It’s a frosty winter day, but New York City–based lensman Sam Kaplan has no trouble keeping warm. His days are a flurry of activity, from shooting back-to-back assignments to finalizing an expansion of a new studio in midtown Manhattan. Looking around the new digs, flanked by slick shelving and orderly stacks of equipment, he says, “It’s still not as neat as I’d like it to be.”

That may be Kaplan in a nutshell. Since striking out on his own in 2011, the 29-year-old Boston native has eschewed high-concept aesthetics and taken a more hands-on approach built around exacting precision—a sculptor’s finely honed interest in process and material.

“I guess ‘precise’ is a good way to describe it,” he says of his own stylistic proclivities. “Maybe even a little OCD,” he adds jokingly. He puts this level of attention to every minute detail, whether he is painstakingly crafting intricate constellations out of dental floss picks for a personal project (“All done in camera,” he notes proudly) or creating photo illustrations for a growing list of clients such as The New York Times Magazine, Details, and Fortune.

His approach might seem throwback, but that’s part of Kaplan’s appeal. Unlike many of his photographic peers, he had a rather low-tech schooling, studying fine art and art history at Wesleyan University.

“There were only a couple of photo classes, so I ended up studying a lot more sculpture,” Kaplan says. “Still, that ended up having the most lasting impact in shaping what I do, particularly the conceptual side—visualizing a form, thinking about the ways materials function, how they can be pushed.”

This innate curiosity kept the creative wheels turning when Kaplan moved to New York in 2007 shortly after completing his bachelor’s degree. He worked as an assistant to sharpen his own skills, but, he says, “I realized quickly that I wanted to strike out on my own. I suppose I could have assisted longer—maybe it would have benefitted me—but I was becoming a really bad assistant, always on my phone looking through assignments.”

Kaplan’s natural sense of form made still life an instant fit. His affinity for the idiom is apparent in a portfolio of images ranging from elegant to daring, from meticulous to gravity defying. Whether depicting lipstick embedded in hardened plaster (a nod to one of his first art-class assignments) or heightening the gloss on sashimi with lighting alone, his explorations seem both intrepid and calculated. “I love having the freedom to make small adjustments,” he says, “to move something a micrometer and see what difference it makes.”

Food has been a particularly rich subject. “I like shooting it because it has a shelf life on set,” he says. “It’ll start looking bad after 15 minutes, so you have to problem-solve rather quickly.”

For Kaplan, troubleshooting is half the fun. “Having unlimited anything sometimes kills the creativity,” he notes. “With every shoot there are definite limitations, whether imposed by the layout, the product, or the time constraint. So you always have to find ways to perform within those parameters. But then again, that’s what keeps the job exciting.”

CLOSE UP: Sam Kaplan
SamKaplan.com
Lives In: New York City
Studied At: Wesleyan University, Middletown, CT
Clients Include:_ Fast Company, Field & Stream, Men’s Fitness_, Nissan, Popular Science, Proto, The New York Times Magazine, Travel + Leisure
Essential Advice: “Develop a strong, recognizable vision or voice, but don’t be afraid to let it evolve.”
amera of choice: Arca-Swiss M Monolith 6×9 with Phase One IQ160. Newest upgrade: Broncolor Picolites with Projection Attachment.

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Still-life photographer Travis Rathbone has established a signature style by redefining the limits of objects. His visual experiments push commonplace items into new realms: submerged in foreign substances, frozen in motion, exploded into larger-than-life compositions. The 28-year-old New York City transplant, already in demand only a few years into his career, has little time to reboot and refresh between projects. After two weeks of intense shooting in San Francisco for client Jawbone through the agency fuseproject, he’s just gotten off a red-eye back to the East Coast, the latest leg of a studio marathon with barely a breather in sight. “It’s been a crazy two years,” Rathbone says, “but I won’t complain about it.”

Then again, it’s this type of all-consuming focus —verging on hubris—that prompted the California native to strike out on his own and start an independent studio at the ripe age of 21. “I was working at a digital imaging lab, but promoting my own work as much as possible,” Rathbone recalls.

Another photographer had backed out of “a tiny still-life shoot last-minute, and I was asked to fill in. So I called in sick to work. I shot the image; they liked it and shortly thereafter offered me another two-week project. Without much more planning, I stupidly went back to my boss at the lab and quit on the spot.”

