. If your subject is known for one thing, I try to get ideas in there that are the opposite of what the audience expects.

Seckler: Why opposing ideas?

Buck: It’s like the baby in the Vice shoot. My subjects were known for being provocative. Babies are innocent. Vice is exactly the opposite of innocence. Once I had the idea, the execution was about trying to make the photograph feel like a real moment.

Seckler: How do you define your shooting method?

Buck: I have a dry sense of humour. There are also ways in which I frame my subjects that are repeated. My style developed slowly. Later I realized that not having such a distinctive style served me well.

Seckler: What does your work reveal about you? Are you violent or self-destructive?

Buck: I have a self-destructive streak. At a certain point in my career I had to learn not be self-destructive. I did things that hurt my chances of success, or I wouldn’t do things that would help me as a way to undercut myself. I had to overtly choose to be successful.

Seckler: Is most of your work editorial or do you do a lot of advertising?

Buck: In the last few years I have shifted toward advertising. In terms of days of shooting it might be still two-thirds editorial, but my advertising work is substantial.

Seckler: Why did it take you longer to get regular advertising jobs?

Buck: My interests were largely editorial. I came to advertising only after having success as an editorial photographer.

Seckler: Why hadn’t you approached more potential clients?

Buck: If I could do one thing differently, it would be to [go back in time and] think seriously about advertising earlier in my career.

Seckler: Isn’t advertising more rigid then editorial? Does that lack of flexibility conflicted with your style?

Buck: Advertising is more specific, but I tend to get hired for shoots I’m appropriate for. Advertising has got to look good in any [lighting] condition, so you have to ace it. It is more fun to shoot advertising because it is technical, but they want my style, so I have to retain a sense of self. I am very much a vital part of the process; I am very vocal about who I want and the locations where we shoot.

Seckler: What appeals to you about photographing people?

Buck: The human face is interesting. People are interested in faces and body language. In a way, making images is my way of connecting with people.

Seckler: How would you shoot your own self-portrait?

Buck: I did a self-portrait for Esquire where I photographed myself with a black eye. It was violent. I also did another with a stuffed toy elephant coming out of my fly, which was sexual. An earlier self-portrait showed me nude—so there you go, sex and violence.

Written by T.K. Dalton
Edited by Jesi Khadivi

Belgian photographer Kurt Stallaert imagery is as broad as it is idiosyncratic. He shoots fine art, fashion, advertising, and more recently motion pictures. His work is united by a shadowy cheer and quirky humor in striking images. For these reasons, and because of his inexhaustible drive, his work is distinctive and has earned him dozens of major ad campaigns and from many top industry publications. Few of his images demonstrate his creative prowess and his tenacity on the set more than our featured image which was featured on the cover of Luerzer’s Archive.

Advertisements for paint companies are typically about as interesting as watching paint dry. This campaign for Belgium-based paint company Levis certainly splashed new color on the genre. Ad agency TBWA had the idea of promoting the “Fashion for Walls” concept (paint colors inspired by the latest catwalk trends) somewhat literally: turn the paint into a dress. The idea was brilliant and the execution of creating the image had to be similarly brilliant or it would fall flat. Stallaert approached the project initially thinking CGI was the answer but quickly realized that that technology was best for reproducing something that already exists and that wasn’t the case here. Once the decision was made to do everything in camera he started out by putting fabric on a mannequin and blowing it in different directions with a wind machine to get an idea for basic shapes that could be made with the “paint dress.” Once he and the ad agency were happy with a shape they proceeded to get down to the dirty work.

Stallaert and his team built a basic set consisting of two Chimera soft boxes attached to one Broncolor power pack each. One soft box was placed about three feet directly above the mannequin (which was used in place of the real model ) and the other about 12 feet to the left of the camera position at about four and a half feet above the mannequin. A Hasselblad with an 80mm lens and a Phase One P45+ digital back was brought in for image capture. After the gear was in place came the plastic tarp. The whole set was meticulously covered in plastic to prevent any of the splashing paint from wrecking the gear. Once the set was done came the fun part: the team proceeded to throw about 25 gallons of red paint at the mannequin as Stallaert snapped image after image of mid-air paint mayhem. The goal was to get a range of splashes that could then be melded together in Photoshop to create a whole dress. Afterwards they setup a duplicate lighting setup with a human model and created images that would be composited onto the paint dress.

The shoot went as planned and the client was happy with how things turned out but Stallaert and his creative partners at TBWA weren’t quite satisfied with the shape of the paint dress. So a week of work was scrapped to start the whole process over again. The second shoot fortunately produced a more perfectionist pleasing range of paint shapes. They used the paint images from the second shoot along with the original model shots to create the final image in Photoshop.

The amount of planning and dedication Stallaert gave to the Levis campaign is no less then what he puts into a personal project. He recently shot a big budget personal shoot based around the concept of children with large bodybuilder type bodies. He captured these beings, existent only in the world of Photoshop of course, in somewhat surreal situations—carrying each other like surfboards, oddly squeezed into a housekeeping uniform, or seated at a card table with bulging legs visible and Bicycle cards swallowed by their tan, oiled hands. The personal project began as a passion, and evolved; Stallaert says the same thing about his start in the business, which he calls typical. “You have to be a little bit lucky to get the good jobs and to make good pictures. Yet continuously, I’m looking for new techniques, new evolutions, that’s something I have to do to do all time. I don’t want to find a technique and to keep this technique for the rest of my life.”

Stallaert was interviewed by our Editor Zack Seckler about his career and his craft:

F STOP: Let’s start talking about the image we’re featuring, the Levis image how did you created this image?

Stallaert: Every year or so European paint manufacturer Levis asks a famous designer to create some special paint colors for their Fashion for Walls concept. So this ad was created to promote their new color. It was a rather difficult job for me. When I saw the layout I was immediately thinking about 3D in combination with real paint. But CGI is good to reproduce something which already exists and then mix in something new. But this was a shape which had to be invented. It’s wasn’t a good option to use CGI so I decided to shoot everything in camera. I started out using fabric to get a basic idea for shapes we could eventually create with paint. The fabric was only used as a guide to creating realistic shapes that would ultimately be made with real paint.  We used the fabric to give a rough idea to show the client what kind of shape we wanted to make and once we agreed on that then we started with paint. We used wind machines blowing into the fabric to create an elegant and natural feeling. Ultimately the fabric shapes ended up being much too simple so we threw a lot of paint also in the air with different intensities and different amounts of paint in the bottles. We also threw it on a female mannequin to see how it would look on a real person. All these little things we used to make this model.

F STOP: Tell me about the actual throwing of the paint. It must have been very messy.

Stallaert: It was a mess. The stage was full of paint. Lamps, lighting, everything was full of paint because you cannot control it. We threw it and then it just splashes down everywhere. We’d laid lots of plastic down, of course, but it was quite a mess.

F STOP: The main part of the ‘paint-dress’ is so smooth especially where her thigh and leg area is how did you accomplish that?

Stallaert: It’s almost one shot.

F STOP: Really?

Stallaert: Yeah. The middle part is almost one shot and then you have little parts that are left when it came out of the can. The left and the right side are little splashes but the middle is almost one shape.

F STOP: Why do you think you were chosen to do this project by the ad agency?

Stallaert: I am somebody who jumps into a project and just goes for it, and I am not happy when it is not good enough. This project we had to go as far as we could. It was quite a hard job. In the beginning we had another shape we created for the paint dress and after retouching the client was already happy but neither the creative team nor I were happy so we had to restart everything. It was almost one week’s work for nothing. They didn’t like that a lot, but now they are very happy they restarted it. I have a good feel for sensual images that are not too perfect. My images are not too retouched. We do a lot of retouching but I’m not the kind of photographer that’s going to make images look too retouched. This is an image that has a natural feel to it, it’s not too perfect. I do not like images that are too perfect, I don’t feel that they are realistic.

F STOP: How did you achieve that not too perfect look?

Stallaert: We left in little imperfections, not perfectly smooth areas, shadows that don’t look perfect. Like under the hands to the right, those types of dark imperfect areas. If it was perfect it would look more fluid and more uniform. But here you feel that it’s realistic. I didn’t want to make the shape exactly like a woman’s body either so that you body takes away attention from the overall look. Under the breasts you feel her shape much more, but I didn’t want to do it everywhere because then it becomes too easy. This had to be more elegant and fashionable without being too sexy.

F STOP: Let’s talk about how you started off as a photographer.

Stallaert: Like a lot of photographers, I suppose, it was a hobby. I think you have to be a little bit lucky to get the good jobs and to make good pictures. It’s still a passion, photography. I never feel like I am working. Yet continuously, I’m looking for new techniques, new evolutions, that’s something I have to do all the time. I don’t want to find a technique and to keep this technique for the rest of my life. Photography is an evolution and that’s what I like.

F STOP: Now when you say techniques, what are some of the techniques that you are referring to? Are you talking about lighting or retouching…?

Stallaert: It’s a combination of everything. In general I adapt my technique, my lighting and my feel of the idea. Especially when I am shooting for advertising. The idea is most important and then the picture has to explain the idea as well as possible. What is quite important in advertising is that you work in the fashion of the work and the client and not in the fashion of what you want to do yourself. I have pro bono for that and my artistic work for that. When I am working for a client it’s a combination of working together with the creative.

F STOP: The Levis campaign we’ve featured was done for the European market, which many observe is quite different from the US market. Do you think your imagery translate well a to American advertising?

Stallaert: I think my images are quite creative and not very classic. I have the impression that the American market is a little more classic.

F STOP: Now what do you mean by classic? Do you mean conservative?

Stallaert: Maybe a little less humour, more…

F STOP: More obvious humour?

Stallaert: Yeah I think so.

F STOP: So I want to ask you a bit about your television work, how did you get into that?

Stallaert: It started from a client that wanted to shoot stills and film. I proposed to do the film portion and they agreed to give me a shot. It was not a very difficult job as I am used to directing a lot of my models. It is completely different though. You work with a bigger team, a lot more people who have influence on the project.

F STOP: Did you feel like the technical side was fairly similar to shooting stills.

Stallaert: Yeah the camera the lights, that’s something I understand. I see if it’s good or not and I can ask to change it, it’s very much like working as a photographer. I tell my assistants how I want the light and they make those changes.

F STOP: Earlier in our conversation you mentioned how people are almost always in your images. What is it that you like about photographing people?

Stallaert: I think it is the human contact. When they ask me to make a still life shot, even for a simple thing, I am even more stressed then when they ask me to shoot several people together.

F STOP: What images are your most proud of in your career thus far?

Stallaert: The bodybuilders series in my personal work is my favourite because I like the feel of the images and the subject matter. The images are in normal situations, it’s not a bodybuilder flexing on a stage, it’s something more realistic. These are some of the first images I’ve created that I’d like to put in my living room. It’s not easy to make an that I’d like to look at everyday.

F STOP: How did you create the bodybuilder images?

Stallaert: First, like usual, I’m looking for good locations, good casting, perfect styling. Once all of that is together on the shoot day I first put the bodybuilders in place and photographed them in certain positions. Then I put the children in the same place. My camera didn’t move when we were shooting so it was easy to composite the children over the bodybuilders’ bodies. I used a combination of daylight and artificial lighting.

F STOP: How long does it take you to create a project like the bodybuilders?

Stallaert: The idea took me the longest. I had several ideas and I of course only want to use the strongest idea. Once I have the idea finalized it can go quite fast. I think it was done in one month.  I was looking for locations, checking locations, checking people, casting, checking stylists. I was lucky because my production company which I use quite a lot was helping me with all of this. So they did location hunting and then I checked everything. The shooting was during two days and then retouching for four or five days, almost one week. It is quite expensive, but I really wanted to do it and make it right. I enjoy investing in my own projects. The feeling I get when people buy my images, it’s so special to feel they really like my personal work and vision. I am not thinking in a commercial way when I am making my own images, instead it’s a little bit like a musician making his own music.