But Rathbone did have a few aces up his sleeve. After graduating from Santa Barbara’s Brooks Institute in 2006, the young lensman sharpened his vision assisting established names including David LaChapelle in Los Angeles and Craig Cutler in New York. “One of the few things I asked for with early jobs was to use the studio facilities on the weekends if they weren’t booked,” he says. “I really took advantage of that. I shot and shot and shot. Looking back, my work wasn’t great but it was getting better. And I would show it to anyone who would look.”

The diligence eventually paid off. Rathbone cites as one big break a January 2012 cover for Money magazine. “You don’t see a lot of still lifes on national covers anymore,” he says. “I always wondered if that was something I would ever get to do.” Sixteen cover shoots in 2012 alone settles that question. Rathbone’s ever-growing roster of clients includes Glamour and New York magazines and Macy’s, Adidas, and Victoria’s Secret.

Behind his success lies a novel approach. Rathbone transforms his studio into a testing laboratory where he can explore materials with the assiduity of a sculptor. “I love stuff,” he says, “but simply taking a beautiful picture is not that impressive. I’m always looking for different effects.

I was at a dinner once, and we ordered some sort of fancy dessert, which was prepared tableside using liquid nitrogen for all of us to see. I left that dinner thinking, ‘What on earth can I do with liquid nitrogen?’” Rathbone took to the studio for a battery of tests on various substances; it culminated in a personal series of frozen make-up. “Since then magazines like Men’s Journal and Women’s Health have had me replicate the technique for different stories,” he says. Rathbone’s inquisitiveness remains a driving force. “One of my art directors brought this weird chemical to my attention,” he says. “It’s a hydrophobic substance and I just saw a bunch of YouTube videos of what it can do. It wasn’t particularly beautiful, but it was unique. There must be something I can do with this.”

Close-Up: Travis Rathbone
TravisRathbone.com
Lives In: New York City
Studied At: Brooks Institute of Photography, Santa Barbara, CA
Awards: SPD merit awards for Field & Stream and Money
Clients Include: Adidas, Barnes & Noble, BBDO, Field & Stream, Men’s Journal, Glamour, New York, Popular Photography, Prevention, Victoria’s Secret
In the Bag: Hasselblad 503CW and H series: “They are workhorse cameras that have been put to the test for years,” he says. “I also use the Mamiya Leaf Aptus-II 12 80MP digital back.”
New Tool: “Something that saves hours of time in post is soft­ware called Helicon Focus, which puts focus planes together and saves a retoucher from having to do it.”

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Somewhere between a slick special-effects lab and Willy Wonka’s rec room lies Peter Schafrick’s photo studio. “Just recently a client wanted us to capture an exploding scoop of ice cream,” the Toronto-based photographer says. “Our initial plan was to use explosive charges in an ice cream ball, but we came up with another method: We attached a tennis ball to a drill bit, then packed the outside of the ball with vanilla ice cream. Then we spun the drill and closed our eyes. That was one of our messiest shoots in a while.”

The Toronto, Ontario, native’s eagerness to get his hands (and lenses) dirty has made him a sought-after commercial shooter; his growing list of high-profile clients includes Absolut Vodka and L’Oréal. Schafrick’s poetic images of liquid—from liquor to paint to melted cheese—in flight appear to bend the laws of gravity, producing smooth, dynamic sculptural forms that blur the lines between fine art and product photography. “I never really planned on specializing in this, but once I started doing it, I just loved it,” Schafrick says. “The aspect of the unknown and the happy accidents always keep it fresh for me. We never know what we’re going to get, but we know when we’re getting something good.”

It’s fitting that Schafrick’s own photo career started as a gamble. After some tinkering with a Hasselblad on vacation in 1999, he lucked into an impromptu exhibition of the resulting landscapes. “I sold 20 prints at the opening,” Schafrick recalls. “It came just when I was ready for a change. So I quit my day job [in telecom sales], sold a lot of furniture, and turned my loft into a studio. Then I shot pretty much every day for almost two years.” It takes some guts to walk into a new career with no formal training, but the doggedness Schafrick learned as a salesman became a tremendous asset: “I was never afraid to show work to anybody, to send an e-mail, to send little promos or postcards to editors and creatives at magazines. It was just a matter of constant persistence and showing new stuff.”

After more than a decade, Schafrick’s gamble has paid off big; he now has studios in Toronto, New York City and Dusseldorf. While he’s smoothed out some of his initial maverick edge, the key to his craft remains the same simple process of trial and error. “You have to experiment with the liquid both on and off the set,” Schafrick says. “Once you do it a few hundred times, you sort of start getting a knack for it—how hard to throw it, how much pressure, the different sorts of devices that can be used to tame it. But there’s always an element of surprise and spontaneity that happens in the shoot.”
His recent series Going Green was born from precisely one of those happenstances. It began when international products manufacturer Cargill commissioned Schafrick to recreate its logo, a green leaf, in a paint splash (below). “It took us three days,” he says, “and we shot over 1,200 frames until we got that single shot. A few weeks later, I went back to the footage to delete the RAW files, but I couldn’t bring myself to get rid of them. I was struck by these spectacular visuals that made you appreciate all that liquid can do as it’s moving in the air. So the series is really just outtakes from a commercial shoot.” AP

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In a scorching summer day on the Upper West Side, photographer James Chororos has no trouble keeping his cool. Just shy of his 30th birthday, he exudes the quiet confidence of someone used to taking things in stride. Lately, this includes tackling more than a few benchmarks, such as a new Manhattan studio (relocated from Brooklyn) and the growing buzz around his multifaceted freelance practice—a mixture of technical polish and poetic abandon that he’s made his own. This would be an accomplishment for any young photographer, much less one who made the leap less than a year ago after abandoning a promising career in architecture to pursue a growing passion for the lens.

As he notes with unstudied candor, the shift was far from planned. “To be honest,” he says, “the reason was very personal: My father became ill and passed away, and that experience made me reevaluate everything. Architecture was something I’d always wanted to do, and I was good at it. But I wasn’t as happy as I could be working on projects that sometimes take years and years to complete. Image making was the opposite. It’s all about rapid production, very energetic; you’re out in the wild. I never had time to think if I was good—I just did it.”

Then again, this was the latest juncture in a long creative journey. As seen in his exacting structural shots and emotive portraits, his visual calling has deep and varied roots. Initially studying fine arts at Rutgers University, he made the leap to engineering before tackling a graduate degree in architecture at the New Jersey Institute of Technology.

That’s where he took up photography. “In graduate school, it was suggested by a couple of professors to get a DSLR to document our works, drawings, and things that inspired us,” he says. “That was the first time I picked up a digital camera.”

Chororos’s new passion did not immediately sway him from the straight and narrow, especially after he landed a coveted spot at a prestigious New York architecture firm, Studio Daniel Libeskind, just before graduating in 2010. The following years proved to be a juggling act between professional demands and his avocation. “I was very involved in the architecture track, and I didn’t have much free time,” he recalls. “I was working weekends, editing at night. I would shoot after work, whenever I could. I was always furiously making images.”

The outlet for this output proved to be another turning point. Chororos launched his own blog, which quickly became popular. “I started gaining a lot of followers, and eventually started getting job offers from the things I was posting online.”

Combined with image-sharing apps like Insta­gram, the blogosphere afforded Chororos a rich platform to share ideas with pros and amateurs alike. “I started to post so I could evaluate my own work, have this stream of images and keep things fun.” Yet the experiment opened him up to new commercial work, online collaborations, and personal projects such as his deeply affecting images of the Rockaways in the wake of Hurricane Sandy.

“It was very compelling to shoot there,” he says. “You had this sense of awe, but you also have the reality of people dealing with the displacement.”

Chororos is now in talks about an exhibition in New York and attending to a growing roster of commercial clients. His biggest challenge to date? “Architectural shoots,” he says. “Sometimes too much education can work against creativity. I like the exploration and challenge, which keeps things interesting and new.”

jameschororos.com
Lives In: New York City
Studied At: Rutgers University (fine art); New Jersey Institute of Technology (architecture)
Lesson Learned: **“How little technical knowledge means without experience,” Chororos says. “Having confidence in your vision and knowing what to do next out there in a variety of different scenarios is invaluable.”
**In the Bag: “Most of my personal work is shot with a Fujifilm X-Pro1,” he says. “I love using it because it’s so compact and it can be a little unpredictable. For professional work, I carry two bodies, both Canon EOS 5D Mark II: It’s reliable and versatile, and it performs great in low light and extreme daylight.”