To see more of Stallaert’s work visit his website.

Written by T.K. Dalton
Edited by Jesi Khadivi

At age 35, Michael Levin left behind his original career as a restaurant owner to experiment with an inexpensive digital camera. Just a few years later, he has been called a “rising star” by Focus magazine which called his images “soulful and evocative,” and year after year, the prize panels agree. Levin has been recognized as Photographer of the Year by the International Photography Awards and at Prix de la Photographie. He regularly places in fine art and book categories in these competitions, as well as in the PDN Photo Annual.

Levin cites painter Mark Rothko as an early influence, as well as Michael Kenna. The latter may come as no surprise, perhaps, given the extended exposure and eerie landscape of our featured image. Levin praises Kenna’s surreal images. “I wondered how this guy could make a tree or a stick in the mud look so unbelievable,” he says.  Patience and commitment temper Michael Levin’s meteoric rise in the photography world; they are also the hallmarks of his approach on location.

Levin’s editing process is intense. Our featured image was created during a three-week long photography excursion through Italy; it was the only image he selected for his portfolio (an alternate angle and a video of the location follow below). His dedication to his subject matter is equally intense “I fired off shots all day and all night for two days,” he says of photographing this one pier. “I had driven past a thousand docks, this one was different,” he says. He used a Linhof 4×5 camera loaded with black and white film and a Schneider 80mm XL lens. The lens was stopped down during the twenty minute exposure and only basic Photoshop work was used to clean up the image. Levin admires the beauty of film but unfortunately for him in this case most of the two days shooting this scene could have been spent relaxing in his hotel room “The final photograph turned out to be very first shot I took at night,” he says.

His career, which began only a few years ago, has the velocity that any budding photographer would dream of. With only five photographs in his portfolio he was approached by IKEA about turning his images into posters; two years later they had sold hundreds of thousands of posters worldwide. Before long, a gallery owner wanted to represent him. As much as he draws on painting, there is something of the poet in him: he is spare in what he includes, unsparing in what he discards. This, too, is part of his success. “My dealers appreciate how I edit,” he says. “Photographers have a hell of a time editing their own work. They might have two great photographs, but eight of them are mediocre and they bring down the level of those two great photographs.”His business sense, from his previous life as a restaurateur, has helped him rise from obscurity as much as talent. “My job is to promote my work as much as possible. That’s the reason that the work is successful,” he says, telling the story of pitching his first book to a popular UK-based publisher that is inundated with book proposals every week. “I sat down and really thought about why he should publish my book and wrote a cover letter to him which I FedEx’d with the rest of the package. About two weeks later I got an e-mail from him saying that the work was interesting and [he] wanted to talk about it further.” He sent only one book pitch: “He was the guy I wanted.”Levin is proud to stand apart from the crowd, whether on a publisher’s desk or an Italian pier. Fondness enters his voice as he recalls sleeping in his car, compelled to capture the image that had made him stop at this pier of all piers, busy even at 4AM. “[The fishermen] were wondering what the hell is this guy doing,” he said.A strange scene to be sure, but strange scenes, especially abroad, have always engaged him.  “I can remember driving around on the family trips down to the US and it seems like I was always looking at an interesting rock rather than a landmark,” he says. “I like looking at these very common views with an uncommon sort of approach spending time in places that easily go unnoticed interests me. There are certainly times when I am photographing and I might happen to be in an area where a lot of photographers are, like a beautiful sunset and I am always pointed in the other direction.”

Levin was interviewed by our Editor Zack Seckler about his career and his craft:

F STOP: Let’s start by discussing the featured image, Zebrato. Please tell us about how you created this photograph.Levin: It was shot in Italy during the Spring of ’05.  I went on a three-week excursion through the country just to shoot. I took hundreds of photographs, but this ended up being the only shot that made it into my portfolio.F STOP: From the entire trip?

Levin: From the entire trip. I have a box full of 4×5 negatives here that will never see the light of day. It was early in my photographic career and I was still trying to figure out composition and the technical aspects of long exposure photography. I think the editing process is often overlooked by photographers in general. I’m really tight about editing and at the time that was the only one that made sense to me.

F STOP: What made sense for you about it?

Levin: It was clear that it would be a harmonious addition to my then small portfolio. The clouds are very dramatic in that image. I originally didn’t want the fishermen sitting at the end of the dock, but in the end it actually turned out to be quite amazing. He adds both  context and mystery to the image.

F STOP: How did you come across this location?

Levin: The locations aren’t actually listed on any of my photographs anymore because I don’t really know where I am a lot of the time. I’m not focused on capturing vistas of known locations, it’s the subject matter that is most important. I find my locations by chance, just driving around and surveying. I found the Zebrato location about half way through my three week trip. I thought it was special at the time. I spent two days photographing that pier from slightly different angles. With long exposure photography you never know what you are going to get with cloud formations, so I fired off shots all day and all night for two days. The final photograph turned out to be the very first shot I took at night.

F STOP: So you didn’t know it at the time but you could have stopped at the first shot and gotten it.

Levin: Exactly, and slept in a hotel as opposed to sleeping in my car.

F STOP: It’s impressive that you dedicated yourself to spend two days just photographing one location. Why did you decide to do that?

Levin: I’m the kind of person that when I need to capture a scene I’ll do whatever it takes. If I need to stay there all day in my car in the pouring rain in order to get the shot, I’ll do it. I had driven past a thousand docks, this one was different. I was engaged with the texture of the dock and those two upright posts really separated this from the others. There is a commitment with every photograph, but some you just feel more strongly than others.  That was the case with this photograph.

F STOP: Were there people around? I mean, you were there for two days.

Levin: There were people around and I’m sure they were thinking ‘what the hell is this guy doing?’ This location was quite remote and these guys were just fishing all day long. They just sort of walked by me and nodded quizzically while speaking Italian to me.

F STOP: You mentioned that you were trying to get fluctuations in tide and the ambient light throughout the day. The final image was shot at night. Did you know you wanted a night shot?

Levin: Typically I have the most success at nighttime with these images; you’re able to have longer exposures with the low light and no harsh shadows. I took photos during the day because I was there and it was a very remote location, it wasn’t like I could go for coffee or anything. The 5am light is what I was most interested in capturing.

F STOP: Why does the water appear to be white?

Levin: That’s the way I visualized the scene, white water with a strong black line reaching for infinity. I tend to try and visually create dramatic scenes from very pedestrian views.

F STOP: Aside from the equivalent of dodging and burning did you do anything else to the image in Photoshop?

Levin: No, that’s it. But I certainly spent a long time trying to manipualte the tones in the clouds. When you look at the video, you can see it’s a very dark and brooding sky in real life. There was a storm brewing in the distance and I think this adds the drama to the image.

F STOP: Did you  always do twenty minute exposures, or did you mix it up a bit?

Levin: I mix it up all the time. This was metered for twenty minutes. It was getting dark out and I needed that extra time to expose the film properly.

F STOP: Moving on, how did you get your start in photography?

Levin: I owned a restaurant for five years and sold it when I was 35. Around that time I bought a digital Canon D60 camera and started shooting in color, without direction, when I had time away from the restaurant. I was shooting everything and was naturally leaning towards minimalism with some of the photos. The only art that had really moved me at the time was Mark Rothko.  Beyond that, I didn’t really have an art background. Soon after that I discovered Michael Kenna. That is where I think the seed was planted, that style of photography. I wondered how this guy could make a tree or a stick in the mud look so unbelievable. I took some time off after selling the restaurant and became more engaged with photography. When I started printing my photographs at a local lab, a couple of gallery owners saw them and asked to represent me. At that point, I only had five or so photographs! About 6 months later, a buyer from IKEA wanted to license two of my photographs for posters. It was like a year after I had started shooting and all of a sudden IKEA wanted to do a deal with me, a little surreal at the time.  At that point, I realized that I actually could make a real go at photography. A couple of years later and IKEA had sold hundreds of thousands of posters all over the world.

F STOP: You have been incredibly successful in such a short amount of time. You have a book out and you’ve won all these awards and have all this recognition. How does it feel to go from having a hobby and then a year later having IKEA make thousands of posters?

Levin: It feels great. It turned from a hobby into a business very quickly and fortunately I had the business background and ability to make that transition. As for the awards I do feel humbled, I work very hard at it, there’s no doubt.

F STOP: What kind of process do you use to choose your locations?

Levin: I’ve had businesses that have allowed me the freedom to travel as that was always a priority in my life. The great thing about photography is that it facilitates this perfectly. I had initially started shooting around the Pacific Northwest and I soon wanted another venue. The next place I went to was France and then England. I recognized that before I could go and photograph these places, I would have to market my work and get a business model in place. I spent a lot of time on that, which eventually enabled me to go on these trips financed by my sales. Fortunately, the market was really good back then. The photographs seemed to resonate with people and they were selling. I would fly off to France for a month and then just drive around and shoot. Every trip I would get a couple of photographs, so I have fifty photos from about twenty trips. I should mention that although I have 50 B&W images in my portfolio I also have quite a few color landscape images that I feel are equally as strong. I’ll eventually do a show with this work but it’s not quite ready yet. The majority of the work was done with a 8×10 camera in Iceland back in the summer of ‘07. Iceland really is this mythical place and you just look at the landscape and wonder if it is real.  I have since travelled through South Korea and Japan several times.
F STOP: What was the moment when you decided to start taking the long exposures that define your work?

Levin: It was my first photograph, “Ferry Docks,” which was taken here in British Columbia back in the Fall of ‘03. I went to this location and photographed it like a normal snapshot image and as the light was fading I did longer and longer exposures. It was then that I realized that was the look I was going for.

F STOP: So you fell in love with that because your affinity for minimalism?

Levin: It was a starting point. It better enabled me to realize the potential for this style of photography. Images can really take on a painterly quality at this point and I think that’s where the Rothko inspiration became evident to me.

F STOP: You mentioned starting off with a digital camera, but ultimately all your work is shot on 4×5 film.

Levin: I started with the digital camera and I was doing little prints with it that were around  8”x8”. The quality was great (at least I thought so at the time), but if I wanted to make anything bigger it would start to get pixelated and I didn’t like that at all. I saw Michael Kenna’s work in a gallery in San Francisco and it was the first time I had ever been exposed to “real” photographs. They also had  30”x40” photographs that were very dramatic and I thought it elevated the photograph to a whole other level. It was at that moment that I realized I needed to get a film camera in order to achieve this level of visual quality.

F STOP: And why black and white?

Levin: I think there is more flexibility with black and white as far as manipulation goes, I don’t mean Photoshop but rather the ability to expand on tonal ranges and have them still look real. I’m more apt at creating emotion in a B&W print, rather than color.

F STOP: Tell me about your subject matter. It’s almost all natural landscape without people in it. Why have you chosen that?

Levin: I can’t quite pinpoint it. I’m certainly attracted to symmetry in nature and in man-made structures. It’s hard to describe it, more of a intuitive feeling when I see it. Whatever the subject matter is, I want to try to elevate it from beyond a level of being pedestrian. I feel compelled to reveal it’s own private beauty.

F STOP: Do you think you are going to stick with this subject matter for awhile longer?

Levin: Well I think the subject matter is vast and I have lots to explore. I really don’t think in terms of series or themes, whatever engages me I will continue to photograph. I do mix it up, you just haven’t seen it yet!

F STOP: You use Photoshop for the equivalent of dodging and burning. Have you ever thought about using Photoshop to composite in a better looking cloud or something like that, or does that just not appeal to you?