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For all intents and purposes, Brooklyn-based photographer Michael George is just hitting his stride. At 25, this New York University graduate remains a new kid on the block—although a growing list of notable clients suggests that moniker won’t last. The varied mix ranges from high-circulation glossies like Runner’s World and Wired to the hip indie publication Hello Mr., whose Issue 04 cover he snapped. Yet when asked about the upward trajectory, he replies with droll candor: “Well, I’m making rent and keeping a studio going, so that in itself feels like an accomplishment.”

Stylistically he may be equally elusive. For someone reared in the age of Flickr and Instagram, his images are carefully, almost classically composed, and his poetic sensibility is strikingly romantic. His contemplative images convey a studied sense of wanderlust—whether mapping the topography of a face in a portrait or unearthing the history of a place in a pastoral landscape. “The fascination with travel is something that has been brewing in me for a long time,” he says. “I grew up in south Florida, and we would just go to beaches for vacation. I actually never really got on a plane until I moved to New York to go to NYU. Now I’m on the road three to four months out of the year.”

By chance, one of those early adventures provided a career turning point. Rather than rush- ing head-first into full-exposure mode (like many of his peers), George remained relatively low-key after graduating in 2011, balancing assistant jobs and freelance gigs with cherished extracurriculars—like a stint with the charity organization Bike & Build, for which he embarked on a U.S. cross-country journey to raise funds for affordable housing. During brief pauses in the group’s grueling schedule, George amassed enough images to compile a travelogue that he presented later that year at a summit for the charity group Images & Voices of Hope. “It was there that I learned about the Camino route,” he recalls. “One of the fellow IVOH youth had just walked it and told me stories from the trail. I became obsessed and started heavily researching. Within a few months I had purchased plane tickets.”

The fabled route, known as Camino de Santiago, is a network of ancient Christian pilgrimage paths that wind through Southern France and into Northern Spain. Traditionally undertaken by foot, the Camino has provided the faithful with meditative silence and penance over some 1,000 miles since at least the 11th century.

Embarking on two separate trips in 2012, George shot images nonstop for a total of four months. The experience was physically and mentally taxing, but it provided an exercise in focus and self-discipline. “When I was shooting there, I wasn’t working other jobs,” he notes. “I wasn’t at home. It was the only thing I was doing.”

And on those time-worn trails he found a measure of artistic clarity. Documenting a landscape rich with history and lore, he encountered colorful locals, commiserated with fellow backpackers, and obtained glimpses into the lives of clergymen and a peek into the larger mysteries of faith. It was a sprawling journey that he edited down into a visual essay, Portrait of a Pilgrim, which, along with its accompanying texts, offers something like a Canterbury Tales for the Internet age.

“I think that project was the first one—from the stylistics to the final edit—where I could recognize the direction of where I wanted to go,” he says. The project garnered attention from National Geographic, which will soon feature selections in an issue in 2015.

Still, despite the steady progress, George is reluctant to carve a narrow niche for himself. “The industry can fixate on compartmentalizing photographers,” he says. “I suppose there used to be a reason for it, as you would get known for shooting one particular thing. But I don’t think that is a feasible model to survive anymore. I think most contemporary photographers have made themselves into Renaissance men.”

CLOSE UP

Michael George
michaelgeorgephoto.com

Lives In Brooklyn, NY
Studied At New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts
Clients Include Crunch Gym, First Round Review, French Institute Alliance Française, Hello Mr., New York Road Runners, New York University, Popular Mechanics, Runner’s World, Wired, YMCA, ZocDoc
In the Bag Canon EOS 5D Mark III: “It’s a workhorse and it has a silent shutter that generally keeps me unnoticed,” George says. “I travel light: one body, two lenses—often the 50mm f/1.2L and 35mm f/1.4L Canon EF. In post, I use custom filters within VSCO and Alien Skin Exposure to make my RAW images fit my vision.”

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Texas native Randal Ford is no stranger to photographic challenges. Choreographing rattlesnakes, rounding up cowboys, wrangling a movie icon—it’s all in a day’s work for the 31-year-old commercial photographer. So, in a recent shoot for the retailer L.L. Bean, he insisted on some particulars. Charged with re-creating the company’s hand-rendered art commissions—idyllic scenes of Americana from the 1930s, ‘40s and ‘50s—for a series of catalog covers, Ford painstakingly restaged a 1933 fishing scene in Freeport, Maine, down to period-specific costumes (borrowed from New York City’s Metropolitan Opera) and the precise breed of fish (eastern brook trout). Ford even hired a biologist to keep the fish alive during the shoot. (Dead fish would look fake, Ford says.)

Such exactitude, in addition to his painterly visual style evocative of apple-pie values, made Ford the man for the job. But to hear him tell it, the gig’s beginnings were rather humble. “I guess it started with the cows,” says Ford from his home base in Austin. “I shot a series of dairy-cow portraits for [the trade magazine] Dairy Today a few years back, and that got me on their radar.” The cows, like the catalogs, are signature Ford: slick, graphic and whimsical, their nod to the good old days leavened by high-tech savvy and wry humor.

None of this was part of the official plan when Ford enrolled at Texas A&M University in 2000 to study business 12 years ago. But it wasn’t long before he deviated from his core courses to pursue a growing interest in photography. “I was part of the generation that grew up on digital,” he recalls, “and that made things really accessible. I went online and explored, taught myself some of the basics. [The Web] is a great asset, and the feedback is immediate.”

After earning his business degree, Ford eschewed a traditional art education and instead jumped straight into the field. Inspired by both the warts-and-all portraiture of Richard Avedon and the homespun realism of Norman Rockwell, he strove to establish his own look. “When I got into photography, I knew I wanted to do commercial work, collaborate with advertising agencies, be in magazines and have a very specific style,” he says. “I think knowing this made the path quicker.”

It certainly made for a magnetic draw, as the young shooter lined up clients including Texas Monthly, Audubon and Fast Company magazines and such high-profile agencies as Pentagram, TBWAChiatDay and The Richards Group. Ford photographed Hollywood legend Tommy Lee Jones for Dallas-based D Magazine at the ripe age of 25. “He really hazed me,” Ford recalls, chuckling. “He busted my chops.”

Ford’s breakout project was The Amazing Faith of Texas, a 2006 coffee-table book by Roy Spence that surveys the the Lone Star State’s spiritual diversity. “It was an exciting opportunity, but daunting and downright scary at times,” Ford says. “The project gave me credibility.” And as his practice grows, Ford continues to refine his signature blend of animals, humor and good-ole-boy values. His dream assignment? “I want to shoot the Chick-fil-A calendar.”

Close Up: Randal Ford
randalford.com
Lives In Austin, Texas
Studied At Texas A&M
Awards: Communication Arts 2012 Photography Annual; Lürzers Archive 200 Best Ad Photographers Worldwide 2010/2011; Graphis Photography Annual, Self Promotion, 2010
Clients: Include The Home Depot, Ace Hardware, AARP, Dell, AT&T, Pentagram, TBWAChiatDay, Fast Company, Texas Monthly
In the Bag: “My equipment is a tool,” Ford says. “I used to use a medium-format digital-back Phase One system. When the Nikon D800 came out I switched. It’s a perfect size chip for what I do, and it’s more fun to shoot with a DSLR than a digital back.”

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When Sarah Fretwell dove into the heart of the Democratic Republic of Congo in 2010, her only plan was to cover a story, not to change the world. “I didn’t understand when people said they had a calling,” Fretwell says, looking back on how her journey to the DRC to document survivors of sexual violence turned into the Truth Told Project, an ongoing multimedia series. “This topic somehow stayed with me.”

What began as a 50-day journey turned into a life-changing encounter with the women and men of this war-torn region plagued by mass killings, conflict and rampant sexual violence. According to data from a 2011 report in the American Journal of Public Health, in the DRC a woman is raped almost every minute, a rate even higher than previous UN estimates—and a problem that has only recently received attention in international media.

With her camera in tow, Fretwell delved into the women’s everyday lives as they recounted their ordeals and confided their hopes. The result was a documentary that combines haunting portraits with fragments of handwritten interview notes, all pointing to a larger story of conflict, a conspiracy of silence and survival.

Tackling gritty circumstances in areas of crisis was not new to Fretwell. The 35-year-old based in Santa Barbara, California, had reported on displaced Eritrean refugees, women’s rights in Haiti and child survivors of land mines in Cambodia; one of her photos of street children there won first place in Digital Photo Pro magazine’s Best Emerging Professional Photo Contest in 2006. When she learned what was going on in the DRC, she was compelled to act.

“I’m a fan of [independent news show] Democracy Now! I would listen to the audio stream every morning while working,” she recalls. “One day I heard a snippet about villagers in the Walikale region who had been held hostage. More than 200 women and girls were raped repeatedly by rebels, or so-called rebels, without any intervention. I was outraged—and I couldn’t fathom why the world hadn’t made a bigger deal of this.”