Levin: Even though I have been using Photoshop for five years, I’m still somewhat limited. So when I am out there I take tons of negatives so I do get those great clouds. I have a number of images that are good but not great on account of the clouds or tide level and I will eventually go back and reshoot those until I get it right. I don’t think I could pull it off as far as compositing images goes. I read your interview with Darran Rees and the work these guys do is incredible, it’s so beyond my skill level in the Photoshop department. I do take out some minor things in images if I find them distracting.

F STOP: Is there a message that you want the viewer to take away for your artwork?

Levin: No. These are simply photographs I take because I like to take them and I think they capture the spirit of my experience there.

F STOP: Would you say you are almost exclusively a fine art photographer?

Levin: Yes.

F STOP: Do you have any interest in doing anything else?

Levin: I’d like to be a better classical guitar pIayer! I’ve done a few private commissions, but if someone said, “here is the product, go take some nice photographs” then I am not interested at all. I like doing exactly what I’m doing.

F STOP: It’s really impressive how quickly you’ve found success and that you’re represented by so many galleries. How did you begin your relationships with these different galleries worldwide?

Levin: I approached photography as a business. Initially I interviewed two different gallery owners here in Vancouver to find out how it all worked.  I asked them what they thought the strengths and weaknesses of their artists were and what they looked for when they review portfolios.  These basic questions gave me a good foundation to go on and learn about the art world. I then became represented by a gallery here in Vancouver and I aimed for Toronto next. At the time I had about ten photographs in my portfolio. Looking back, it seems quite comical that an artist with ten photographs gets representation. When I sent out a CD, I spoke of my dedication to the work and the presentation was paramount. I asked a lot of questions at first. Fortunately, I am interested in a type of photography that a lot of people seem to respond to. There are a lot of great photographers out there who take amazing images, but they don’t seem saleable. I also started entering photography competitions and it helped that I won. I received first place in the first contest that I entered. Then I became aware of other competitions and started submitting my work and the big one was the International Photography Awards in 2006 where I won Nature Photographer of the Year. That started opening up a lot of doors. I started getting magazine articles and people calling me who wanted to represent my work. I have been fortunate, but I also work at it continuously, which is important as a fine art photographer. My job is to promote my work as much as possible.  That’s a big factor in why the work has been successful

F STOP: Tell us about the process of publishing your book.

Levin: I started thinking about a book in October of 2007, but I only had about 40 photographs at the time. I knew that by the time any publisher would respond I’d probably have another 7 images and that would be enough for a book. When I thought about publishers I thought Europe would be the best place to start as I already had presence in the US and Canada. I thought if I went through a European publisher they would be able to elevate awareness of my work in a market that I had a small footprint in. I searched out publishers and decided that my number one choice was Dewi Lewis Publishing in the U.K.I sat down and really thought about why he should publish my book and wrote a cover letter and included about 10 small prints. About two weeks later I got an e-mail from him saying that the work was interesting and wanted to talk about it further. At that point I was confident that we could make something happen. The highly unusual thing about this is that I had only sent out one proposal, so I was extremely fortunate. I had only sent out one book pitch because they were the publishers I wanted.

F STOP: What was the reason you gave him for why he should publish your book?

Levin: At the time that I wrote the letter I had won that International Photography Award. It was the 2006-2007 season and there was momentum behind my name and he was aware of that. I told him that I would work hard at marketing the book in North America and try to get as much press as possible. So, less than a year later the book has won some great awards and is almost sold out.

To see more of Michael Levin’s work visit his website.

Written by T.K. Dalton

Edited by Jesi Khadivi

Whether shooting Jason Kidd for Sports Illustrated or the anonymous maintainers of Times Square’s “guts” for the New York Times Magazine, Stephen Wilkes frames his subjects to reveal a truth about them. He captures the humanity of a glistening Chinese skyscraper, of an Ellis Island office a century removed from the last huddled masses it welcomed. His impressive career encompasses editorial, advertising, and fine art work of equal skill and renown. All are united by his attention to detail and his keen sense of the eye’s hidden rhythm.

Time, Portfolio, and Vanity Fair are just a few of the many glossies featuring Wilkes’ images. His photojournalism transitions naturally into fine art, which he approaches as social documentary. This was nowhere more true than in his images of contemporary China, a country he had last seen in 1978, just two years after the end of the Cultural Revolution.  “Whole cities had changed, they weren’t even recognizable,” he says. “Because of my unique perspective, I had a true concept of what China was versus what China has become. One of the things I was drawn to was humanizing the factory worker.” His method of humanizing the worker relied on capturing what he calls the “epic quality” of China’s factory buildings and their cavernous, glimmering interiors. A sense of uniformity pervades the images, with shimmering steel filling a room populated by workers wearing dull orange shirts. Carefully framed and symmetrically balanced the human subjects seem as vulnerable as Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times. The image on his website set outdoors echoes this symmetry, while foregrounding the loneliness of the single worker living—for that that moment—between the buildings.

His approach to fine art, editorial work, and even advertising is informed by his understanding of photography as “the recognition of a rhythm in the world of real things.” This idea, featured on his website and excerpted from a Henri Cartier-Bresson essay, runs throughout his work. It is nowhere clearer than in our featured image, a shot of the Highline that appeared in New York Magazine. The shot appealed to Wilkes because of the “intimacy” it offered with the buildings. But shooting from rooftops didn’t satisfy him. “Everything was a little too high,” he said. “I was losing the intimacy.” So he shot from a cherry picker at points throughout the day, then worked with a retoucher to electronically blend the images together. He wanted to capture the floating, expansive feeling that had drawn him to the Highline to begin with, and settled on a 17^th Street location. This ended up being key, as the other challenge of the shoot was finding an effective transition point between day and night shots. Wilkes picked a good spot.

Wilkes shot this image using a 39 megapixel digital back on a 4 x 5 camera. He embraces large-format photography because it gives his all-important details greater depth. “So much of my work is about levels of story,” he says.  He rotated the camera manually on a tripod throughout the day as he shot tons of images of the Highline while different street scenes unfolded within his frame (“The last thing you want to do is come back to the studio and have this great picture but realize you’re missing something”). He varied his exposure throughout, keeping a constant f-stop but varying the shutter speed to allow for proper exposure as the sun set. Periodically he and his retoucher, who was in the cherry picker with him, would load images onto a laptop and start creating rough comps to make sure he was getting what he needed. The final image was created by simply stitching together multiple images in Photoshop.

Wilkes’s success is due in no small part to his executive producer. She knows him well; in fact, they’ve been married 26 years. “People either think it is great or that we are nuts,” he says. “But it works for us.” Long-standing relationships have been crucial to his success, as a lesson he learned from his father demonstrates: treat every job like your first one. The Highline shot underscored the joy of working with supportive colleagues. “The great thing about working with people who trust you to do what you do [is] you can take something that is really interesting but take it to another level,” he said. “That’s always exciting when you can take something that’s unfamiliar for some people, and familiar for others and make something dramatically different.”

Wilkes was interviewed by our Editor Zack Seckler about his career and his craft:

F STOP: The genesis of this idea for your Highline image came from a shot that you had actually done several years earlier, right?

Wilkes: Changing time in a single photograph is a very interesting concept. The genesis of this idea really happened many years ago when I was working for Life magazine on “a big picture”. They hired me to photograph Claire Danes and Leonardo Dicaprio as Romeo and Juliet, and I had an opportunity to photograph them along with the entire cast and crew in Mexico City where they were filming. We spent about four days waiting to actually get the entire cast and crew into this one photograph and Life had asked me to create a panoramic gatefold.  When we got to the set, I realized that the set was actually a huge square. So I decided to take the square and break it apart, ala David Hockney, using individual images. I ended up shooting over 250 images that I pasted together by hand. The interesting time aspect came into play when in the centre of the photograph is where the stars are, Leonardo Dicaprio and Claire Danes, they are literally in a moment of embrace when everybody else, cast and crew, is surrounding them. To the right side of the photograph is a huge mirror, probably 20 feet in height. I asked them to kiss for the reflection image. So the reflection does not match the centre embrace, they are kissing in the reflection. When you look at the photograph quickly you think the image in the mirror is a reflection. But then you realize that the reflection is a time change and a completely different moment. That idea stayed with me for a while. 

F STOP: A lot of your work deals with time: blurred motion and long exposures. What appeals to you about it?

Wilkes: It’s true of some of my work, especially the China series where I shoot long exposures so you don’t see people. I am interested in creating voids in physical space. If I am shooting architecture I want your focus to be on the architecture. Usually, It’s just a single element that I am drawn to. I’m interested in scale and the context of humanity within that scale. A lot of my China work delves into that. By the same token, I do shoot single decisive moments. I look for a certain type of spontaneity. I’ve been known to wait hours to get it, patience is a photographers secret weapon. I work on both ends of that spectrum, it really depends on the story I am trying to tell and what I am photographing. 

F STOP: How did you become interested in photography and what was your path to becoming a professional photographer?

Wilkes: My first photographs were taken through a microscope when I was twelve years old. That shot of a paramecium sort of changed my life. The combination of seeing a microscopic world and actually holding a photograph in my hand for the first time excited me in a way I had never felt about anything. I had a portrait done of me and my twin brother by a candle light at our bar mitzvah and I remember looking at the photo and thinking it was the coolest thing I had ever seen, I wanted to learn from this guy. So I ended up working for the photographer for almost a year in Jamaica Queens every Saturday. By the time I was 15 I already knew how to make the wedding albums, where the prints were made, and how to do the double exposure of the couple in the champagne glass.  I started my own little business and I had cards printed up.  By the time I was 16, I was doing weddings, special events, whatever I could do as the local kid in the neighbourhood. I used to go to people and say listen I know I’m young, take advantage of me while I’m young an innocent. I had a pretty good reputation, and I was getting work. I published a photograph in Cover Girl magazine when I was 18. I had taken photographs of  a model, which she used to enter a contest with the magazine. When she won they called and told her they wanted me to re-shoot the photo in color for the cover.

I’ve been blessed with great teachers and mentors my whole life. I had incredible professors during my college years at Syracuse University’s Newhouse School of Communications. When I left school I became Jay Maisel’s assistant and after a year I became his associate, which was when I started shooting my own jobs. Jay was my mentor, and  of the many lessons he taught me the most important was just how hard you have to work to make it in this business. I was Jay’s associate for 2 years, and with Jay’s blessing ventured out on my own. I do feel that the more you practice the luckier you get. I feel there is a direct relationship in any type of mastery with how much time you put into something. I have good fortune to be as excited today as I was when I was 13. That’s what this picture is about, in a way I continue to challenge the idea of what a photograph can be. I’m always interested in doing something different and I think sometimes people are sort of surprised when they think they have me pigeon holed and then I do something completely different. I am interested in pursuing all aspects of the art.

F STOP: Your work seems to oscillate between produced images for big commercial clients and a more intimate photojournalistic style. Tell me about that dichotomy.

Wilkes: I take pictures and then I make pictures. I love doing both; I love discovering something and photographing it. On the other hand as I have grown as a professional, I have developed the craft and the professionalism of learning how to produce a job. I think the basis of even being able to execute jobs like that comes down to abilities to work with people and create an environment where people feel comfortable and relaxed

F STOP: Where do you think your interest in these two modes of photography stem from?

Wilkes: My core philosophy about photography came from journalism. I was a street photographer; I used to go out for hours at a time, that ‘s where I really cut my chops.  Street shooting is like being a hunter; you can see how a moment builds. You can sense it happening. I think when you develop your eye through the study of gesture, movement and human nature; the ability to create those moments eventually translates to you as a director. When I work on big commercial jobs, I direct the movement and the moment, so to speak. But if you don’t understand the movement and the nature of human gestures then my pictures don’t have that energy or sense of realism. I think it all starts at being a real student of photojournalism.

F STOP: Where did the interest in doing advertising develop?