Seized by a familiar sense of purpose, she could only follow her instinct: “I decided to take a leap of faith and buy a ticket. I just knew I had to go.”

In a serendipitous twist, Fretwell was introduced by a friend to Amy Ernst, a freelance journalist who was working with CoPerma, a humanitarian nonprofit of farmer-businessmen based in the North Kivu region, to help victims of rape and demobilized child soldiers. The NGO helped Fretwell secure a visa into the notoriously insular nation.

Fretwell and Ernst put out the word through CoPerma that they wanted women from the surrounding area to come and share their stories. In a culture where trauma is commonly accompanied by silence and shame, the gesture was unique and, Fretwell recalls, cause for trepidation: “I remember riding on the back of Amy’s motorbike to the first set of interviews and thinking, ‘What if no one will talk to me?’”

To her relief, the first outing was an immediate success, with triple the number of women expected lined up ready to share their trials. It was an act of generosity, but also a leaden charge for Fretwell, who had to rethink her approach.

“I recall one particularly difficult interview with a girl who was a minor. She must have been about 15. I really wanted to convey her story, but also maintain her privacy. That’s what first led me to experiment with layering text, so that her identity wasn’t immediately recognizable but she was also very much present. I posted one of these first images on my blog, and someone working at the National Museum of African Art at the Smithsonian saw it and encouraged me to continue.”

The text eventually became a pivotal aspect of her image making, providing a written record of her subjects’ testimonies. As these came together, so did the Truth Told Project (thetruthtold.com), an ambitious undertaking that seeks to place these issues on a worldwide platform.

It’s working. This year Fretwell presented at SXSW Interactive and has spoken at numerous human- and women’s-rights summits; she’s now partnering with the Responsible Sourcing Network to raise awareness about how the tech industry’s reliance on the DRC’s rich mineral deposits helps fund armed groups and hinders peace.

The Truth Told Project now encompasses portraits and landscapes, interviews, journals, blogs and video and has been exhibited at the Contemporary Arts Forum in Santa Barbara and the Walk to End Genocide event in Los Angeles. In August her work was shown at Human Rights Watch’s second annual “Art with a Heart” event, which focuses on global humanitarianism in Eastern Africa. Plans are also in the works for a documentary short. As it evolves, Fretwell says her mission remains the same: “This is not over. This is still happening every day, and that has to stay at the forefront.”

For more on the Truth Told Project, check out this video.

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While pursuing a political science degree at the University of Texas at Austin, Jay B. Sauceda took a class that changed his life. Taught by Dennis Darling, Sauceda says, “the class was geared towards people who knew nothing about cameras. But what really stuck was a guest lecture by celebrated photographer Harry Benson. He stressed that the interesting thing about cameras is the access people grant you into their lives.

“Benson noted that life is like a movie, and you have the opportunity to capture it as such,” Sauceda says. “If you approach photography in that way, it becomes less about the technical aspects and more about finding a way to feed a story.”

After he finished school, Sauceda sought to bring the power of modern marketing and design to the world of politics, but a stint in the Texas political scene gave him a firsthand lesson in why the status quo stays that way. “It wasn’t a singular vision, so the end result was watered-down drivel,” he says. “I ultimately became disenchanted.”

Returning to the romance of the lens, Sauceda began documenting the Austin region’s rich cultural mix—including fire breathers, foodies, toddler beauty queens, wizened ranchers and hipsters—along with such fading traditions as juke joints and hand-painted road signs.

Sauceda’s imagery blends old-fashioned storytelling with edgy élan—a style that has landed the 26-year-old photographer a growing list of commercial clients, including Target, BMW, The Times of London and Southwest Airlines. “I’m drawn to the characters of Texas: weird, unique and interesting people,” Sauceda says. “Initially, I tried elaborate set-ups, but ultimately I became more interested in simply hearing what they had to say and trying to capture that.”

This impulse led to his most C&W project to date, All Around Cowboys, a series about unlikely poets he began in early 2011. “A friend of mine was going to the Texas Cowboy Poetry Gathering in Alpine, so I decided to join him and take a few shots,” Sauceda says. He ended up with formal portraits of a motley crew of ranchers and cowboys, solitary figures with weighty stories shared in verse. Both stark and subtly humorous, these shots pay homage to a long spoken-word tradition dating back to early frontier days. “I learned a great deal about the role of poetry in cowboy life,” Sauceda says. “It helped me realize that photography, like poetry, can play the same role of preserving culture and history.”