Wilkes: It just became a challenge for me. People used to look at my work early on and they couldn’t even realize I was lighting. That was kind of interesting, there was a perception that I had incredible luck all the time. When in reality I had discovered how to light and produce images that look found. But then rather than go away from that idea, I felt like I could even do something more. As my career began to grow I began doing even bigger production photographs for major campaigns. I remember doing the launch campaign for a new Kodak film called Ektar, I had to photograph a guy propelling down the top of the totem pole in Monument Valley. It was an enormous production. We had these professional stunt guys dropped via helicopter on top of this 600 ft high stone monolith, there was only one place in the United States that makes a single piece of rope 600 feet long that a climber could repel with. It happened to be in New York City. There were amazing challenges, yet we pulled it off. Each project creates its own set of challenges. I think that’s what I love, the challenges. We do so much of the legwork prior to shooting; the easiest part for me is the actual shooting. Once we have done all our homework, I am just living in the moment when I get on set. 

F STOP: Your executive producer is your wife Bette. Did that work relationship develop from a romantic relationship?

Wilkes: Yeah, absolutely. She was a hard driven and well-liked established businesswoman when I first met her. I was really impressed, we were the same age, she asked me what I did and I was like, “Oh, I’m this struggling photographer,” as I was assisting and doing what I could do. She was intrigued by what I did and she said she never saw pictures like my pictures. She always believed we would be successful, and told me I was one of the most ambitious people she’d ever met. When you’re in it, you don’t feel that way about yourself. We shared a one-room apartment for three years and just saved everything we could. Whatever we made we invested back into the business. 

F STOP: Do you know any other photographers with wives or husbands as their executive producers?

Wilkes: People either think it is great or that we are nuts. But it works for us. We’ve  been married for 26 years, so I think it’s worked pretty well.

F STOP: What do you think has been the one thing that has really formed your success?

Wilkes: My dad is a self made man, he made fragrances. He always used to tell me that he would sell a guy on the street two gallons of fragrances when he first started his business. As the business grew he continued to sell that guy those two gallons.  He never forgot the people who helped get him started in business. I always respected that and I guess for me I think if there is one key, it is to treat every job like my first job. I never bank on what I’ve done.

F STOP: Tell us about your fine art work. There seems to be a common line of capturing the architectural ascetics of a place and the character of that place. Do you agree? 

Wilkes: I feel like my work is sort of a social documentary approach to fine art. I mean that’s what I am drawn to. I realized when I created the Ellis Island work I could take pictures that were not only beautiful to look at, but could actually inspire people to change or get involved in something. 

F STOP: And in contrast to places that are forgotten you have the new factories in China. Tell me about that series.

Wilkes: Well China was a very interesting project for me because it was a way for me to look back and look forward at the same time. I had the good fortune in 1978 to go to China, two years after the Cultural Revolution had ended. It was a very important moment for me as a photographer. I was hyper-focused on the idea that I was a photographer and I was really looking to create a body of work that would separate me from a host of other photographers and get a career going. So that series of pictures even to this day is as powerful for me as it ever was. When I went back 27 years later, whole cities had changed, they weren’t even recognizable. I felt the need to photograph what I was seeing. I had a unique perspective on what China was versus what China has become. In the factories, beside the epic scale I was also drawn to humanizing the factory worker.

F STOP: How did you get access?

Wilkes: We wrote letters to a lot of these factories and showed them my work. I think they were very cautious because everybody is worried about being misrepresented. When I shared with them that I was doing pictures that were showing the epic quality of what Chinese factories are, what China has become, many of them acquiesced. I try to keep my China work very open. I don’t want to dictate how you should feel about my pictures. I am just showing it the way I see it, I want to allow the viewer to bring his or her own interpretation to the work.

To see more of Stephen Wilkes’ work visit his website.

Written by T.K. Dalton
Edited by Jesi Khadivi

It seems like everywhere you look recently you see one of Kelvin Murray’s photographs. He’s won eight major awards for his imagery this year alone and you’ve likely come across our featured image in the 2009 PDN Photo Annual or in the 2008 Lürzer’s Archive 200 Best Ad Photographers Worldwide. Despite all of his success Murray is happy to reminisce about his years as a budding photographer. He says he can’t underestimate the impact of the studio where he spent his first ten years. “I am a massive fan of the training that still-life brings you,” particularly, he adds, in the form’s emphasis on the fundamental aspects of images. “It’s great training for the mind as a photographer. You’re looking at every single aspect of your image and I think you can see [the influence of still-life photography] in the ‘Boob’ image.”
The concept for our featured image, or as we’ll call it the “Boob” image, was a collaboration between Murray and his art director at Getty Images. The idea was to focus on peoples’ anxieties around body image. “The original idea was a man in a studio just holding his torso which was kind of a strong upper torso body,” he explains. It’s a solid concept and Murray took it to a new level by using beautiful clean locations and casting people that “were real and might have really thought they wanted a smaller bum or bigger boobs.”

The lighting in this image may seem fairly straightforward (natural light from one large window you might have guessed?) but it’s actually all artificial light from two light sources. Murray had his team climb up onto a platform and place one Elinchrom head attached to two Elinchrom 404 power packs outside of a window in the bedroom. They then put a 1 stop silk between the Elinchrom head and the window to soften the light a bit and proceeded to set both packs to full power. Murray also had a ring flash attached to his Hasselblad V System camera to add a bit of fill light. Numerous flags were then used to help shape the broad light sources and prevent a flat look to the image “the light you take out is as important as what you put in.” Attached to his Hasselblad was a 40mm lens and a Leaf Aptus 75 digital back. The exposure was f/11.5 at 1/60th of a second and the back was set to 50 ISO “the best speed for the Leaf back.” Photoshop work was minimal. Murray adjusted the tones in the image and then added a bit of high dynamic range processing to the image for “a little bit of that digital crunch.”

What’s amply evident in our featured image is Murray’s wry comic touch. His style has been popular both in the UK and across the Atlantic and he’s frequently complimented for the humour in his photography. Interesting enough, however, Murray doesn’t view his work as having a comical feel, he says that’s largely accidental. “It must be how I look at the world. Even the body series, the “boobs” image you’re running, I don’t know if I see it as humorous. It may be humorous to other people but that’s not how I see it,” he says, adding that any smile it evokes is “more of a gentle smile, the acceptance that we all want a body different than the one we’ve got.”

Murray was interviewed by our Editor Zack Seckler about his career and his craft:

F STOP: Can you tell us a little bit about the idea for the featured image?

Murray: The image was a personal shoot from my portfolio. I often give my personal images to Getty images because it gives me the courage to go out and spend more money than I would normally spend on a personal project.  It allows me to have more latitude and freedom in approaching test shots in a more aggressive and colourful way because there is a chance I will recoup some of the money in the end.

F STOP: So it’s a way of tricking yourself?

Murray: It’s a kind of emotional management, if you will.

F STOP: We’re featuring an image from a series about body images. Were they all done on the same location or various locations?

Murray:  I found a location two or three years prior that we never used and decided that I had to find that location again. It had these lovely different coloured rooms that were all vaguely plain without too much human contriteness lingering around. I hadn’t kept notes, but I knew what part of London it was in. I tracked it down and it was such a perfect location I was able to do all four shots in that one location.

F STOP: What was the whole budget was for this personal shoot?

Murray: It probably ended up costing about three and a half thousand pounds.

F STOP: Was it worth it?

Murray: I absolutely love this series and it’s done me very well. It’s in my book and it fits beautifully. It’s winning awards and getting me a lot of good publicity. I almost use Getty as a sort of emotional trigger early on and then I forget about it.

F STOP: It has been featured in quite a few venues, awards and magazines and such. I figure just the publicity you gained from it is worth a lot more then you put into it.

Murray: It’s so easy for me to sort of get lost and run around in circles. I really envy photographers who can manage their emotions to the level where they don’t have all that background noise. But you can argue that all the background noise and doubt is part of the process. If you don’t go through it, you’re taking a short cut. Otherwise you just end up producing something that you already know you can do and not pushing yourself. It’s not going to really move you forward.

F STOP: Where did you get the idea for this series?

Murray: My art director at Getty pulled an ad from a German or Swiss magazine and showed it to me.  It spent about a year on my desk. I had lots of ideas the whole time. I have these massive magnetic orbs up in my studio that are covered in ideas. The idea changed slowly and became a much more involved idea with a room set with different characters and a different body anxieties.

F STOP: What was the original idea?

Murray: The original idea was a man in a studio just holding his torso which was kind of a strong upper torso body.  He was holding something in his hand that made him look stronger.

F STOP: Did you shoot the images on the magazines that each person is holding up in the series?

Murray: Yes, I completely forgot that, when we priced it out I forgot the body parts! We spent around another thousand pounds on those.

F STOP: After you shot the images of the body models did you print them out to look like it was on a magazine?

Murray: It was the other way around, I shot the four hero characters initially. I was pretty specific when I started. The models were cast for one specific body part. But I didn’t want it to be over the top or garish. I wanted it to have a real element of honesty about it. I tried to find people that were real and might have really thought they wanted a smaller bum or bigger boobs or that kind of thing. When I shot the magazines I spoke to the retoucher first. He said the best approach is probably to shoot a magazine that’s not too light, not too dark and add an element of sheen to it. It shows the retoucher where the light is coming from and how to mimic the final image when it goes in.

F STOP: Now it looks like there is a bit of HDR retouching, kind of post brushing feel to it. Is there a degree of HDR in this?

Murray: A little bit for the hero images, but I try to limit it. I don’t like images to look overly Photoshopped.

F STOP: It looks like just a hint of it.

Murray: That’s a good way of putting it. I like to play with colors afterwards, if the colors aren’t right. I try to work with a limited color pallet, which is why that house was so appealing to me. It has these lovely plain walls. We only slightly adjusted some of the colors to fit better together with some of the props. At the end it took quite awhile to explore and I ended up putting a little bit of that digital crunch on.

F STOP: It’s a really beautiful series of images and I think it resonates with a lot of people. Is it a project that you created with the intent of sending to award shows?

Murray: Absolutely. I take these projects on because they are great for my career. I think without them your career isn’t going to blossom in the same way.

F STOP: Can you mention specifically how it has been great for your career?

Murray: I think I’m doing very well with a number of different projects in the awards. And then you start to get calls from people that you haven’t met or worked with before because they’ve seen something you’ve done somewhere. It’s shows people where I am going as a photographer. It’s hard to separate the good from the bad, so winning awards is a good indicator.

F STOP: Has shooting this type of personal work helped get you into that type of category?

Murray: Absolutely, it just to keep your book moving on. Otherwise there’s a strong danger that your book stagnates. If art buyer sees that your book hasn’t changed I think that’s a negative statement, especially in London.

F STOP: How did you get your start as a photographer?

Murray: Even in my early teens I was drawn to 35mm cameras.When I was in university studying psychology I met people that heard I was a very keen photographer and I got a job in a studio in London, a still-life studio. When all my fellow students were off in Thailand or whatever they do I was pushing brooms and picking up burgers in the studio. When I left for university the photographer offered me a job as an assistant. Then I worked my way towards being a still-life photographer.  I think if I had gone to work in a different studio I would have ended up as a different type of photographer. I think the studio you get your first job in has a massive impact on what you see and what you learn. I started off as a still-life photographer working on 8 x 10 large format cameras and I assisted for 4 years and at the end of it the guy I worked for said what you need is ten beautiful 8 x 10 and if you go off into the world with 8 x 10 ‘s you’ll get work and he was right. I worked really hard as an assistant, I would be in the studio whenever I had an idea, and I shot everything. Looking back on it I was manic. Part of it being that I was allowed to use the remnants of shoots. So if the person I was working for had bought five boxes of 8 x 10 for a shoot but only used 3 ½ I was unofficially allowed to use that box and half.  I used to use Polaroid in the same way. When you’re not paying for your resources, everything became very studio based. I did that as an assistant and when I went out on my own it went very well, even though there was a recession going on I was very successful in still-life.  And that’s the way it continued for about ten years. I became more and more frustrated by being locked in this studio but I am a massive fan of the training that still-life brings you. I think I am still influenced by my training in still-life.  If you break everything down to texture, composition, color, you’re much more tuned into the sort of basics of it because you’re so used to working in a black studio where you have to find your background and compose your subjects. In a still-life studio you build it from the ground up and I think it’s great training for the mind as a photographer.  You’re looking at every single aspect of your image and I think you can see that in the “Boob” image.  You can see how I used really simple composition techniques, really simple use of color and texture of the carpet, and the simple pink walls.

F STOP: Do you still consider yourself primarily a still-life photographer?

Murray: No, definitely not. After ten years of doing still-life I became increasingly frustrated with it and I started to move my still-life studio into the outside world. I traveled a lot and I would do still-life in Vietnam or Chilli or Bolivia just really simple stuff. At the time no one was really doing much of that, still-life was very much in the studio. This is about a decade ago. And I came back and built this portfolio of still-life on location, it was more just to show my commercial clients I was trying to achieve new things. I assembled a leather bound print book of still-life on location and I took it around to a few art buyers and they were incredibly excited by it and I began to get still-life on location work straight away on a very commercial scale.  Then it began to move into staged shots with models. I’m definitely not a lifestyle photographer.

F STOP: A lot of your images now seem to have a strong sort of humorous vein through them. Is that planned?

Murray: Definitely, I don’t even know if I would call it humour.

F STOP: It has a subtle quality of humour to it.

Murray: I think you’re right. I did a series of people carrying things.  On my website there is a shot of two boys carrying a portable football goal and there’s these two old men carrying this very modern pink sofa. And these are things that just amused me. I looked out the window and I saw these two boys carrying a goal back from the local sports field. And they were arguing because the one in the front wasn’t carrying it right and the one in the back was really having a go at the one in the front. And it really made me smile so I held that idea and I kind of recreated it. Then I saw a couple carrying a sofa up the road. Obviously someone had out a sofa up in front of their house and they took it and were carrying this sofa up the road. So I recreated that as well, but I took away all the extreme information.  These two men are stepping down these old steps with this very old plain stone wall behind them and they are carrying a pink sofa. That’s when you can really see my still-life roots coming through, in that you see how I strip things away and try to almost put something on a background.

F STOP: So it seems like a lot of your imagery kind of has that humorous kind of touch to it now, would you agree with that?

Murray: It’s not really intentional, I hear that said about my work all the time and it’s always a positive thing, ‘we like the humour in your work,’ but the irony is I don’t tend to see it that way. It must be how I look at the world. Even the body series, the “boobs” image you’re running, I don’t know if I see it as humorous. It may be humorous to other people but that’s not how I see it.

F STOP: You said that it brings a smile to your face…

Murray: But it’s more of a gentle smile, the acceptance that we all want a body different than the one we’ve got.

F STOP: Do you think that there’s a large market for that type of imagery in advertising?

Murray:  I think there is. I picked up an American agent just before the recession and I did a lot of work rather quickly, which then stopped when it got really bad about 18 months ago. One thing I kept hearing about my book was how the American market really likes my softer humour.

F STOP: I have heard people say that during a recession people want to laugh more. Have you noticed people gravitate towards work with a light humorous quality?

Murray: I am quite busy at the moment and I’m working harder for less. People don’t really define it, they don’t say, “hi Kelvin, I’m using you because you make me laugh in a sort of gentle sort of way.” In a nutshell, I think I am benefiting from the fact that people want to feel happy about things and I think my work is instinctively clean.

F STOP: In many feature films, comedies or anything with a humorous nature, there’s a very high-key look to everything. It’s kind of like the signature lighting style for comedy. Now we’ve talked about how you’re images aren’t necessary outright comedic, but they do have a humorous tone to them. Do you approach lighting in a similar way, using a high-key look to communicate that the image in question has a degree of humour in it?

Murray: My lighting varies shoot to shoot, although I think you do see certain themes running through. I tend to be happier with large banks of soft light. For example the shoot of the “boobs” image, it’s a girl’s bedroom, although we changed the tone slightly, we didn’t change the color. Other shots are quite different but on that shot that worked. I used that style the whole way through that series. I had to hire these massive stands to get up that high because the minute you bring the light into the room you change everything. On that “boob” shot there was a large black fiber hanging taking the light off that left hand part of the wall and then there was some smaller blacks doing other little things. You start with a large amount of light then you slowly begin to remove bits of light. That comes really from still-life where you a lot of the time take light away.

F STOP: Do you ever build sets?

Murray:  I don’t build them myself.  But to be honest, I prefer to shoot on location.

F STOP: Why is that?

Murray:  Because it is so hard to get a set really good. I just did something for the BBC and I guess there was water going everywhere and we had to do it on a set, but I spent a lot of time and effort making the set look real. There’s nothing worse than looking at a set in the corner of a cheap studio.

F STOP: You started off in still-life and you’ve transitioned into doing this location work, which is quite different, but you still have incorporated the roots of your still-life start. What’s next for you, what direction are you heading in now?

Murray: I am really interested in moving imagery and I think that’s where our work is going. It turns me on. I’m playing with the idea of covering still shoots with HD video. It’s a little more expensive because you need a track and someone to help assemble the track and get the dolly along the track. But you can do the two things in one environment. It excites me the way people move the camera.  I am not sure how I will incorporate this into my work, but I will just shoot things where it works.

To see more of Kelvin Murray’s work visit his website.

Written by T.K. Dalton
Edited by Jesi Khadivi

Where others see a silhouette Leon Steele sees a new horizon. Through his lens, people become physical features, camels and cows become simple textures in a larger landscape. In a cutthroat industry where sexuality often sells, Steele turns that idea on its head as well: a shoot for an organic food company becomes an artistic statement. “We took these girls into the middle of a field, stripped them naked and turned them into landscape,” he says. The same innovative aesthetic has been utilized in our featured image, a personal piece entitled “Cheekscape.”

For this shot, Steele wanted to create an image that was tack sharp and would be large enough to print several feet wide while preserving fine detail. His technique for maximizing sharpness and creating a large file to print from was to create ten separate exposures of the talent, each one focusing on a slightly different part of the face so, when everything was combined in Photoshop, the result would be extreme sharpness throughout the image. Steele required absolute stillness from the talent, who also happened to be one of his assistants, and all of the lights and equipment to be firmly in place so nothing would move during the ten exposures. Steele used City 5000 power packs instead of his more usual Profoto equipment. He’s a fan of older equipment, despite its risks. (“Damn heavy and will blow your head off if used incorrectly,” he says, “but well worth the extra effort and insurance premium.”)  He used two heads, each with a 5’ strip light and barn doors, running off the packs. The lights were placed partially behind large light blue boards and bounced in such a way to create a very precise moonlit look. A silver reflector was also placed behind the camera to add a bit of detail to the shadows. He placed the camera, a Sinar P2 with a 55mm lens and a Leaf Aptus 75 digital back less then an inch from the subject’s face. Each of the ten exposures were f/16 at 50 ISO. Retouching took five days; the final file weighed in at over two gigabytes.

In all his work, whether it be commissioned or fine-art, Steele sees a single, subtle stylistic vision.  “I try to break things down without too much clutter or fuss.” His trademark as a commercial photographer is finding the beauty in anything. This feature is evident in his personal work as well. Steele strives to view the beauty of a subject from unexpected angles, starting with a portrait of his nephew’s back. Some critics claimed it was not a portrait; it has since been exhibited at the National Portrait Gallery. “There was a big brouhaha about it because [they] debated whether it was a portrait or not. The animal backs and cows have been really well received and they were hugely enjoyable to shoot,” he says.

In fact, many of the successes in his impressive career have only come after untying some serious knots. He calls of an early shoot for New Balance, “a real baptism by fire,” and “the most stressful thing I have done, but the great thing is nothing has come close to that. Nothing is stressful anymore once you’ve been to the point where you’re almost doubled up on your hotel floor thinking that you’re going to mess this shoot up. It’s really good to put yourself through that.” With luck this too worked out—it was early in his career and Steele’s technical skills had some holes. Those holes have been filled in, leaving him free to look for his next new vision. “Often the way I work [is] to catch a glimpse of another angle, which turns what I’m looking at on its head,” he says. “It’s a way of seeing. The technique is the easy part. The magic is in the idea.”

Steele was interviewed by our Editor Zack Seckler about his career and his craft:

F STOP: Please tell us a bit about the Cheekscape photo, our featured image. Where did the idea come from?

Steele: The idea came whilst working on another job. I was photographing an ad for a TV program called Criminal Minds. I remember there was something interesting about the way that the light fell across the subject’s face, and what I tend to do is to hone in on something that interests me during a job and come back to it after the shoot. I was fascinated by the fact that something was going on with the side of this guy’s head. I’ve been shooting abstracted landscapes since 1993 so this kind of imagery is in my sphere of thinking.

F STOP: You’ve also photographed cows and horses in this way too, right?

Steele: The cow/horse landscapes were exhibited here in New York.

F STOP: So basically you just visualized the idea from something you saw on a past shoot?

Steele: I can’t really sit down and predetermine what’s going to happen with my personal work. I happen upon things more instead of siiting down and deciding what I am going to shoot. I love the fact that the things that interest me to shoot are out there waiting to be discovered, and the discovery comes with altering how you perceive

F STOP: Tell us about the technical side of the Cheekscape shot, how did you create the image?

Steele: I wanted to be able to produce a large detailed end image, something that I could do as a large print with amazing detail and sharpness. This meant I couldn’t crop into the image and had to fill the frame. I was about five inches from the side of the guy’s head, and so had an incredibly shallow depth of field. I remember for that particular shot I racked the camera focus ten times from the front of his cheek to the back of his hair and then laid the files together. Everything was absolutely pin sharp and when we blew it up, we got amazing detail in the hair follicles and skin textures. For the blue light, I basically just bounced that light in off two big blue boards which were painted, letting the light come through these tiny little slits to bathe across the model’s face. Cutting the slits give you amazing control of the light because you’re only allowing a little light to come through. I used these two big packs to generate plenty of light and squeezed it through these little gaps on the boards. I am actually not a hugely technical person. For me my lighting techniques are not set in stone. This way you don’t stagnate and you can create new things as you go and happen discover new ways to light subjects. It makes it hard for the assistants because they can’t set things up before you arrive at the studio in the morning.

F STOP: Did you combine the separate images, with their different focal points, in Photoshop?

Steele: We just overlaid layers and brushed them through. That particular shot took a ridiculous amount of time to do. My retouching guy finished it off, but it must have taken maybe four or five days to match them up.

F STOP: What was the size of the file?

Steele: I think that one was probably about 2 .5 GB as a layered file, something like that.

F STOP: Was it shown in any galleries?

Steele: If I do have another landscape exhibition that it may be included in. I think it is really important to get the file size as big as possible because there may come a time when that image may be 10 feet across.

F STOP: I’ve noticed that the backgrounds in a lot of your work is quite subtle. What’s your decision making process for the color for the background?

Steele: I guess I can just feel what’s right for an image. As I am shooting something, I can feel what strength and colour the background needs to be. Most things these days are shot on white and then I’ll wash in the color myself afterwards.

F STOP: So after you shoot you’ll leave some information in the file and fix it up in Photoshop?