The ongoing photo series will be published in 2012 in a book designed by DJ Stout of Pentagram, the forward-thinking design firm with an office in Austin. It’s a fitting testament to a subculture that continues to intrigue city slickers and country folk alike. As Sauceda puts it: “Living in the saddle, sleeping under the stars—it may sound corny, but there’s nothing more romantic than that.”

Jay B. Sauceda
JayBSauceda.com
Lives In Austin, TX
Studied At The University of Texas at Austin
Clients Include Bloomberg Businessweek, Fast Company, Texas Monthly, The Times of London, BMW, Target
Book Project_ All Around Cowboys_, to be published by Pentagram in 2012
In the Bag Sauceda likes to keep things simple: “I don’t like cameras that I have to spend a day reading a manual to understand,” he says. For commercial work, he favors a Mamiya 645AFD with a Phase One P 30+ digital back. He also uses a Fujifilm FinePix X100.

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Monica Lozano’s enigmatic and haunting photographs ride the line between traditional art photography and reportage. But for this native of El Paso, Texas, who grew up just across the border in Juarez City, Mexico, blurred boundaries are just part of everyday life.

“Having been raised in a border town really gave me a unique perspective; it exposed me to a wide range of experiences from early on,” notes the 31-year-old photographer, who recently completed a Photo Global residency at New York City’s School of Visual Arts (SVA). “There are huge contrasts in the population, but no real separations. There’s an incredible visual mix: the vivid colors of Mexican culture, and then in the U.S. everything becomes neutral, like the colors of the desert. Many people come to Juarez to try to cross over, and those who don’t make it stay there and make a life there. You’re exposed to extreme things that just seem normal.”

Juarez is where Lozano made her first picture, a Polaroid, at age 9. She studied graphic design and visual arts in Monterrey, Mexico, and early in her career worked as a graphic artist for a television station in Minneapolis. “It only took a few months before I knew my calling was behind a camera,” she recalls. Around 2008 she moved to Madrid to study fashion and commercial photography. “I was still trying to find myself and decide which avenue to pursue,” she says.

Then her path found her. Encouraged by one of her instructors to apply for the prestigious International Talent Support (ITS) photo competition, Lozano thought of using her native Juarez as a subject. Coincidentally, her mother had recently sent her a newspaper clipping about a man who had attempted to cross the border hidden in a car seat. It was a common story for the region—one of the prime crossing points for illegal immigration into the U.S.—but the haunting newspaper image of the disassembled car seat with a man embedded in the stuffing struck a nerve with Lozano, and her Borders series was born.

Compiling her research over several months from newspaper items, online stories and even Facebook posts, Lozano began contacting her subjects and persuading them to share their stories: a man who had hidden inside a mattress, a girl who’d floated down a river in a car tire. Carefully restaging each incident as a spare tableau, Lozano used her Hasselblad H3D with a P25+ digital back to chronicle small details, resulting in bold but elegant images with a surreal edge. “I wanted to decontextualize the stories from what we’re used to seeing, the usual six o’clock news replete with sensationalism, drama, fear and violence,” she says. “I wanted to dignify my subjects, voice their stories, but in a different way that cut through the fear.” The resulting suite of images took the top ITS photo prize in 2009, garnering Lozano international exposure and exhibitions, including one—in keeping with the theme of crossing borders—at the Munich Airport.

Now based in New York, Lozano continues to refine her craft, pursuing fine art projects as well as commercial avenues and developing her already keen instincts. But even from a distance, her hometown remains a constant source of inspiration. It provided source materials for her newest series, Juarez (top), which was met with acclaim at an SVA/New York Photo Festival exhibition in 2011. Once a bustling border town, Juarez has changed drastically over the past decade. It’s now marked by violence, including the disappearance of thousands of young female workers and bloody territory disputes by warring drug cartels. An oppressive cloud has settled over the region, a palpable change that Lozano could not help but note on her last trip. “I really wanted to capture the current state of the region—the pain, the killings, the complex situation,” she says. I found an element in Mexican culture—the mask of the Day of the Dead celebration that portrays beauty in death. A lot of my subjects wanted to hide their identity for security purposes, so the masks were the perfect vehicle to capture real people in real scenarios while protecting their privacy.”