Steele: You have to leave some grey in the background, otherwise it’s very difficult to wash color in. The tone and quality of the background needs to be right as you shoot so that your subject matter and the background hold together. After that you can just tweak it slightly in terms of coloration. The trick is to get the photograph looking right in camera, so that retouching is more of a finessing tool as opposed to a rescue mission. Retouchers are usually not photographers as is evident by the amount of overworked crap we are seeing these days. Although a photographer will sit in and direct the retouching there seems to be too many options and no one knows when to say stop.

F STOP: What was your path to becoming a photographer?

Steele: It was my hobby as a kid. It was my mother that decided I was going to be a photographer when I was 14 and that was very intuitive of her. She set me up with a camera and had me get on with it. I absolutely loved it. I was a graphic designer for a little while with an eye towards photography. I left college and moved to London. I worked with an editorial photographer for two and a half years as a full time assistant and then I worked with another guy, an advertising photographer, for another three and a half years. So I did quite a stint as an assistant until I was 26 I think.

F STOP: How old are you now?

Steele: I am 38.

F STOP: So you’ve been a full fledged professional for about twelve years now. Do you do mostly advertising work now?

Steele: 90% of my work is advertising, although I suspect that will change over the next few years.

F STOP: How?

Steele: I would like to put my work out into different areas. Advertising is a really great way to earn a living, but there’s a lot of other great photography out there.

F STOP: So what kind of ideas do you have for yourself for the next couple years?

Steele: I will carry on working in advertising of course, but I’ve been starting to do a lot more portraiture although I am best known for my still life work in the advertising world. Often you get put into one box and that’s where you stay. If I want to carry on doing portraiture then I will need to look into shooting for magazines or the music industry. This may of course create new opportunities in advertising for me.

F STOP: Do you have any interest in exhibiting in galleries?

Steele: I have done and it would be great to do more. I think it’s as cut throat an industry as advertising, however. When I won the National Portrait Gallery’s Prize I was approached by several galleries, but I was very much into my commercial photography and the timing wasn’t right. Back then there was a split between advertising photographers and those who exhibited in galleries. That is not the case now.

F STOP: You just mentioned that the fine art might be as cut throat as advertising is, how have you managed to do so well and last so long in the advertising world?

Steele: I think by not doing exactly what is expected of me. I don’t spend much time looking at everybody else in the industry. Having good agents is hugely important. But Number one is working for a good photographer as an assistant. Once you’ve done that for a decent amount of time, you are ready to move on. It puts you in the right sphere, you start to meet the right people at a young age. You are exposed to the art directors at the studio and you’re soaking up all the information about how to do things by working alongside somebody that is a successful photographer. You also need to develop a way of looking at things that is unique to you. Art directors are looking for something unique in your style and thinking, not just some retouching technique, but a progressive style.

F STOP: How would you describe your style?

Steele: It’s subtle. I try to break things down without too much clutter or fuss.

F STOP: What would you describe as your inspiration for your personal work?

Steele: That’s not easy to answer off the bat. I guess it’s just getting up in the morning and going out and keeping your eyes open. I told you my favourite things are things you kind of happen upon. My inspiration would really just come from looking around. I’ve got a massive collection of art books that inspire me. Although I can’t sit and look at books for too long because I get the urge to get up and do something myself. For example….Right now I am looking out my studio window now and  there is a dwarf child sitting opposite with an old sewing machine. The environment is quite grubby and dirty, but if I brought that kid up here with his beaten up sewing machine into a sanitized environment things would start to happen. This sounds bizarre but he’s really there. I’m not on drugs.

F STOP: What appeals to you about shooting in the studio versus shooting on location and incorporating more of the real world?

Steele: Number one is the control that you have. Across the road there are all sorts of distractions in this kid’s environment right now. If I brought him into the studio, you’d start seeing the textures of his skin, you’d see the textures of his clothes. You hone in on very different things. I would be simplifying things. The fascinating thing for me is just him with this old sewing machine. I love texture, I’m quite anal when it comes to things like that. I want to see lots and lots of detail in things and I don’t want to be distracted by external things.

F STOP: What has been your favourite thing to shoot so far in your career?

Steele: I won the National Portrait Gallery prize years ago. The photograph was of my nephew. It’s just shot with his back to camera, and he looks really old. It won an award for portraiture and there was a big brouhaha about it because the debate was whether it was a portrait or not. The animal backs and cows have been really well received and they were hugely enjoyable to shoot. I tend to earn a living shooting rather dull objects and making them look expensive and beautiful. Advertising is great in that we are paid very well to do the job we do and it allows us the time and funds to continue to shoot personal work. Advertising is a great patron to the arts.

F STOP: What’s been your most challenging shoot?

Steele: That would have to be the New Balance sneaker shoot in New York. I ended up shooting nearly 50 ads over four years. It was a real baptism by fire being early in my career. The other photographer that was in the running for the job was Albert Watson, so I felt a little out of my league from the off. It was challenging because there were a few technical things that I had work out on the hoof. It’s the most stressful thing I have done, but the great thing is nothing has come close to that since. Nothing seems stressful for me anymore. Once you’ve been to the point where you’re almost doubled up on your hotel floor thinking that you’re going to mess up a shoot…with hind sight it’s really good to have been through that.

F STOP: What were the technical things you weren’t sure about?

Steele: This was in the early days of converting color to black and white. And we’re talking shooting color film, and converting that to a black and white file. It never really looked that great when I tried the conversion in my studio. The results were always muddy. It’s easy these days, you just hit the curves. I remember on a phone call with the agency where I was asked whether or not this picture in my portfolio was something that had been shot in color and converted to black and white. And I said, “Oh, I shot in color and I converted on my computer,” but it wasn’t, it was shot in black and white, which is why it looked so amazing. I just got carried away with myself.  The problem was that the images for the campaign had to be shot in color and converted in post-production in order to retain the colored logo on the sneakers and have the rest of the shot in black and white. So I got out to New York thinking I don’t even know if I can do this. I was working really close with this amazing retoucher and I told him what I was hoping to achieve and even he said that it sounded a bit tricky. So he was taking all the film and going out and trying to figure out how this was going to work for me. I was ringing him every afternoon after all the models had gone home, and we’d spent another few thousand dollars that day, and I would say “How’s it going?” and he would say, “We’re getting there.” So on the Friday having done five days shooting (and spent most of our budget) he came into the studio in the morning and he had a proof under his arm. I was shooting this model and I remember looking across the studio because I was just so nervous waiting for this guy to come into the studio just to let me see that everything was alright. And he just winked at me to say I cracked it, it worked! It looked amazing, when he pulled this proof out.  It was a thing of beauty, So I basically blagged my way onto my biggest advertising campaign although I wouldn’t recommend this cavalier approach to anyone with a weak heart .

F STOP: That’s a great story.

Steele: I believe you need to take a few risks now and again to get anywhere in life.

F STOP: So what would have happened if it didn’t work out?

Steele: I don’t think I’d be here right now.

To see more of Leon Steele’s work visit his website.

Written by T.K. Dalton
Edited by Jesi Khadivi

For a series of pieces on sideshow performers, Matt Hoyle called on the talent of an unconventional modeling agency, Ugly NY. “The hardest part was getting a giant,” he recalls. If that sounds like a recited line of surrealist poetry, imagine weeks of preparation along the same lines. His conceit was to document the fictional town of Barnumville, itself based on a Florida town of retired circus workers. “It’s one of the only towns that was zoned for elephants. The post-master general was a midget,” he says. But the fictional set had a few specifications the real town did not, such as a lack of hotels to discourage gawkers. So he turned to CGI out of necessity.  “It would have been nearly impossible to find a town fitting the specifics of the story,” he says. Each set he produced without CGI would have cost $20,000 but digital supplements allowed Hoyle to fulfill leave his aesthetic vision without compromise. Our featured image comes from this series and it is appearing for the first time here on The F Stop.

To create this image Hoyle first created a rough wireframe of the background in CGI and then matched the camera angle and lighting based off the light sources in the background image. Next he photographed the people individually in his studio using two large umbrellas to emulate a softer light that he can later add contrast to in Photoshop if necessary. In the case of the Siamese twins Hoyle notes “one umbrella was to the right emulating the streetlight, the second was a soft wraparound fill from the left that made sure we had the detail on the shadow side of our subjects.” Hoyle chose a Canon 1DS Mark III “which gives me a large enough digital file and allows me to be more mobile than a larger format camera,” he says. He shot with a 35mm lens “as that was the same angle and framing as in the background shot.” The exposure was f/11 at 1/125th of a second and he shot about 4 feet from the subject in order to fill the frame. After the shots were captured he used a deep etching program called Vertus fluid mask “which works beautifully on masking hair and other hard to select areas,” he says. When the image is ready he imports the backdrop, which he would have already created in CGI with the program Vue Infinite, into Photoshop.  He then composites the two together which “involves playing with contrasts, white balance, curves and color balance.” Hoyle continues on “once the images feel right and natural, I distress the background and create a depth of field to give a sense of space in the shot.” After all the tweaking Hoyle tones the shot with a hero color “which in this case would be a cool blue to emulate a night scene. Night time does not really throw a blueish tint in real life but for artistic shots, including ones in movies, a slightly blue feel will give a sense of night.” The last step is to create a final layer of a a black vignette with 10% opacity to “subtly frame the subjects in their environment.”

Hoyle preceded his photography with a 20-year career in advertising. “I left because I was quite simply disillusioned. I worked in management and there wasn’t much room for creativity. After leaving, I just started shooting. It was just this natural outlet. I hadn’t picked up a camera before then in any serious manner. People in the industry said ‘you’ve got a good eye you should really do this.’” He gained attention and respect at a pace he calls “laughably quick.” After his series “Icebergs” he found an agent; within four years he had gone from a hobbyist to a fully-fledged professional living solely off his images.

Naturally, he learned something in his two decades on the other side of the desk. “All that discipline that I had learned as a creative in advertising I can now do without restrictions.  It definitely helped me think of themes rather than just aesthetic one-shots.  I can think in holistic themes, and extract each theme differently unto itself. I feel if you can create a great common thread, but also each one is striking in its’ own right, then you’ve got something strong,” he says. That’s not to say it ‘s easy: to create the realistic effect he desires for his CGI images can take more than 40 hours in front of the computer.

Hoyle believes the time is worth it, if only to record the true nature of his subjects. “I’m primarily interested in colorful characters,” he says, taking the phrase literally as well as figuratively. “It was going to be a real wasted opportunity to have this amazing group of people together and not capture them in stark black and white.” With nearly three dozen images of Barnumville’s residents, his goal was to capture “a contextual shot of what they do,” working as a pharmacist or a sheriff.

The search for raw reality is evident in his personal work. Regularly eschewing the beautiful for the exceptional, Holye finds himself drawn to subcultures: aging boxers who used to be champions, winter swimmers or sideshow freaks. “I love the beauty in imperfection. They make great stories,” he says. “Every great story has a flawed character. I just try to magnify them.”

Hoyle was interviewed by our Editor Zack Seckler about his career and his craft:

F STOP: Please tell us about the Barnumville series.

Hoyle: Barnumville is a fictitious town in Florida that I loosely based on Gibsonton, Florida a real town where sideshow performers, or freaks as they used to call themselves, spent their winters. It’s one of the only towns that was zoned for elephants. The post-master general was a midget. It just inspired me to create a town of circus performers. The series does have a little bit of a darkness to it, but I wanted it to be hauntingly beautiful. I wrote a back story for the town. A ring master in the 30s and 40s got tired of the exploitation of his friends and colleagues and wanted to create a town.  We found residents for the town through this great casting guy, Oliver, at Ugly NY.

F STOP: Is that a modeling agency?

Hoyle: They cast people that aren’t really models. Anyone from tattooed people, to twins or sideshow performers. We made a wish list that included everyone you could imagine in an old school circus sideshow. The hardest part was getting a giant. We got someone who absolutely looked the part, a giant from the film The Wrestler. The project evolved from the back story I wrote and hit a more cinematic approach, which was where my work was headed anyway. The town had the look and feel of an old Florida town with an urban feel; a little bit dilapidated and a little bit darker. I started creating the backgrounds in CGI, cast the characters and got some great stylists involved.

F STOP: Was the decision to shoot the background in CGI out of practicality? An aesthetic reason? A thematic reason?

Hoyle: It was all of those. I wanted a town that would’ve been inhabited by sideshow performers. For example, part of the story was that Barnumville didn’t have hotels because they didn’t want outsiders coming in. It would have been nearly impossible to find a town fitting the specifics of the story. As for the aesthetic side, I really wanted to create something where my vision wasn’t compromised by budget. CGI was a tool that allowed me to not compromise any of those things.

F STOP: You mentioned that it was a total cast and crew of forty. Did you photograph them over a period of several days, weeks?

Hoyle: Several weeks.

F STOP: Did you have one location or did you go on location?

Hoyle: We shot at the studio here. It was easy to do in this central location. We shot them here with widescreen background. Whether I shoot CGI or a photographic plate, what I do is consider the lighting and camera angle.  I’d already created very rough wire frame back drops to the 14 scenes and then I matched the camera angle and the lighting for the scene I had already created with my portrait shoot here at the studio. Basically I shoot for that exact scene. Then I cut it out, obviously in post, and drop it in. I spend a lot of time trying to create reality with the two scenes, trying to composite them. Creating reality means making things imperfect because a lot of times everything becomes too angular in CGI. I use photographic textures to begin with so it should look real in a lot of ways because it’s a plate of a photo just wrapped on a wire frame image. One thing that helps is my lighting experience. Many CGI artists really don’t have that lighting experience. When I’m compositing the two scenes together I make it as organic as possible. And that takes time: scratches, dents, paint falling off, dirt, trash, blurs, depth of field. There’s a whole bunch of tricks and things you do that you learn and they take some time, but it’s worth doing. And then you create this fantastical thing that would’ve otherwise cost $20,000+ for each production piece.

F STOP: Do you do everything yourself?

Hoyle: I do everything myself for personal projects. On commercial jobs where I have a budget, I work with a team.

F STOP: How much time does it take to do one background?

Hoyle: Anywhere from 3 days to a week.

F STOP: 8 hours a day?

Hoyle: Oh yeah! And then, of course, there’s rendering. Rendering takes a good day.

F STOP: So it’s a lot of time in front of the computer?

Hoyle: Yes, but it saves so much time. Try getting a crew to fourteen multiple locations in a town of forty and it’s going to cost a lot of money and coordinating everyone will be difficult.

F STOP: Do you prefer a white background to a green or blue screen?

Hoyle: Back to when I was directing or shooting TV for advertising, you shot with a chroma-key background and it was easier to key with technology. But, in terms of photography you want the background to contrast against the tone of the person. It depends on what they’re wearing and it’s as simple as that.

F STOP: So, it’s all about contrast?

Hoyle: It’s just about contrast and being able to capture that. I work with a pretty progressive piece of masking software that I also endorse. It also gets the hair. It’s pretty advanced. It sees the scene like your eye sees and it’s been designed so that it captures things and separates things from the background. You have to look at it when you light it that way to separate it.

F STOP: Tell me how your black and white portraits without CGI fit into the series.

Hoyle: I’m primarily interested in colorful characters. That obviously can manifest itself with a black and white shot of a forked tongue, a tattooed giant, some sort of interesting person. While they’re black and white, they’re still colorful and a character without anything else. It just seemed like such a shame to limit it to a full color scene when they have so many interesting features on all of their faces. From the giant where his elongated features were very prominent to the little people to the circus fat lady to the tattooed people, it just seemed like it was going to be a real wasted opportunity to have this amazing group of people together and not capture them in stark black and white. The 28-30 images are going to be the town residents of Barnumville. You’re going to see them for who they are. And then of course, we’ll take you into their life. The scenes will be a contextual shot of what they do. Some of them work in the local drug store. The strong man is also the deputy of the town; the sheriff.

F STOP: So is this a fine-art project meant for a gallery setting?

Hoyle: Yes. There will be large format black-and-white portraits peering at you throughout the room. There’ll also be wide-screen scenes. What I’m trying to do is to extract as much character as I can from our collective imagination of what sideshows are. There is a collective cultural imagination that we have of them whether it’s the series Carnivale or just what we remember growing up or what was depicted during an X-Files episode. It is an amazing thing that doesn’t really exist that much anymore; it’s seen as politically incorrect. I just want to extract as much personality out of this in a way that hasn’t been done before, both in a cinematic way which creates an entire experience, and with black and whites which show them in a beautiful way. There’s a nice symmetry about them; the way that they’ve been lit that makes their features seem extraordinary.

F STOP: As of the day of this interview, people haven’t seen the CGI backgrounds, but they have seen the black and white portraits. How have they responded so far?

Hoyle: With any work it’s very subjective. But by all accounts and comments, this has probably been one of the most successful things that I’ve created. I think that there are comments anywhere from, ‘Matt’s captured what’s been in my imagination for a long time, but haven’t really seen’ to ‘he’s made these guys beautiful and almost seem just like you and me.’ To the more sensational, ‘these guys just look like they’ve stepped out of an X-Files thing.’

F STOP: This is your third project where you’ve created the backgrounds in CGI. Do you think you’ll continue in that vein?

Hoyle: I don’t know that I will. As an artist, I’m going to go back to really just shooting characters. I’m still working on Barnumville, but I really want to get up close and personal in terms of going back to exploring faces and everything, similar to the black and white. I’ll let the CGI happen when a client in my commercial life requests it, especially for movie posters or Broadway posters.

F STOP: Has the personal work that’s been based on CGI gotten you work in the commercial realm?

Hoyle: Yes, for the more cinematic magazine features as well as a few bigger production Ad jobs.  I think creating CGI backgrounds is definitely a technique that helps a vision be realized. But, it shouldn’t stand out on its own. It should just be there to help you realize that vision. So, in commercial work sometimes I use CGI as a more cost-effective way to create a set.

F STOP: Is your previous work where you used CGI backgrounds fine art?

Hoyle: Yes.

F STOP: And has it been for sale?

Hoyle: Not yet, but people have expressed interest; I want to choose the right gallery. Barnumville is the first series I’ve done with a proper launch.

F STOP: So tell me how you got your start as a photographer.

Hoyle: I started as a creative director in advertising and worked in the industry for twenty years.  I left because I was quite simply disillusioned. I had worked my way up into management and there wasn’t much room for creativity anymore. After leaving, I just started shooting. It was just this natural outlet. I hadn’t picked up a camera before then in any serious manner. People in the industry said “you’ve got a good eye you should really do this.” I did a series about Australian winter swimmers called “Icebergs”. That is where my career catapulted because the “Icebergs” series hit a chord.  The retouching was minimal, but still it captured the essence of what my work is about.  Almost slightly hyper-real and very textural with raw characters.  The series got me an agent.

F STOP: How long did it take between picking up a camera and working professionally?

Hoyle: It was laughably quick.  I didn’t have to be an assistant.  It was about 2000 when I left the ad industry and I picked up a camera. In 2001 I started my personal series.  Between 2003 and 2004 I was a fully-fledged professional in that I was making my career and money off of photography.

F STOP: Do you think working in the advertising world has helped you?

Hoyle: It’s helped me amazingly. All that discipline that I had learned as a creative in advertising I can now do without restrictions.  It definitely helped me think of themes rather than just aesthetic one-shots.  I can think in holistic themes, and extract each theme differently unto itself. I feel if you can create a great common thread, but also have each image being striking in its’ own right, then you’ve got something strong. That is what advertising has taught me, among other things.

F STOP: How do you feel about where the advertising industry is right now?

Hoyle: I am optimistic about it. I think that I have seen the aesthetics cycle even in my entry into the field.  At first it was a very raw, then it went to the other extreme where it was over-retouched and very plastic.  With the tools that we have with us today and people being more educated, there is starting to be a maturity to not over-use all the different techniques now. I am optimistic and I see more art buyers and photo editors being open to new ideas.

F STOP: Stylistically, where do you see things going?

Hoyle: I used to think that I could predict things; especially when I was a creative director. But now I absolutely don’t know.  I think that things work in cycles. There will be more sophistication with post-production. I hope people won’t over-use Photoshop and use tools more sparingly to help realize their vision, rather than over compensate for their lack of.

F STOP: So you don’t think CGI will overtake the photography industry?

Hoyle: No, photography will still be photography. But CGI will be another tool the same way a set builder or a retoucher or even a filter might be a tool.

F STOP: Is your visual style a conscious decision? Did it arise out of experimentation?

Hoyle: I developed a visual style in “Icebergs.” I had found a group of extraordinary
swimmers. They weren’t the beautiful people of Bondi Beach, which is similar to Malibu, but Baltic Russians or giant freckled kids. I wanted to make the images beautiful and not Photoshop the hell out of the essence of the subject.  So it was natural to do the contrasting. It wasn’t done as a style. I did it to bring out the freckles, laugh lines and character of each person. Toning was also important. I toned them a certain aquamarine, blue-green because they are winter swimmers and I wanted to give the viewer the same feel that I got when I photographed them.

F STOP: Can you tell us a little bit about how you work.

Hoyle: Often I’ll shoot a person very simply using three-quarter, Rembrandt lighting.
I never flatten out the person. I want a sense of dimension and for them to
pop off the page. So obviously I use some angular lighting and shadows. In post I try to de-accentuate anything that’s going to get in the way, anything that competes with what I’m trying to get out of the subject.  I’ll do that with exposure. I’ll play with the depth-of-field. Once I have the exposure and the depth-of-field then I accentuate unique features like freckles, baby fat or piercing blue eyes. I avoid the overly sharpened degree a lot of photographers use and try to stay quite natural and raw. Sometimes I’ll tone a background to compliment the model’s skin.  A lot of time cyans or blues and greens work nicely because they are at the other end of the spectrum of the peach or flesh color.

F STOP:What made you interested in portraiture.

Hoyle: People have always interested me. It may actually  be as boring as that. I love sub-groups and the sub-cultures. Whether that be aging boxers who used to be champions, winter swimmers or sideshow freaks. The imperfections of society are what interests me also and that’s why I try to unapologetically bring them out. I love the beauty in imperfection. They make great stories, don’t they? Every great story has a flawed character. I just try to magnify them.

To see more of Matt Hoyle’s work visit his website.

Written by T.K. Dalton
Edited by Jesi Khadivi
Diagram by Brandon Jones

Though he now has a mantle full of trophies and a stable full of prestigious clients, James Day suffered a rocky start as a freelancer. “I took out a bank loan and set up a studio,” he says, “and didn’t get a single job for about twelve months.” The loan was, however, a very good investment. Day now shoots for clients as varied as Canon, Heineken, Motorola, Nestle, Proctor & Gamble, Tropicana, and Volkswagen, and his portfolio has earned him awards from Communication Arts, Cannes, The One Show, PDN, AOP and others.

Despite the impressive depth and breadth of his portfolio, Day expresses singular pride for one shot in particular: the portrait that won him the John Kobal Photographic Portrait Award in 2002. The piece landed in London’s National Portrait Gallery. “…it was the first set of portraits that I’d ever shot,” he said. That sensibility as a skilled portraitist translates across subjects. In our featured image, he combines his vision as a portraitist and his technical skills to capture an unlikely (and unruly) subject: a koala bear whose custom-made parka was just one challenge in the production. “Koalas are quite docile until you have to pick them up and then they go absolutely berserk. We didn’t have to put any stuff on, but we had two handlers in the room,” Day recalled. “They were wearing protective clothing. Big, thick outfits like meat packers. The head keeper told me that someone had once lost a finger.”