The eerie portraits, captured on a Canon EOS 5D Mark II digital SLR, chronicle friends and acquaintances attempting to get on with their lives against a grim backdrop. There’s a lyrical stoicism to this work that for Lozano reflects the spirit of the region. “Life continues in Juarez despite all the violence,” she says. “These are people with strength. They stay and fight and continue. I admire their love for the land.”

More: monicalozano.com

The post Monica Lozano: Crossing Over appeared first on Popular Photography.

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Monica Lozano’s enigmatic and haunting photographs ride the line between traditional art photography and reportage. But for this native of El Paso, Texas, who grew up just across the border in Juarez City, Mexico, blurred boundaries are just part of everyday life.

“Having been raised in a border town really gave me a unique perspective; it exposed me to a wide range of experiences from early on,” notes the 31-year-old photographer, who recently completed a Photo Global residency at New York City’s School of Visual Arts (SVA). “There are huge contrasts in the population, but no real separations. There’s an incredible visual mix: the vivid colors of Mexican culture, and then in the U.S. everything becomes neutral, like the colors of the desert. Many people come to Juarez to try to cross over, and those who don’t make it stay there and make a life there. You’re exposed to extreme things that just seem normal.”

Juarez is where Lozano made her first picture, a Polaroid, at age 9. She studied graphic design and visual arts in Monterrey, Mexico, and early in her career worked as a graphic artist for a television station in Minneapolis. “It only took a few months before I knew my calling was behind a camera,” she recalls. Around 2008 she moved to Madrid to study fashion and commercial photography. “I was still trying to find myself and decide which avenue to pursue,” she says.

Then her path found her. Encouraged by one of her instructors to apply for the prestigious International Talent Support (ITS) photo competition, Lozano thought of using her native Juarez as a subject. Coincidentally, her mother had recently sent her a newspaper clipping about a man who had attempted to cross the border hidden in a car seat. It was a common story for the region—one of the prime crossing points for illegal immigration into the U.S.—but the haunting newspaper image of the disassembled car seat with a man embedded in the stuffing struck a nerve with Lozano, and her Borders series was born.

Compiling her research over several months from newspaper items, online stories and even Facebook posts, Lozano began contacting her subjects and persuading them to share their stories: a man who had hidden inside a mattress, a girl who’d floated down a river in a car tire. Carefully restaging each incident as a spare tableau, Lozano used her Hasselblad H3D with a P25+ digital back to chronicle small details, resulting in bold but elegant images with a surreal edge. “I wanted to decontextualize the stories from what we’re used to seeing, the usual six o’clock news replete with sensationalism, drama, fear and violence,” she says. “I wanted to dignify my subjects, voice their stories, but in a different way that cut through the fear.” The resulting suite of images took the top ITS photo prize in 2009, garnering Lozano international exposure and exhibitions, including one—in keeping with the theme of crossing borders—at the Munich Airport.

Now based in New York, Lozano continues to refine her craft, pursuing fine art projects as well as commercial avenues and developing her already keen instincts. But even from a distance, her hometown remains a constant source of inspiration. It provided source materials for her newest series, Juarez (top), which was met with acclaim at an SVA/New York Photo Festival exhibition in 2011. Once a bustling border town, Juarez has changed drastically over the past decade. It’s now marked by violence, including the disappearance of thousands of young female workers and bloody territory disputes by warring drug cartels. An oppressive cloud has settled over the region, a palpable change that Lozano could not help but note on her last trip. “I really wanted to capture the current state of the region—the pain, the killings, the complex situation,” she says. I found an element in Mexican culture—the mask of the Day of the Dead celebration that portrays beauty in death. A lot of my subjects wanted to hide their identity for security purposes, so the masks were the perfect vehicle to capture real people in real scenarios while protecting their privacy.”

The eerie portraits, captured on a Canon EOS 5D Mark II digital SLR, chronicle friends and acquaintances attempting to get on with their lives against a grim backdrop. There’s a lyrical stoicism to this work that for Lozano reflects the spirit of the region. “Life continues in Juarez despite all the violence,” she says. “These are people with strength. They stay and fight and continue. I admire their love for the land.”

More: monicalozano.com

The post Moniza Lozano: Crossing Over appeared first on Popular Photography.

Articles may contain affiliate links which enable us to share in the revenue of any purchases made.