Day has a unique approach to lighting his portrait subjects “I tend to light the people like they’re a still life. It’s quite a formal and static form of portraiture,” he says. For our featured image Day decided that because photographing unruly koalas was so difficult he had to shoot four separate images (the koala, the background, the sky and the furry parka) and composite them all together in post. The closest place they could find a koala was in a Lisbon zoo and the lighting was quite simple for that shot, just a bare Profoto head with some half weight spun diffusion plugged into the Profoto 7B pack. He shot the koala using a Hasselblad V system camera with a phase P25 back and a 150mm lens positioned approximately 3 feet from the koala. Day then had a custom-made parka created for the koala (they have relatively small heads) and shot it using three Elinchrom 3000 heads and a Linhoff 679 view camera with a Phase P25 back (see accompanying diagram for more details). He then gave those images and the two photos of the sky and dirt to his post-production specialists at Core Digital to be assembled into a seamless final image.

Day’s love of shooting still life drives his personal work and shapes his approach to portraiture. “I quite like putting a camera right, literally six, seven inches from people’s faces. And I like the slightly intrusive feel, which I think comes across in some of the images that look a bit—not intimidated—but slightly uncomfortable,” he says. This lends a certain realism that is missing from the mass of commercial photography of professional models posing for the camera.

Day was interviewed by our Editor Zack Seckler about his career and his craft:

F STOP: Why were you hired to photograph our featured image?

Day: The ad agency was attracted to my technique and the almost hyper-realism of my work.

F STOP: Were you bidding against other photographers?

Day: No, you get less of that in London. With the current economic climate triple-bids have become more common, but quite often people will come to you with layouts. Triple bids are not as common in the UK as in the United States.

F STOP: How did you approach creating the image?

Day: I thought the best way to make the image look believable was to use real animals. The client wanted a blue sky, which I couldn’t guarantee in London in March. We found a koala in Lisbon, Portugal. They allowed us to be in the cage with them and get right up close. We then found a shooting location in Southern Spain. After we took some test shots of the parka, a fashion designer made it to the size of the koala. So, first we shot the koala and went to Spain. Then we came back to the studio in London and took the main shot of the jacket.

F STOP: So was the koala easy to shoot?

Day: At the Lisbon zoo, I climbed up one ladder and my assistant went up another to hold the light. I was about three feet away from the koala, but it kept running away. I didn’t know what to do. I tried to explain to the keeper, but he didn’t speak English, so I ended up speaking with the head [keeper] in passable French. I was starting to panic because, after about three or four hours, I was worried about getting the shot. The keeper brought a scale with a eucalyptus branch on the other side and was able to get a koala to sit absolutely still on it. We were able to just shoot away for twenty minutes, and got the shot.

F STOP: Did you have to wear any protection?

Day: Koalas are quite docile until you have to pick them up and then they go absolutely berserk. We didn’t have to put any stuff on, but we had two handlers in the room to make sure we didn’t get too close. They were wearing protective clothing. Big, thick outfits like meat packers. The head keeper told me that someone had once lost a finger.

F STOP: How did you become interested in photography?

Day: I just started assisting. I didn’t go to college or have any formal training.

F STOP: Why did you start assisting?

Day: I started working because I didn’t want to go to college. I worked in corporate finance for about a month and a half. And I just thought, ‘I do not want to do this for the rest of my life.’ I’d always been interested in photography, but no one ever explained that it could be a career.’ It had never really been explained to me or proposed as an option. I began assisting for a photographer  for about three and a half years, who  I was put in touch with by a friend’s parents who owned a design consultancy.  I totally fell in love with it. I was in there every weekend doing test shots and trying to shoot as much as possible. And I really, really enjoyed it, and it was quite a shock—both to me and my parents.

F STOP: That’s interesting. So you started assisting more as just a job, as something to do and you end up falling in love with photography?

Day: I was seventeen and a half and I thought it seemed like quite a cool job. It’s been my obsession ever since.

F STOP: How old are you now?

Day: I’m 37.

F STOP: When did you stop assisting?

Day: I sent letters out to the top advertising photographers.  One of them called me in for an interview because his first assistant was leaving. I freelanced for him for a couple of months and then he offered me the job. I worked with him for about three years and once I was about twenty-four or twenty-five and I thought I had a fantastic portfolio so I went out on my own. Unfortunately the portfolio wasn’t quite as great as I thought and I took out a bank loan and set up a studio and didn’t get a single job for about twelve months. Eventually, I got an agent and started to get bits and pieces and started shooting and it just kind of built up from there.

F STOP: You shoot a lot of portraits and still life. What kind of a photographer do you consider yourself?

Day: I like to think that I’ve got more of a look and a feel—a sort of graphic hard light that I carry through the still life and the portraiture and the cars and stuff. But I suppose I probably would say I’m a still life photographer.

F STOP: Do you treat your portraiture subjects any differently than still life?

Day: I think because of my still life background, I tend to light people like they’re a still life. It’s quite a formal and static form of portraiture.

F STOP: How do they take to that?

Day: They’re alright. Sometimes it can be a little overwhelming when the lights are really close. I quite like putting a camera like, literally six, seven inches from people’s faces. And I like the slightly intrusive feel, which I think comes across in some of the images that look a bit—not intimidated—but slightly uncomfortable.

F STOP: Why do you like it?

Day: I always liked formal portraiture. My all-time hero was Irving Penn. He’s succeeded with both still life and portraiture.

F STOP: Why do you like your subjects to be outside of their comfort zone?

Day: I think by the nature of taking someone’s portrait that they are in a sort of slightly odd environment in the first place and many of my subjects are not professional models. When I shoot fashion models they have a kind of look and feel and they really like to do their thing in front of the camera. That can really work, if that’s what you’re after. But I prefer something a bit more realistic.

F STOP: Why did you settle on shooting still life?

Day: Partly because I trained with still life guys. With still life it’s all about the lighting. I quite like that you start in a room that’s completely black. I like to control what I’m doing.

F STOP: Tell me about the process of shooting a typical still life. Do you know exactly what the lighting is going to be or do you play around?

Day: Strong shadows are featured in my work, especially if I’m shooting advertising. But I don’t like to just turn out the same thing over and over again. So I tend to start with a hard key light and see how it interacts with the subject matter depending on what background we’re shooting against, the kind of look and feel that they’re after. I let the shoot evolve from there. You’re very much governed by what you are shooting and how it reacts to light. It has a big bearing on how hard I can use the lighting. Sometimes what I do is I’ll light the objects to get them looking how I want them and disregard everything else. And then I’ll light the shadow for the object and that balances out how interesting that is as a separate element. And then I’ll shoot the background separately and then comp all of them together. So I think quite a lot of my work is interesting because it looks like it could be all done in one image but when you look at it you think ‘well actually, that shadow shouldn’t be there and the highlights in that bit wouldn’t react like that it real life.’ But you don’t really question it when you look at it, you just think, ‘well that’s quite a striking image.’ I’ve definitely embraced the computer.

F STOP: Do you do all of your own post?

Day: No, I work with a fantastic set of guys called Core Digital in London. They’ve done all of my personal work and probably 90 percent of my advertising work for the last ten years. It’s quite good to have that sort of relationship where you can kind of work on the style and the look together and it’s sort of evolved over the years to where we are at the moment. And we constantly want to move it forward. So I have a whole raft of personal work that I’m trying to do at the moment where we are trying to take it on to the next level and just change the colors and the general look and feel, slightly, nothing too drastic.

F STOP: Is any of the still life work on the website personal work?

Day: All of it is personal work.

F STOP: Tell me about the ketchup and berry images. Maybe I’m wrong here, but it looks like it’s cut out and put up against a computer generated background, like a single color background.

Day: Yeah, that’s basically exactly what it is, just shooting the object. I used to do a lot of that sort of stuff. I think those sauce bottle shots are probably five or six years old. It was quite new when I was doing it. But I think a lot of people started doing it since, so I’ve tried to move away from it a little bit. It’s got a graphic, kind of pop arty sort of feel. I use a slightly more naturalistic looking background these days. I shot the berries last year, I wanted to achieve a three-dimensional object that had a bit of depth to it, but then suddenly make it feel almost flattened out. We shot the berries and then we cut perfectly around it and then filled it in with black and then just slid it down, so it’s like a perfect shadow. And then you put the background in, so it sort of flattens. You know there is depth to the shot but it’s slightly off because then it’s grounded by this shadow that shouldn’t really be there.

F STOP: What do you see as new photographic trends?

Day: A slightly less post-productiony feel. I mean that’s what I’m trying to do now. I keep the sharpness and character of the images, but I feel like there is slightly less feel of the computer.

F STOP: So a lot of the still life is personal work. Is that work that you just have up on your website or do you show it in another context, in galleries?

Day: My portfolio is mostly personal work and there are a few small strips of ad campaigns at the back. I prefer for people to see my personal work and they like that. I send regular mailers and we do email promotional and stuff like that. Personal work is really important because it’s how you keep pushing forward.

F STOP: Do you exhibit your personal work in galleries at all?

Day: I haven’t. I’m definitely interested in doing it in the future.

F STOP: You’ve won several different types of awards from different magazines and award shows. I’m curious to know if you’ve noticed that one in particular has been particularly valuable in projecting your career to a new level?

Day: The one that was always very important, being based in London, was the Association of Photographers Awards. It’s not like suddenly you get loads of other work, but when you first start getting them but you definitely start to pop up onto people’s radar. People look at them, places like Communication Arts and PDN, in the photographic community. But I think it’s a combination of getting the right representation and then once you start getting the awards I think it’s good to keep winning them. Every time you get into the book it’s just a little reminder that ‘hey he’s out here, he’s trying to do something new or interesting.’ It just keeps your name floating around in this arena of commissioners. But I wouldn’t say that there has been any single one that suddenly put me on the map. It’s been more in the advertising community with certain campaigns that I’ve done. The advertising awards, at least for commissioning, have been more beneficial. The most satisfying one for me was winning the John Kobal Photographic Portrait Award in 2002. My work was up in the National Portrait Gallery in London and there was a big sort of gallery launch of the body of work that year. So for me, that was proper, worthy photography. And also it was the first set of portraits that I’d ever shot.

F STOP: Oh wow, well that’s quite the encouragement to do more portraiture right?

Day: Yeah, it was. That was probably the best one, but then it probably had the least impact on my career in terms of commissions and stuff like that.

F STOP: Did you have the opportunity to contribute your own visual ideas to the imagery often?

Day: Yeah definitely. Obviously, if they’re talking to me then they like the style of my work. It’s a collaborative thing. I think great art directors are the ones that you do collaborate with. I would never want to be one of those photographers who says,  ‘this is how we’re going to do it and if you don’t do it like that I’m not going to shot your ad campaign.’  I think that it should be a collaboration and I think that both of you bring interesting ideas to the party. Conversely, I’d hope that if people were commissioning me, hopefully we can let it grow together. You can usually tell when you have a first meeting whether it’s going to be like that or not. Mostly it is. I think I’ve been very lucky with the people I’ve worked with over the years.

F STOP: When a client approaches you about doing a commission, do you have to agree with the idea behind it in order to accept the job?

Day: You have to be sort of pragmatic. I work in a very commercial environment with advertising and not every campaign that you shoot is going to win Cleos and Gold Lions. The good campaigns are the ones that actually consider the photographer, that have a great idea and then they want to use a good photographer who can really bring that to life. I think that’s where you try and position yourself in the market. I try to work with good reps who get my work in front of the sort of people who are making the interesting work, so mostly I’ve been very lucky. Hopefully I have enhanced the original idea with some great imagery as well.

To see more of James Day’s work visit his website.